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A Rare and Topical Revival of ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS at CSC

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com October 24, 2016

There are so many very good dramatic treatments of the story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn out there (A Man for All Seasons, Wolf Hall, and The Tudors, to name a few), it might prompt one to ask why Chesapeake Shakespeare Company has chosen to revive Maxwell Anderson‘s seldom-produced 1948 blank verse rendering of the tale. Lesley Malin, the company’s managing director, perhaps anticipating that question, told the audience on press night that she had fallen in love with the show many years ago.

And maybe love is the right answer. More than any other version of the story I’m familiar with, this is a sort of love story. That statement might raise an eyebrow or two, since it’s hard to contemplate much swooniness en route to a breakup that ends with one party having the other beheaded. Yet Anderson clearly saw it as a love story. The dramatic tipping point, for instance, is what Anne calls the one day she and Henry loved each other in the same way. But we are not in Harlequin or even bodice-ripper territory.

Instead – and this makes the play immensely topical – this tale is first and foremost about the confusing way love works when the man is immensely powerful, dishonest and fickle, in a world where men make the rules, many of them quite arbitrary. Many of us might have assumed that that kind of world had disappeared along with Don Draper and the three-martini lunch, until a certain presidential candidate’s tape and the accounts of women who claimed to have been abused by him – and/or by another presidential candidate’s husband – reminded us that that world may be a-dying, but is hardly dead.

When we first encounter Anne (a splendid Lizzi Albert), she is happily trying to forge her own romantic path with her suitor Lord Percy (Gerrad Alex Taylor), with sexual autonomy very much a part of the pursuit (she frankly acknowledging her earlier sexual experimentation at the French court). In comes Cardinal Wolsey (Gregory Burgess), with a cease-and-desist order, since King Henry has his eye on Anne and is putting dibs on her. Otherwise put, the forces of church and state are collaborating to force Anne into mistress-hood, a disadvantageous state to a woman with prospects, with a man who, being already married in Catholic Europe, cannot divorce and hence cannot marry her, and who does not even attract her.

It would seem that her autonomy is at an end, yet she fights back courageously, giving way to Henry’s advances only in exchange for huge changes in the rules and the situation: in order to achieve her, Henry must break with the Catholic Church, divorce his wife, execute some of the foremost men of the realm, including Chancellor Thomas More (E. Martin Early), and greatly alter the course of history.

We know from history, and indeed from the two monologues that form a prologue to the action, what will come of Anne’s attempt to negotiate a worthwhile surrender to Henry’s power, but Anderson manages to make the upshot shocking nonetheless. He does this in large measure by a knowing depiction of Henry, a man as heedlessly self-deluding as a certain presidential candidate, who wants to believe that his pursuit of sexual variety is what God wills and has blessed, that his quest for a legitimate male heir is the discharge of duty to his dynasty, and not mere vanity – and even that his amateur versifying and composition is first-class. Ron Heneghan does a fine job conveying the frightful blankness at the core of the man, without making a cipher of him; in fact, Heneghan makes it possible to say we always understand Henry better than he understands himself.

In essence, Anderson tells us, Henry could never be loved safely and successfully. Anne’s effort to do so is spectacularly successful, but only for a short time (and hence the title) – but even that short time, like a bronco rider’s in the saddle, should be deemed a triumph of sorts, given not only Henry’s sociopathic personality but also the strange male-ordained rules that that effort was entangled with. These rules included male primogeniture, the religious doctrines forbidding divorce, the politically-controlled annulment process, and the weird abstract theories of church and state the modification of which required the very concrete judicial slaughter of so many dissenters.

Yet at the same time Anne, like Henry, is engaged in more than just affairs of the heart. She too ends up playing (and winning, on the best terms available to her) the game of thrones. Just before her arrest, she is offered a choice, which she recognizes lies between survival and legacy. Her choice of the latter is immediate, and has long-lasting positive effects, dwarfing those made by her ostensibly more powerful husband.

Anderson’s Anne, then, is correctly seen as a feminist heroine from a time before there was even a language for such things. When we realize that, we more fully grasp why the CSC chose to revive the play. Going back to the other dramatic works that touch upon Anne’s rise (and downfall) that I cited earlier, Robert Bolt‘s play sanctified one powerful man (Anne does not appear as a character), Hilary Mantel‘s dramatized books draw us into the world of another man, and The Tudors adopts a more general focus. Anderson uniquely contemplates the situation and achievement of a woman, Anne Boleyn. She proves herself a worthy object of contemplation.

CSC’s production is also largely a women’s achievement, starting with director Kasi Campbell, whose work with The Rep company in Columbia I have admired, and continuing with what is billed as CSC’s first all-female design team. The costumes, courtesy of Kristina Lambdin, are particularly striking. (In particular, be on the lookout for the red dress in which Anne dances the tarantella.)

An evening at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s downtown theater is almost always a delight, what with The Globe Theatre-inspired architecture, the musical warmups and entre-actes, the readily-accessible bars, the up-close-and-personal sight-lines, and the nightly wine-lottery. As tremendous as William Shakespeare himself always is, it is good to see the company continuing to stretch its legs and venture a few steps away from its namesake, particularly to provide us something so unusual. It all adds up to an evening of theater that should not be missed.

[Note: A fascinating blog completely devoted to literary, dramatic, and cinematic works about Anne Boleyn, including Anne of the Thousand Days, is The Head That Launched a Thousand Books, well worth a look before heading out for the theater.]

Copyright Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo credit: Teresa Castracane.

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Still Chilled

In the Still of the Night, by Cole Porter, performed by Carly Simon (2005), encountered 2006

Buy it here | Video here | Lyrics here | Available on Spotify | Sheet music here

In the Still of the Night suffers from the overfamiliarity that plagues too many songs in the Great American Songbook. We don’t really hear it. There’s a prettiness on the surface that belies its rawness and insecurity, its desperate plea for an impossible reassurance.

No Satisfactory Answer

Think about it.

The lover asks this loaded question:

All the times without number

Darling when I say to you

Do you love me, as I love you

Are you my life to be, my dream come true

Or will this dream of mine fade out of sight

Like the moon growing dim, on the rim of the hill

In the chill still of the night?

And how could the beloved could ever make a satisfactory answer? Beloveds, no matter their devotion in this moment, can’t know the future. Humans change over time, and beloveds are only human, and hence, with the best will in the world, they cannot issue unqualified guarantees. And worse, even the beloved’s present sincerity is not totally knowable.

Not Just Constancy

Nor is the lover’s question just about the beloved’s constancy. The beloved’s survival also enters into the question. Every affair or marriage, no matter how devoted the parties, will end one day, and (barring what lawyers call a common disaster), one of the parties will have to live with the loss.

In short, the lover’s insecurity is not unreasonable. But it can easily be unreasonably extreme.

