Photos, from Top to Bottom: Will LeBow as Hamm and Thomas Derrah as Clov in ART's Endgame; Karen MacDonald as Nell in same; Bates Wilder as Ray and Marianna Bassham as Una in SpeakEasy Theatre's production of Blackbird; ditto; Timothy John Smith as Eddie and Stacy Fischer as May in New Rep's production of Fool for Love; ART's poster for Christine Evan's new play Trojan Barbie.
Farewell to March 2009, a month that proved so busy that my beloved blog has been sorely neglected and as a result I am four plays behind! So this is playing catch-up and I will be giving short-shrift here to the plays I saw this past month.
As it turns out, only one of the 4 is really worthy of extended discussion in a critical context here, Scotland's David Harrower's Olivier-prize winning play Blackbird. So I will gloss over the other three (withholding comments on Trojan Barbie until later this week as it's currently in previews).
Of course, much has been said and thought about the great Irish playwright Samuel Beckett's work, including this play Endgame. I have always much preferred Waiting for Godot myself, finding the characters of Didi and Gogo much more engaging theatrical creations than the blind and overbearing (if helpless) Hamm and his servant/son-figure Clov. The post-apocalyptic room we find ourselves trapped in alongside these two, and Hamm's parents Nagg and Nell (trapped themselves in garbage cans) is claustrophobia-inducing and mind-numbing. Nothing happens in the play--well, almost nothing--and the most we are left with at the end is Clov's departure for the outside world. Devastated as this dead and denuded world must be, it is far preferable to the endless bickering and empty rhetoric that is bounced off the walls of their 'prison'. Of course, the inaction of the play is Beckett's absurdist point, and it is to the great credit of the four-member cast and their director Marcus Stern at ART that there as many laughs as there are in this production, and a highly physicalized performance of Clov from Thomas Derrah that raised my level of admittedly fairly low interest in this particular play up significantly. While all four actors play their parts with skill, and Stern directs with a fierce faithfulness to Beckett's text and stage directions (as opposed to a scandalous ART production in 1985, set in a ruined New York subway station, that the playwright himself condemned), it is Derrah's work here that stood out for me. With a comic lurch, as though one leg was shorter than another, a limp that invites a combination of both pity and laughter, Clov is the only mobile character on stage and every thought in his head is reflected fully in his body as portrayed by Derrah. LeBow declaims as Hamm, playing-up his deeply resonant voice in a way that works in the role (although I found Hamm's existential despair somewhat lacking in LeBow's portrayal) and Karen MacDonald and Remo Airaldi as Nell and Nagg do nice work, too, but Derrah literally dances around them as Clov. The repartee he engages in with Hamm has moments of bleak comic poetry that LeBow and Derrah toss-off with great skill. In the end, what does it all mean, this meaninglessness? Beckett gives us lots to ponder but no answers, as is his intent. And we, the audience, play our silent part in the witnessing of the final moments of futile and clownish humanity:
CLOV:
Why this farce, day after day?
HAMM:
Routine. One never knows.
(Pause.)
Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore.
CLOV:
Pah! You saw your heart.
HAMM:
No, it was living.
(Pause. Anguished.)
Clov!
CLOV:
Yes.
HAMM:
What's happening?
CLOV:
Something is taking its course.
(Pause.)
HAMM:
Clov!
CLOV (impatiently):
What is it?
HAMM:
We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
CLOV:
Mean something! You and I, mean something!
(Brief laugh.)
Ah that's a good one!
HAMM:
I wonder.
(Pause.)
Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn't he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough.
(Voice of rational being.)
Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they're at!
(Clov starts, drops the telescope and begins to scratch his belly with both hands. Normal voice.)
And without going so far as that, we ourselves...
(with emotion)
...we ourselves... at certain moments...
(Vehemently.)
To think perhaps it won't all have been for nothing!
[...]
Why this farce, day after day?
HAMM:
Routine. One never knows.
(Pause.)
Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore.
CLOV:
Pah! You saw your heart.
HAMM:
No, it was living.
(Pause. Anguished.)
Clov!
CLOV:
Yes.
HAMM:
What's happening?
CLOV:
Something is taking its course.
(Pause.)
HAMM:
Clov!
CLOV (impatiently):
What is it?
HAMM:
We're not beginning to... to... mean something?
CLOV:
Mean something! You and I, mean something!
(Brief laugh.)
Ah that's a good one!
HAMM:
I wonder.
(Pause.)
Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn't he be liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough.
(Voice of rational being.)
Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes, now I understand what they're at!
(Clov starts, drops the telescope and begins to scratch his belly with both hands. Normal voice.)
And without going so far as that, we ourselves...
(with emotion)
...we ourselves... at certain moments...
(Vehemently.)
To think perhaps it won't all have been for nothing!
[...]
CLOV:
I'll leave you.
HAMM:
No!
CLOV:
What is there to keep me here?
HAMM:
The dialogue.
[http://www.samuel-beckett.net/endgame.html]
I'll leave you.