My mother felt such extreme insecurity more than anyone else I ever knew. In retrospect I recognize that I was the truest love of her life, and that my infantile adoration, while she received it, was the sweetest feeling she would ever feel. And she received it for a long time, probably longer than she had any right to expect; most boys my age seemed to move on quicker than I did. Yet, eventually I saw my parent’s limitations, and the need to adjust my previously uncritical response, as all children eventually do. To her dying day my mother could never accept this inevitable nuance. Nor could she truly accept my subsequent commitments to lovers, spouses and children, friends and work, which were all experienced as deep wounds and neglect, even at times apostasy and treason.

And this became the great tragedy of her life. My mother could neither understand nor consent to a mature love from me, and, try as I might, I could not propose to love her in any other way. Her demands grew increasingly strident, and my resistance increasingly cruel-seeming to her, and sometimes to me.

The Central Question

Yet I was not blind to what underlay her insistence: that all-too-human fear of the oblivion of love of which Cole Porter wrote.

After she died, I had occasion to ruminate bitterly on this, largely while I was on the road. I did some traveling in her wake. Though she had passed her last couple of years at a senior community in Baltimore, we had decided years earlier that her ashes would be immured next to my stepdad’s in Ann Arbor. So there was a visit home for a funeral and a memorial service. And then there were two more visits, because I wanted to write about the re-encounter with my home in the middle of my life, to use Dante’s phrase, and wanted to do some research, as well as to mourn in the place that felt most appropriate for this particular siege of grief.

On the road, I was frequently playing Carly Simon’s previous year’s album, all standard love songs, called Moonlight Serenade. One of the cuts was In the Still of the Night. And when the lyrics came around to that lover’s question, I realized it was the central question of Mother’s life, for many years and certainly towards her sad end, an end rendered heartbreakingly solitary by the dementia that had shredded continuity in most of her relationships.

Now It Was My Question

But now that question had become my question. I did not, could not, love Mother as she had loved me, but that is far from saying that I did not love her. Of course I did, difficult as she had been. And now she was not there. So what did that mean? Had she and our relationship just faded out of sight, as Porter so aptly phrases it?

Up until that very point, as I said in the preceding piece, I would have answered as my religion had taught me: that the relationship was still there, and that, even though I could no longer see her, we were still connected. That, in fact, our relationship would be fully restored one day in an afterlife.

But I could not feel it. Not this time; I’d felt it somehow when I lost my father and when I lost my stepfather. With Mother there was no sense of assurance, none of continuity. And I was feeling exactly as the lover in Porter’s song dreaded to feel: left “in the chill still of the night.”

Still Chilled

It’s hard to overstate what a shock this “still chilled” feeling was. I had always been a cheerful person, an optimistic person, no matter what difficult or sad times I might be passing through. Now, though I had hardly lost the ability to be happy, the default setting of reflexive cheerfulness had disappeared. I could not shake and – to this day over ten years later – have still not shaken the opposite reflexive sense, one of isolation and doom.

I had to conclude that, unbeknownst to me, and with all the difficulties between us, my mother had somehow been the indispensable prop of my sense of well-being, and that there was nothing to replace her. In saying this I do not slight any of the others who were close to me, my wife, children, or colleagues. I depend on them even more now. But still something essential to everyday happiness has to my astonishment departed.

And as I was quickly discovering, and will discuss in the next piece, other things had departed with it.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for album artwork

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Is Unconventional Obligatory? Freedom of Expression vs. Equal Protection  Before the Footlights

Published in The Daily Record September 16, 2016

Unconventional casting, which assigns dramatic roles to performers of different race or gender or ability than the role would seem to have been conceived for, has been much in vogue recently. The celebrated musical Hamilton is perhaps most prominent instance right now, with nonwhite actors portraying our white Founding Fathers. All-female and all-male Shakespeare productions are much in vogue. I am continually exposed to this new vogue because not only do I write of law and policy (in these pages), but I also review theater regularly for BroadwayWorld.com and The Hopkins Review. But I write here as a lawyer, not a theater fan. My purpose here is not to approve or disapprove of unconventional casting, but to discuss the legal battle I sense brewing up around this practice.

Black Roles, White Actors?

The coming fight is over one particular form of unconventional casting, placing white actors in non-white roles.[1] Acceptance of non-white actors in white roles is fairly widespread. However, there is a resistance when the traffic runs the other way. It is argued that this is “appropriation” of the ability of oppressed and silenced minorities to tell their own stories and contravention of the wishes of authors, and that it unfairly curtails the already limited career opportunities of minority performers.

There was an incident last year, for instance, when Katori Hall, author of The Mountaintop, a play about Martin Luther King, Jr., learned that a white actor had been cast as King in a production at Kent State University; Hall wrote an angry denunciation and changed the standard language of her contract with companies producing the play to prevent the companies from putting white actors in either of the play’s two roles.

And this March there was a flap about the casting of Hamilton. The original cast has been moving on, and when casting notices for replacements first went out, they specified that only “NON-WHITE ACTORS” [all caps in the original] need apply for most of the roles. There was an outcry, after which the nonwhite language was brought down to lower case and a confusing additional phrase was added: “Performers of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are encouraged to attend.”[2]

CNN quoted Randolph McLaughlin, a “New York human rights lawyer,” as suggesting that any racial requirement in casting would violate New York’s law against discrimination in employment. Assuming that McLaughlin is correct that New York really does forbid racially-exclusive casting, the question becomes: can the New York law stand?

A Revival of Bakke Arguments?

I know of no test cases yet, but it looks likely some disappointed white actor will bring one sometime soon, much as Allan Bakke challenged affirmative action in medical school admissions a generation ago. And when that actor’s suit is brought, I predict the right of theatrical employers to discriminate will be upheld, because the precedents supporting it are in place. But whatever happens, it’s a fascinating problem. Actually two problems.

The first problem, in a nutshell, is this. Except in community theaters, casting is an employment decision as well as an artistic one. Employers are not supposed to discriminate racially in hiring decisions, under federal and state law everywhere. There is, however, a long tradition of making exceptions for discrimination in recruitments where membership in a particular category (ability, gender, age, etc.) is a “BFOQ,” a bona fide occupational qualification. Indeed, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s regulations specifically make gender a BFOQ for casting decisions “for authenticity.” But there is no similar protection for race-based decisions. And in a world where racially unconventional casting is the norm, as any theater critic will tell you it now is, how can any racial casting decision be defended as having been made “for authenticity”? In an era where Idris Elba is being considered for the part of James Bond, audiences no longer expect or require that kind of authenticity.

First Amendment vs. Commerce Clause and Equal Protection

I therefore suspect that the “authenticity” argument would fall before racial non-discrimination laws. But a stronger argument exists. No one would dispute that a theatrical production is artistic expression, protected by the First Amendment.[3] And it would be frivolous to claim that, even in an era of public acceptance of unconventional casting, the effect of this protected expression is the same when unconventional casting occurs. Audiences will notice, and the experience and the message will be different. Hence, if antidiscrimination laws, whether federal or New York ones, are being invoked to force unconventional casting, we have a direct conflict between First Amendment principles and Commerce Clause and/or Equal Protection ones.

There has been a decided tilt in jurisprudence over the last generation to resolve such conflicts in favor of the First Amendment. Religious schools were allowed to reinforce their (First Amendment) Free Exercise Clause-based message by terminating religion teachers who violate their churches’ prohibitions against extramarital sex, even when those prohibitions facially violate Commerce Clause-authorized pregnancy discrimination laws.[4] And the state equal protection-based New Jersey public accommodations law had to yield to the First Amendment associational rights of the Boy Scouts when they ousted an advocate of LGBT freedoms from membership[5] in keeping with their since-abandoned exclusion of gays.

There certainly remains some countervailing authority. In 2002, a Texas strip club, though purveying First Amendment-protected performances, was told it could not discriminate against African American dancers.[6] An Atlanta strip club recently found it could not terminate a dancer for being pregnant.[7] In these cases, then, Commerce Clause-based antidiscrimination statutes trumped First Amendment concerns. But the theater is all about speech, whereas exotic dancing, though properly protected as a kind of speech, isn’t speech, really. Plays and musicals are much closer to core concerns the Free Speech and Assembly clauses exist to protect, and I’d look for greater protection.

While all this remains to be worked out, there will be some dramatic moments (in the generic sense of the word) before the bench. But my crystal ball says that the courts will end up allowing the exclusion of whites from certain roles in front of the footlights.

__________________

[1]. There is a shameful history, especially in Hollywood, of not considering non-whites for non-white roles, whether we’re discussing Mickey Rooney in yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), or Laurence Olivier’s excruciating blackface in Othello (1965), or the casting of most of the Thai parts in The King and I (1956). But what I am discussing here is whether whites should be considered at all for non-white parts.

[2]. As of September 3, 2016, that language is absent from the “Auditions” part of the website.

[3]. The First Amendment protection of theater was mentioned in dicta in a case concerning a high school drama teacher terminated for allowing mild swearing in shows her students staged. Webb v. Lake Mills Cmty. Sch. Dist., 344 F. Supp. 791 (N.D. Iowa 1972).

[4]. Dias v. Archdiocese of Cincinnati, No. 1:11-CV-00251, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 43240 (S.D. Ohio Mar. 29, 2012). Federal laws forbidding discrimination in private employment rely on the Commerce Clause, not the Equal Protection Clause, for their constitutionality. However, it is typical that state laws forbidding employment discrimination rest on equal protection or equal protection-like clauses of state constitutions for their constitutionality. The federal Equal Protection Clause has been held not to enable Congress to legislate against discrimination by private actors.

[5]. Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640, 644 (2000).

[6]. Gordon v. JKP Enters., 2002 U.S. App. LEXIS 29270 (5^th Cir. 2002).

[7]. Newby v. Great Am. Dream, Inc., No. 1:13-CV-03297-TWT-GGB, 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 182342 (N.D. Ga. Dec. 18, 2014). Pregnancy, not being a matter of the “authenticity” shielded from the influence of antidiscrimination laws, thus is analytically in the same place as race, which, as noted, is not shielded by “authenticity” either. Interestingly, the Newby court mused in a footnote that the club might have been able to fire the dancer for loss of sex appeal.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Here’s To Party Elites

A somewhat different version of this piece was published in The Daily Record August 17, 2016

In this column, as I’ve often stated, I write about law and policy, not politics. Yet there is such a thing as the law and policy of politics. The primaries and conventions we’ve just lived through have certainly provided some fresh object lessons about one political issue that touches on both law and policy, namely, the role of party elders. Should senior members of the party (elected officials and members of central committees) have a voice in the selection of party presidential nominees separate from the voices of the voters articulated through primaries and caucuses?

“Stolen”

The question has come up in both major parties. We’ve heard the claim that the Democratic nomination was “stolen” from Bernie Sanders by party elders. In that party, superdelegates, elected officials who were not answerable to primary voters, committed early and overwhelmingly to Hillary Clinton, and the national committee apparently put its thumb on the scale, via various procedural decisions bearing on the timing and rules of the campaign. Meanwhile, over in the Republican Party, party establishment candidates were pushed aside in Donald Trump’s favor by a torrent of votes from ordinary voters who may or may not have even been Republicans. Many elders, including the last four Republican presidential candidates, did not want to see Trump nominated. However, without Democratic-style superdelegates (Republicans have three automatic delegates per state, but they are not comparable), and with less partiality by the national committee, all the elders could do was make a couple of doomed feints at somehow opening up the convention.

So at least among Democrats, the elders do have a strong say. But is this a good thing or a bad one? The problem we have in answering that question is that our system of choosing presidential candidates is a patchwork that draws on two separate and not totally compatible paradigms. Political parties are theoretically private organizations that should be able to set their own rules and appoint their own candidates according to their own rules. But since two specific parties have for 150 years had a monopoly of the power to name the only presidential candidates who stand an actual chance of election, the reality is that parties have been delegated a very significant aspect of the power of the state. Starting in the time of the Progressives, states have tried to reclaim for the general electorate some of this state power by organizing primary elections in order to make the delegate-selection process, and hence the candidate-selection process, responsive to democratic principles and state law.

So at the moment, then, the choice comes both from the party organizers, the ones who “own” the parties, do the parties’ work, and represent the parties as officeholders, and from the voters whose participation in the party may amount to nothing more than turning up once every four years (if that) to vote.

“Rigged”

When candidates complain that this system, with such ambiguity baked into it by its history and role, is “rigged,” what they generally mean is that the will of the voters is tempered or overridden altogether by the will of the party elders. But is that a bug or a feature?

I’m here to argue it’s a feature. And I think both parties’ travails so far in this presidential season illustrate this. Each eventual major party candidate emerged from a selection process shaped by compromises between accountability to party stakeholders and accountability to the electorate that showed up for the primaries or caucuses. In each party contest, there were cries that the system was “rigged,” because in one way or another the party elders had too much of a role. As we know, Donald Trump, who complained about rigging in the early going, ended up the Republican nominee, and Hillary Clinton, accused of having benefitted from rigging, ended up the Democratic nominee. What do we learn from that contrast?

Though I’m no political insider, it seems clear enough to me that in each case, the party establishment was looking to find the most electable candidate from among those who presented themselves. The Republican elite observed Donald Trump’s now well-documented shortcomings as a primary candidate; it is no surprise that they concluded he would be hard to elect, and tried to derail his candidacy. Whether the “rigging” that Trump complained about, particularly state committee selections of delegates that did not always reflect Trump’s level of support vis-à-vis Ted Cruz’s, really owed much to intentional interference by party elders, is hard to say. But the reasons the Bushes and McCain and Romney had reservations are clear.

Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side was a different case, because he had had a long history of electoral success behind him, and had polled better than Hillary Clinton did against the likely and eventual Republican nominee. Nonetheless, he was clearly a limited candidate: he had two or three signature issues that were really all he seemed to care to talk about. He was perceived by party leadership as a hammer to whom too wide a variety of problems looked like a nail. A president, however, and for that matter a presidential candidate, must be a Swiss Army knife, conversant with a large number of issues. Reasonable minds may differ as to whether the Democratic Central Committee and almost all the superdelegates were correct in concluding that Sanders lacked the breadth of skills the electorate would be looking for, but I’m confident that that was their thinking. They (along with most of the eventual Democratic primary voters and caucus-goers) prevailed.
And at least at this moment, it certainly looks as if the party that heeded the thinking of its elite about the more electable candidate is likely to see that candidate prevail over the candidate who overcame the elites of his party.

This stands to reason. Pros usually know more about a game than amateurs, and on that principle party elders usually will see better than anyone else what makes a candidate electable (and re-electable).

Paradigm War

Nor is this argument simply a pragmatic concession to the superior horse-picking talents of the political pros. There is an element of fairness to consider here. I go back to the rule that parties are private organizations. In almost any other kind of private organization the biggest decisions are entrusted to those who perform the most important services. In a party, the most important services are developing issues, raising money, recruiting candidates, commissioning polls, buying television ads, orchestrating the ground game on election day – and representing the party by serving in city councils and statehouses and Congress, all things the elders do. Doesn’t this earn them a bigger voice in their parties’ biggest decisions?

The unspoken norm of those who scream “rigged” when party leadership asserts any power to decide the nomination is an election paradigm: the idea that all votes are equal and the result should be binding. But that paradigm neither does nor should apply full force to the private organizations we call political parties. Pragmatism (and fairness) suggest that the parties and the republic probably benefit when elders exert separate power. Choices between outstanding candidates are best for our electoral health, and that separate power supports it.

Witness our current election campaign.

POSTSCRIPT: November 20, 2016

It’s amazing how quickly time can make a mockery of a commentator’s sense of omniscience. I continue to maintain that many of my abstract arguments above were correct, but, as is now obvious, my examples did not illustrate my point. It is hard to be demonstrably wrong about policy, but very easy to be demonstrably wrong about the future. I hope I have learned a proper lesson about humility, at least as regards the latter.

Two points should be made in the clear light of retrospect. First, I still believe the views of the Democratic party elders were entitled to the kind of weight for which I argued above. But there were two flaws in their approach. First, these elders were too entangled with the money of interests that stand in the way of the Democratic program. Second, they were not content to act within the rules that should have constrained them. Both flaws proved far more costly to their candidate than they could have anticipated. While it would be crazy to suggest that we know the comparative impact of each of the causes that led to the result in the recent election,we can be certain that voters were not pleased with the way they saw people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile behave.

As to the Republican elders, my view remains that, if they had been given a greater say, and thus the ability to name a nominee other than Donald Trump, their candidate would have won the election, but the candidate chosen would have been far better for this country than Donald Trump looks to be poised to become.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn

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Mean Girls, Primary Colors and Grand Guignol: HEATHERS at Red Branch

Hasani Allen and Vivian Cook

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com August 8, 2016

It is a safe bet that at every institution of secondary education with female students, there are Mean Girls. It is also a safe bet that there isn’t a reader who needs the term defined, because there probably isn’t a reader who hasn’t experienced Mean Girls – or been one of them. And one trait we know the Mean Girls all share is they make people want to kill them.

The phrase has a jocular sound, and it should, because it isn’t meant quite literally. But it’s a fun conceit that someone might mean it quite literally. That conceit drove the 1989 cult classic Heathers, a movie that asked the question what circumstances would actually would lead to someone killing Mean Girls and their male Jock consorts, and came up with an ingenious answer. The killers would be a sensitive girl, sensitive enough not to be immune to the blandishments of the Mean Girl lifestyle but with broader horizons as well, and a hipster loner with a wide psychopathic streak. Winona Ryder andChristian Slater were Veronica and J.D., the original sensitive girl and psychopathic hipster.

With its universal subject, sharp satiric streak, acerbic humor, primary colors production and costume design, and its touch of Grand Guignol, it was a natural to be musical-ized, and that adaptation occurred in 2013 and 2014, when the musical adaptation opened in Los Angeles, and went on to Off-Broadway. Written by Laurence O’Keefe, half of the creative team behind Legally Blonde, and Kevin Murphy, primarily a television composer, it had a limited but very successful Off-Broadway run. It is now available for regional productions, the first of which in our area is being presented by Red Branch Theatre Company in Columbia.

Having seen and greatly enjoyed the New York production, I was looking forward to the regional revival, and Red Branch’s version does not disappoint, but it is rather different. I liked Barrett Wilbert Weed, the original Veronica, but I like Red Branch’s Vivian Cook better, probably because Weed kept on a sardonic grin that sort of showed she was in on the joke, while Cook’s Veronica, for all her sensitivity and insight, sees the irony more steadily than the joke; this Veronica is too deep in the drama to be in any sense above it, which is as it should be. This show works best as a drama and a satire; not as camp, which Weed’s portrayal tended to force the show into.

Hasani Allen is a rather different J.D. from either Christian Slater or Ryan McCartan, who played J.D. in the New York production. He seems both more angry and more love-struck than his predecessors. (When he sings “Our love is God,” as he does repeatedly, it takes on more vulnerability.)

It has been commented, for instance in the director’s notes in the program, that the murderousness of J.D. is an edgy portrayal of the kind of mass killer whose handiwork we have all grown far to accustomed to. (The director phrases it as a “trend of social stratification in schools pushing outcasts so far to the margins that they lash out violently.”) I would not go too far with that approach. Neither in the film nor the musical is J.D.’s murderousness primarily a product of the social stratification of the school; the fallen members of the Mean Girl/Jock combine may have annoyed J.D., but a different explanation of sorts is provided. I’ve always felt that the explanation is dramatically unsatisfactory, though it fits well with the gruesomeness that suffuses the production. I’d prefer to think of J.D. as afflicted with “motiveless malignity,” what Coleridge saw in Iago. Allen’s portrayal has that inscrutable quality at its core.

The three Mean Girls, all named Heather (Tiara Whaley, Megan Bunn, and Geocel Batista), also bring different queen bee styles from their predecessors, but very enjoyably so. The two king Jocks, quarterback Kurt Kelly (Taylor Witt) and Ram Sweeney (Tendo Nsubuga), are pretty much the same, however, as the Jocks in earlier incarnations, which perhaps goes to show that youthful male peckerheadedness varies little across the ages and the subcultures.

I’ve already said that not all the Heathers and not all the Jocks make it out of this show alive. For newbies, I will not reveal how or to which of them the deaths occur. Suffice it to say the deaths are both horrifying and comic, the more so because of the community’s reactions to them. In an era of school grief counseling and talk shows and pop psychology, all things which simply lend themselves to lampoonery, the community’s infallibly wrong embrace of these contemporary phenomena are the funniest things about the show, and drew the biggest laughs on press night.

The developing reaction of Veronica to these deaths, by contrast, give the show its drama. She is in part the author of the deaths, and the forger of documents that have led to the community’s wrongheaded, pop-psych-inflected responses. Her bemused disgust at those responses does not drown out her increasingly mature conscience. She realizes what she must do to restore the moral order. And of course, this being a musical comedy, the moral and social order must be restored. In the final number, the high schoolers sing feelingly about having a harmonious and normal last gasp of childhood, and perhaps, thanks to Veronica, they’ll get it.

A word about the singing and the music. Red Branch has a tradition of casting good singers, and this show was no exception; it also has a tradition of less-than-stellar acoustics and that tradition unfortunately continues too. With ears that are two-thirds of a century old, I was probably affected worse by that shortcoming than were most of the Audience members, but the shortcoming is real. (At the New World Stages in New York, where the show started, every word was clear.) I recommend you give the original cast album a listen before coming in. The songs deserve it. They may not be melodically memorable, for the most part, but they are cleverly written, with an unusually tight fit between the action and the lyrics. There could be several things happening at once in the frequent ensemble pieces, and they are all typically advanced by the songs, with little pieces of the lyrics being parceled out to each subplot. So understanding all that is sung pays big dividends.

Whether you go to such lengths or not, you should make time to take in this show, a perfect summer entertainment, at least for theatergoers with a taste for the grotesque and the funny.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo. Photo Credit: Jeri Tidwell Photography

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Lush, Untranslated, and Disorienting: THE WEDDING GIFT at CATF

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 18, 2016

It seems to be customary at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, held each July in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, for there to be one technically big show, a “shoot the works” production at the Frank Center Stage in which the scenery, costumes, and cast size call for more effort (and I assume expense) than do any of the four other shows presented. This year the “big deal” show is undoubtedly Chisa Hutchinson‘s The Wedding Gift, a parable about race and other forms of Otherness placed in a context that one might call science fiction or fantasy.

Like the astronaut in Planet of the Apes, Doug (Jason Babinsky) finds himself transported to a world which bears great similarities to ours, but which has a fundamentally altered civilization. In this world, blacks comprise not merely the dominant race, but indeed apparently the exclusive one, speaking a language which bears no resemblance to ours.

This is awkward for white-skinned, English-speaking Doug. As quickly becomes apparent, Doug’s difference in language and looks from the dominant populace results in his being enslaved and/or treated as a pet (take your pick), and made a wedding gift to Nahlis (Margaret Ivey) and Beshrum (Damian Thompson). That’s where the audience first encounters him, after we witness the ceremony.

It is no accident that the ceremony comes first; it gives us a chance to take in the resplendence of the scene. The costumes, the makeup, the music and sound effects, and especially the scenery are magnificent; the photo above will give a sense of it. This is a highly developed society, if one that is in certain ways barbaric, and its usages are of the utmost importance.

It is only after this lesson has been subliminally administered that we encounter Doug, brought on in a cage as the biggest and presumably most expensive wedding present. There is dialogue which accompanies his appearance that unfortunately is translated only in the script, in which Nahlis’ mother explains quietly to Nahlis that Beshrum is a “sissy” and won’t know what to do with a woman, and that Doug is really a gift to Nahlis (presumably to remedy Beshrum’s deficits).

But that soon becomes apparent in any event. We see the wedding night, which is not a success. To get out of having sex with her, after Nahlis turns up in some sumptuous and provocative sleepwear, Beshrum belittles Nahlis’ breasts as surprisingly small, and, in consequence, as the script demurely puts it, “nobody’s getting laid tonight.” Nahlis will be wanting what the slave/pet has to offer.

Obviously, we are being set up for Doug to disrupt this highly developed but barbaric society, and the only question is how. I do not intend to spoil the fun or the drama by imparting too many details as to how the question is answered. It will involve sex, love, death and a good deal of violence. Also neat futuristic gizmos, many accompanied by intriguing sound effects (by Nathan A. Roberts and Charles Coes), and interesting tricks with the set (by David M. Barber).

It might be slightly inaccurate to call the play “space opera,” but that is probably the branch of science fiction it most comfortably fits inside. In common with the best space opera, it has certain timeless mythic qualities, speaks as well to issues of our time, and into the bargain has its own narrative drive and logic. Playwright Hutchinson, whose work Dead and Breathing I applauded at the Festival two years ago, can justly claim to have checked off all these boxes. Doug, for all his bathetic cusswords which establish his status as a modern regular guy, finds himself growing in Promethean directions.

We watch as he takes stock of his situation, recognizes the failure of vision on the part of his captors, their inability to see him as a fellow-human, and recognizes what this means in terms of his power and his lack of power. It is a humbling lesson, but one he needs to learn to survive.

At the same time, Nahlis is not simply a sexually-frustrated bride; she is also a spoiled and somewhat narrow-minded product of her civilization challenged to expand her horizons. Ivey does a great job conveying Nahlis’ initial limitations and her gradual overcoming of them.

The challenge of Doug and Nahlis’ mutual incomprehension is underlined by the language gap. And here is a significant part of playwright Hutchinson’s achievement. Though creation of new languages for narrative works is hardly unheard of (Tolkien did it, and so did the Star Trek folks), I cannot think of another stage play where it has been done, doubtless because the amount of creative effort required is seldom viewed as justified in the context of a two-hour play. Yet Hutchinson has done the work, and actually includes with her script a lengthy glossary. Of course the audience is not going to see the glossary, but the actors will; the actors will know they are talking a real language, and it will inform their delivery of the lines. The payoff comes when the audience is struggling along with Doug, the audience’s surrogate, to make sense of what seems like babble, knowing that bits of comprehension may make the difference between life and death, while the characters speaking the made-up language are obviously communicating just fine.

The potential pitfall, naturally, is that the audience may understand too little, even as it inevitably begins to master small pieces of the overlords’ speech. Hutchinson has tried to offset this problem by giving us two characters who can translate a little: Onjah, a priestess (Nafeesa Monroe) and Translating Attendant (Edward O’Blenis). Their shaky mastery of English poses nearly as much of a barrier to mutual comprehension as would a complete unfamiliarity with English. But that reinforces how great the barriers to mutual comprehension generally are when persons who regard themselves as fully human encounter people whom they think of as being otherwise.

I cannot say that the made-up language is always a “game worth the candle.” But I can say it’s a considerable achievement, and probably one the play is better off with than without.

Overall, the Festival chose wisely in making this play the season’s big deal. The lush production pays off handsomely, making us all vividly aware of the personal drama the characters must endure, and the larger issues the audience is asked to consider. May Adrales, who was also entrusted with last year’s “tentpole” show, Everything You Touch, a farrago about the fashion industry, featuring lots of over-the-top fashion, was also a fine choice to helm this big production. This is the one not to miss in this year’s Festival.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo (photo credit Seth Freeman)

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Boomers Considering What They Were and Are: 20th CENTURY BLUES at CATF

Betsy Aidem and Franchelle Stewart Dorn

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 15, 2016

“Look at us!” is the last line, but also pretty much the substance, of Susan Miller‘s play 20th Century Blues, now being presented as part of this year’s Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. We are invited to look at four women’s pictures culled from annual photoshoots of the quartet over forty (or is it thirty-nine?) years. The question whether the fortieth and final shoot will have happened at the moment the invitation is issued to the audience is almost the only suspense in this play. Apart from that, the play might be described as a nearly formless review of themes associated with aging New York Baby Boomer women.

The four women – photographer Danny (Betsy Aidem), real estate agent Sil (Alexandra Neil), veterinarian Gabby (Kathryn Grody), and journalist Mac, the only black and the only lesbian member of the quartet (Franchelle Stewart Dorn) – are a random sampling of this demographic, thrown together initially by the shared experience of having been arrested at the same forgotten demonstration. But separately and together, they have been through everything women of their class went through, including of course the predictable marriages, divorces, adoption, marijuana, senile parents, physical decline, retirement, and all the “Terrible Things,” starting with the John Kennedy assassination. In their fortieth reunion, we review it all.

At least we see the characters joke about it all, and/or ponder it lightly. Here is Sil’s recollection of that first “Terrible Thing”: “My husband was studying for the Bar Exam with some of his buddies. I walked in to give them more caffeine, and they were just standing in the middle of the room. All these young men in their madras shorts and loafers crying in front of the TV.” Or Mac’s explanation of why she’s hesitant to marry her partner, even though same-sex marriage is now available: ” But, what if I turned out to be a bad example? What if I make a terrible spouse? Then it’s not just my relationship that’s failed, it’ll be a strike against the cause…. When you’re an African American and a woman and gay, it can be a little tricky as to which cause you’re most afraid of not living up to at any given time. (beat) And — I don’t want to get divorced.”

You can see how this is slightly piquant but not deep. The detail of the madras shorts, evocative, though of what is not clear. And the meditation on letting down the multiple causes, gently comic, but again not terrible revelatory. It’s very pleasant, and you chuckle from time to time, particularly if, like me, you’re part of the age cohort under consideration. But it frequently sounds like sitcom writing, a legitimate thing but not precisely the legitimate theater.

My first reaction upon seeing the play was that it was the best-written of the five on offer at this year’s Festival. But as it dissolves in the mind, it really dissolves, leaving very little behind. Should it be judged wanting on that score? That’s a really hard question.

Perhaps the answer turns on how much Boomer self-indulgence we are willing to entertain. The characters remember, for instance, when the fashion of the times encouraged them to hold mirrors up to their vaginas. Danny comments “I never really understood what I was looking for.” Precisely: a body part of interest to physicians and lovers and pornography consumers reveals little as an object of introspection. And much of what we Boomers do revolves around the unproven proposition that we are worthy objects of scrutiny, whether exercised by ourselves or by others.

If we really believe we rate that time before the mirror, then the fact that little of great note may be revealed there should not be a deterrent to holding the play in esteem. I suspect that Millennials are thoroughly tired of their parents’ introspection, and this play might not be for them.

Or not yet. As I continued to consider the play, I realized that the characters are presented more as processes than objects. The point is not merely what they and we have been through, nor merely that plus what we’ve all learned by going through it in a particular time and place. Perhaps most important, 20th Century Blues (notwithstanding its title) addresses, from the inside and the outside, the universal experience of aging, an experience common to all times and places. Here is Danny, talking about coming to terms with the fact that that experience happens to everyone who lives long enough:

“I used to think old people came into the world that way. There were babies. Children. Adults. And old people. It didn’t sink in for a long time that one person, including me, would actually change, inexorably, from one to the other. That one person could embody all those opposing forms.” And hence, to be scornful of age, as if it were some kind of willed failure, is as stupid as it is cruel: “But, doesn’t our acquiescence to this collective shame about being a certain age have a diminishing effect on our ideas and culture? Are we willing to let that happen? Are we really willing to sacrifice a generation each time it grows old?”

It is probably because of this “seven ages of man” (or woman) theme that playwright Miller has incorporated two characters from outside the focus demographic: Danny’s aging and somewhat demented mother Bess (Mary Suib) and her adoptive son Simon (Jason Babinsky). Across the generations, the three form a unified and loving family, the continuum of age cohorts in action. I’m not sure that the mother and the son have enough work to do in this show to justify their presence, but that seems to be what Miller is driving at by including them.

In any event, there is sufficient substance to the cumulative discussions of aging throughout the show to make it more than a pleasant visit to sitcom-land. The show is about more than just us navel-gazing Boomers.

As I constantly have occasion to comment of shows at this venue, the acting, the direction (in this instance by Ed Herendeen), and the production (particularly David M. Barber‘s ingenious set), are all to the Contemporary American Theater Festival’s typical high standard. You could do far worse than include this play in your Festival visit.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo (photo credit Seth Freeman)

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Sloppy pen/man/ship at CATF

Brian D. Coats

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 14, 2016

Playwright Christina Anderson returns to the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia with a new play,pen/man/ship. I was not an admirer of her play The Ashes Under Gait City, produced at the Festival two years ago, being taken aback by its internal inconsistencies, its lack of historicity, its unnecessary improbabilities, and its general lack of craft. I allowed that there was a strong element of just-among-African-Americans discussion implicit in it which may have bypassed my ken and hence my critical faculties, but I could only speak from what I understood.

The good news is that pen/man/ship is both more accessible to general audiences and better written. The bad news is that it still needs a lot of work.

The premise is ahistorical: an 1896 ship chartered by a U.S. African American, with a black crew, sailing from America to Liberia, with an eye to undertaking an activity there of a sort which there is no record I can find of anyone having undertaken. At a crisis in the middle of the ocean, the crew lowers the sails of the ship and unbelievably leaves it bereft of wind power for at least 22 days. Taking down all the sails, what sailors call “bare poles,” is acknowledged to be an extremely risky maneuver, and not one any sane group of sailors would ordinarily undertake except under extreme storm conditions, especially for such an extended period. Anderson claims to research her plays, but I saw scant evidence of this, down to the very language. She cannot hear an obvious anachronism (“subpar” did not appear in the language as a synonym for “inferior” until many years later). She makes a mistake in describing her central character’s occupation; he is said to be a “land surveyor,” which she seems to think means a land appraiser, a meaning the phrase does not bear today and did not bear in that era.

So out of touch with historical realism is the play, other theatergoers with whom I discussed it suggested the story should be viewed as a hallucination or fantasy of the “land surveyor.” And perhaps that is what was meant; I cannot tell.

Just to make it all more confusing, most of the set of the play (by Kris Stone) is situated in an inch or so of water. The characters walk around barefoot in it, fall prostrate in it, and never seem by their actions to acknowledge it. The water is not called for by the script, and plays no clearly evident role in the action. When characters are standing in the water, we understand them to be in a cabin of this ship, but since the character who occupies the cabin we are supposed to be in most of the time is the charterer of the expedition, a man who regards himself as superior to all the other souls on the vessel, one would expect that, were the water to be taken literally, he would have selected a cabin from which any bilgewater was drained. If the water is meant to symbolize the sea, there are other problems. It is not my intent to belabor this point; let me say simply that there is no clear sense to the standing water.

I said at the outset that pen/man/ship is accessible, especially by comparison with Gait City. And it is. We can understand that Charles, the “land surveyor” and ship-charterer (Brian D. Coats), is a black man who believes himself superior to all the black people who surround him. He has internalized the view held by Jim Crow America of African Americans as the inferior “other,” but in order to entertain that view he necessarily has mentally set himself apart. Anderson’s remarks in the program suggest Charles is an exemplar of America’s notion of exceptionalism.

Of course it is all a charade. Charles is an alcoholic and an emotionally abusive father, his hidden project is morally objectionable despite his outward religiosity, and he either commits murder in the course of the play or abets someone else’s crime. Under the tutelage of Ruby (Margaret Ivey) the sailors come to recognize the true dimensions of the situation, and contrive to force Charles to confess his crimes. The spectacle of a man with these specific hypocrisies being deprived of control over his circumstances is accessible as a dramatic action and as a consideration of the underlying racial and social issues. And it works dramatically.

It would just work better if Anderson would not make up such an outlandish situation for the action. We get it that this is a reversal of the Middle Passage, but why are we doing that? Is it to depict a threat by American values to Liberia? If so, why choose as the vehicle for that threat a project that never happened, borne back to Liberia on a charter that seems never to have been chartered? If there is an implicit indictment of the racism beneath the mask of neocolonialism, surely there are more factual ways to do it. (See, e.g. Kwame Kwei-Armah‘s Beneatha’s Place, which does a great deal with the way that Americans and other Westerners helped screw up newly liberated West Africa in the middle of the previous century.)

I would urge Anderson to strip the play down to the studs and rebuild it. I think there is a gripping play here, but it urgently needs to be set somewhere else and carefully researched. As the play now stands, I must say regretfully that if there is one show to miss at this year’s Festival, this is the one.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo (photo credit Seth Freeman)

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A Working Kitchen in THE SECOND GIRL at CATF

Cathryn Wake and Jessica Wortham

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 13, 2016

There’s a small genre of plays that take place adjacent to well-known existing plays. Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for instance, reprocesses the story of Hamlet through the perceptions of two minor characters. Clybourne Park shows what is happening in the titular suburb while the Younger family, the collective protagonist of Raisin in the Sun, struggles in its Chicago apartment over its impending move there. Ronan Noone‘s The Second Girl is of this small genre, focusing on the goings-on in the kitchen of the summer home whose living room is occupied by the Tryone family of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Noone’s play tracks the action in the kitchen the same day the O’Neill’s Tyrones use the living room to drift slowly but inexorably toward the rocks. This new contribution to the small family of “another part of the forest” dramas is in what seems to be its second production now at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

There is one character who frequently exits one play and enters the other, shuttling back and forth between them, Cathleen, the “second girl” of the title (Cathryn Wake). The job title means that she performs all the domestic service not accomplished by Bridget (Jessica Wortham), the cook. (Bridget is an offstage character in Long Day’s Journey.) But the transitions are not seamless; this Cathleen is not really O’Neill’s Cathleen, whom his stage notes describe as “amiable, ignorant, clumsy, and possessed by a dense, well-meaning stupidity.” Noone’s notes, by contrast, inform us that “The Second Girl is far from stupid and resents anyone talking down to her.” When we first see her she is boisterously declaiming Shakespeare, obviously aping the manners and aspirations of the theatrical Tyrone family. And as Noone draws her, she is vivacious, inquisitive, and determined to better herself.

As anyone familiar with plays about the Irish knows, there’s a tradition of prickliness when it comes to people suspected of getting above themselves, aspiring to move up socially or economically. For instance Bridget, who we learn is Cathleen’s aunt, says reproachfully of Cathleen’s Shakespeare training that too much education isn’t a good thing (for a woman, it is implied). Yet Cathleen’s mission in America is about nothing but bettering herself; at the outset, her aspiration is to earn some money, and return to Ireland and marry her sweetheart with it. Developments over the course of the day will change that aspiration, leaving her determined to become an immigrant in the brave new world of American opportunity (in 1912). It is not settled at the end what she will do, but it seems likely she will make a go of it.

The outcome is less clear for the two other strivers who occupy the kitchen. Bridget was badly damaged by an abortive love affair on the auld sod, the upshot of which was she was exiled from the family and sent to America to ward off the resulting disgrace. Like a true O’Neill character, she has sought solace in the bottle, and in bitterly rebuffing efforts by others to get close to her. Yet, in addition to Cathleen, who may quarrel with her aunt but will not ultimately reject her, Bridget has one other contact whom she can only put off with difficulty: Jack (Ted Koch), the chauffeur. Jack is a former reprobate with much in his past to regret, but with a firm intention to pull his life together; he is also in love with Bridget and determined to build a life with her even as she resists the whole notion. Close to the end, it appears that he may have persuaded her; the ending is ambiguous as to that issue.

Still, this is America in 1912. We know that World War I is coming, and with it the end of the era of domestic service which has brought these three characters to the Tyrones’ kitchen. They will not stay stuck because it will simply not be an option for them. Their future is almost inescapably hopeful, try as they may to resist it (not that Cathleen is trying). This is a point of contrast with the Tyrones of O’Neill’s play. Their tale is a tragedy in slow motion. In the end, The Second Girl must be classified as having more in common with comedy than tragedy. But true happy endings remain hard and elusive.

What makes it a comedy more than anything else is Cathryn Wake‘s electrifying performance as Cathleen, a confection of flashing eyes, red hair, a tell-the-truth-and-shame-the-devil attitude, and naked ambition. Her vivacity is inescapable even when she is sad, even when, as the script requires, she must be much the worse for wear because of a drunk she went out on to take her mind off a sad plot development. Ms. Wortham’s Bridget may be a more difficult role because while young comers like Cathleen may be played as charismatic, that kind of magnetism cannot be exerted by prickly older characters staring down threats from unwelcome spinsterhood and alcoholism. Instead, the challenge with Bridget (one Wortham rises to) is to present a woman who is almost uncompromising in her unwillingness to be treated with love, while struggling with demons that can seldom be fought alone. Mr. Koch does very well with a role that might be characterized as a foil with embellishments.

This play scored high with the members of the audience I talked with, which I found intriguing. There is so little movement, so few definitive changes in the lives of the characters over the one day the action covers; what was the secret sauce that gave the play its wide appeal? I credit two things: the banter, most of it delivered with an Irish lilt, and the cooking.

The banter rolls out by the yard. For instance, here is Cathleen, confessing that Jamie Tyrone has his charms:

CATHLEEN: I’d say Master Jamie would be good for a roll in the grass

BRIDGET: Cathleen Geraldine O’Leary!

CATHLEEN: I’m in America now. Liberated I am…

BRIDGET: You’re indecent.

CATHLEEN: I’m only sayin’. Haven’t we suffered enough away to have the right now to speak our minds? That’s one thing they have here I like.

BRIDGET: That might be how you feel but this is my kitchen, not America’s, and I’m in charge of what can be said in it. And your words are banned.

It would be a strange theatergoer who couldn’t enjoy characters going on like this all night.

The cooking does goes on almost all night; the highly detailed set (by Kris Stone) looks like an actual working kitchen, 1912 style. So the characters chop veggies, fire up the stove, wash dishes in a real working sink, etc. There may be a little too much of this, but it’s good fun to watch the downstairs part of an Upstairs, Downstairs menage doing what it does.

In short, we find ourselves constantly entertained by what they say, and by what they do while they say it. It is surely no accident, either, that Long Day’s Journey Into Night, true to its title, starts in the morning and ends at midnight, while The Second Girl starts the same morning, goes right through the same night, and, leaving O’Neill behind, proceeds on to the following morning. In its modest way, it is a Journey Into Day.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo (photo credit Seth Freeman)

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Comparing Small Things To Great: NOT MEDEA at CATF

Ben Chase and Joey Parsons

Posted on BroadwayWorld.com July 12, 2016

The great legends and myths have their roots in common human experience. Yet it is not always obvious which experience gives rise to them. Take the myth of Medea, the sorceress who aided the hero Jason and who, when Jason cast her aside to make a politically expedient marriage, murdered their two sons. Only part of the story is commonplace: the part about Medea being cast aside. We all know (if we are not ourselves) women (and men) whose spouses have deserted them and left them heartbroken. Few of us, however, know parents, and especially mothers, who have murdered their children for that reason. Nor is it fair to trace the roots of the myth to occasional feelings of “wanting to kill” Junior; those feelings are seldom serious to begin with, and almost always transient.

I think the link to common experience in that part of the story is simply Medea’s willingness to do something extreme, outrageous, and very public to express her rage, to burn her bridges behind her, to slam the door on her way out, no matter the cost. All of us have experienced that feeling, and most of us have acted on it at one time or another. We can relate to slamming the door – but not to killing our children as a way of doing it.

But that is where the central choices of Allison Gregory’s new play Not Medea, in a rolling premiere at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, become questionable. Gregory has tried to tell the Medea story twice simultaneously: once in a pseudo-Euripidean mode as a revenge tragedy, once as a modern disquisition on motherhood. Given that slaying one’s kids out of spite is not a common experience, do these pieces fit together? It is not an easy call.

The framing device is a bit of metatheater, where a late-arriving member of the audience barges in, sees the play has not yet started, apologizes to us theatergoers for making a disturbance, and in the process starts artlessly letting out bits and pieces of her story. We learn that one of her daughters has died and another has been taken away from her by her ex-husband and Child Protective Services. The parallel, though imperfect, is obvious, and is soon enlarged upon when the Woman, evidently not an audience member after all (Joey Parsons), breaks the fourth wall and wanders into the play of Medea we are apparently here to see, with herself as the title character (much like Babe in the Firesign Theatre classic How Can You Be In Two Places At Once becoming part of a radio commercial he had been listening to a moment before). For the rest of the play the Woman veers back and forth from her life as a modern divorcee and her life as Medea the princess from Asia Minor. In both roles she has been abandoned by a spouse named Jason (Ben Chase) and in each she finds herself in dialogue with a Chorus (Rachael Balcanoff).

Do these narratives interplay well? In part the answer rests with revelations in the modern half of the story which it might violate critical ethics to disclose. I shall say only that the stories are not entirely parallel. The modern story is emotionally credible at the cost of the very qualities I observed above make the Medea myth so universal. The modern woman has not deliberately burned any bridges. Her life, though there is a horrifying sadness at its heart, is prosaic, and lacks the grand scale of universal myth. The play, if it works at all, must do so as a comparison of small things to great.

Playwright Gregory’s primary tactic is tearing down the epic qualities of the original, in a “we’re all sisters under the skin” kind of way. Medea frequently becomes just another flawed woman falling for an even more flawed handsome guy. Here is the Jason talking (at least partly the ancient one): “I was hoping your father would just sort of give me the Golden Fleece…(cupping her face) God your eyes are an unholy gorgeous green.” The modern Woman turns to the audience and comments in response: “Who could blame anyone for falling hard on that? The guys I settled for because I was lonely or bored or hungry? Then you find one that fills you, fills the room…and your guard drops as fast as your I.Q.”

But this flip modern diction forces everything down to the lowest common denominator, i.e., prosaic chick lit talk, laced with the occasional bathetic profanity. Now, giving that kind of diction its due, it can be as much a vehicle for delivering the telling truth as anything else. And, to give Gregory her due, she uses this kind of talk for telling truths about love and parenthood.

But it is not poetry. And Gregory sometimes allows the characters to quote Euripides’ breathtaking lines, lines whose grandeur withstands the test of time even in translation, and then uses the modern talk to puncture the pretensions of the older diction. This is risky, because one’s reaction may be to think how much more one would rather be listening to the poetry of Medea right now than to the language of Not Medea.

And the title is correct: this is truly not Euripides’ tale; the most important truths being told are not Euripides’ truths. Euripides chronicles a woman who chooses to slay her children. (Whether the motive was amour fou overwhelming her parental instincts or a more creditable effort to preempt their being slain by others is a question for Euripides; in the current play, only the amour fou hypothesis is entertained). Gregory’s heroine, on the other hand, is a flawed but fundamentally protective mother, a victim of mischance.

Like everything at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, this play is beautifully acted, directed and staged. I especially like Jesse Dreikosen’s set in the midst of an intimate theater-in-the-round, a messy bed lying on a beautiful wooden floor with a still pond near it, a setting that bespeaks peace but permits conflict. And the Studio 112 space, the smallest of the three venues at the Festival, was a wise choice for this play. We want to be right on top of these tales. And for that matter, the play wants to be right on top of us: the alarming frequent interactions with the audience, like those of an insult comic, are most effective where the audience has nowhere to run.

Slapped on top of this action as we are, we witness up close a sometimes witty, sometimes horrifying, comparison of small things to great, of apples and oranges. We may or may not agree with Gregory’s choice to use these particular contrasts to share perceptions about motherhood and abandonment and loss and pain. But the two stories are rendered inextricable, for better or worse. It is what it is. On balance I enjoyed the ride, and I think the audience did too.

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn, except for production photo (photo credit Seth Freeman)

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