HAMM:
No!
CLOV:
What is there to keep me here?
HAMM:
The dialogue.
[http://www.samuel-beckett.net/endgame.html]
David Harrower's Blackbird began as a Fringe production at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005 and has gone on to successful productions in London and New York (the latter featuring Jeff Daniels as Ray), with shows in Toronto and Vancouver opening soon. Reflecting its humble Fringe beginnings, the play has a small cast of two (with a walk-on role in the final moments that packs a whallop), a minimal set of an office lunchroom littered with workers' lunch detritus, and a searing, provocative plot about an encounter betwwen a young woman and the man who sexually abused her as a young girl of 12. Or is it a love story? You see what I mean about provocative...
I'm sure there have been many walkouts at the moment 20 minutes or so into this one-act play when Una, now 27, lets us in on this nasty little secret that is the source of the extreme tension felt between these two from the moment Ray is confronted by this encounter with his past. He has paid the price for his sexual relationship with the child Una, 6 years in prison, and has moved on to change his name and location. But she has hunted him down and wants a reckoning. Why is never quite made clear by Harrower, why now, what for, what does she hope to gain? It is made clear, in the long and difficult (to deliver and to hear) monologues that recreate for us the undeniable pull these two felt toward each other 15 years earlier. Una is revealed as somewhat of a Lolita, filled with romanticized longing for this neighbour who makes the fatal error of responding to her pubescent flirtations. The complication of the narrative lies in the uneasy feeling we get that these two still feel something for each other, that calling what happened child sexual abuse is simplifying the more complicated, and messy, reality of human attractions and emotions.
The SpeakEasy Theatre production, directed by David R. Gammons (a busy man this year, having directed Lt. of Inishmore at New Rep and The Duchess of Malfi at Actors' Shakespeare Project, two other 'difficult' plays) features fine performances from Bates Wilder as Ray and Marianna Bassham as Una. Wilder plays Ray as a gentle sort of man, decent really, who is understandably discomfited by the sudden appearance of this shadow from his past. But his denial of responsibility begins to chafe at us over time, and when Una finally physicalizes her rage against him, it is a welcome release for the audience as well. We cannot but feel he deserves the punishment. But when that physical fight becomes a sexual embrace we are pushed again to see Ray's side of the story, that he is not a pedophile or a predator, that what happened between these two people was real passion, real love. Bassham digs very deep to play Una and does some fine work, never backing away from the damaging anger and hurt this young woman has carried around inside her for too long. And when she tells the story of how their flirtation was consummated one night in a beach hotel, followed by Ray's abandonment of her, it is almost unbearable.
My one criticism of the production is that I felt that the stage was too bare to be a believable lunchroom, containing only one chair (that gets thrown around quite a bit!) and a small locker upstage right. In pictures of the New York production, I see a table and a number of chairs, with a few pieces of lunchtime garbage left on the table. Much more real a setting for this encounter than the more stylized space given here, with so much garbage on the floor it becomes an overpowering metaphor for the dirt and stink and residue of this forbidden relationship, rather than something more subtle. But overall I found this to be a difficult yet rewarding theatre experience with sparse yet tightly-constructed dialogue and a sense of dramatic tension that was pervasive and never let up throughout. Not for the faint of heart, but it has its rewards.
Fool for Love by Sam Shepard makes a good pairing with Blackbird, being yet another play about forbidden love, this time of the incest variety. I have always felt this to be a terrific play, by a terrific playwright, with two fabulous roles in Eddie and May, the half-siblings of the same father (who watches, interacts with and comments on the prceedings throughout). The fourth character is the hapless Martin, who arrives to pick May up for a date at her motel room and comes smack dab into the middle of a passionate fight between these two. Eddie and May have been fighting with, and loving (off and on) each other for 15 years when Eddie shows up out of nowhere (yet again) to declare his undying love and to take May away from the dead-end life she's been living. He's a rodeo rider and she's a short-order cook; like most Shepard characters, they've lived hardscrabble lives and everything they think or feel is fully expressed, often physically. Not much repression in a Shepard play! Similar to Harrower's play, interestingly, is that this play ends with two extended monologues that reveal the 'heart of the matter', the truth of their past and how it literally destroyed the lives of both of their respective mothers. Even though their father, The Old Man, tries to intervene in this truth-telling session (with poor sweet Martin as witness), to deny that he abandoned two separate families to fates including murder and incest, the truth is spoken. Then Eddie leaves, as we suspect he always does, and May is left to pack her single suitcase and move on . And we also suspect that this cycle will continue, that these two will come careening and colliding back into each other's lives because they are in love...simple and horrible as that.
While I enjoyed the New Rep production, directed by Bridget Kathleen O'Leary, for its effective physicality and some nice work from the company, I did have one major concern. The actors playing Eddie and May (Timothy John Smith and Stacy Fischer) are very young for these roles. Their youth brings the physicality to the forefront in ways that work with the text, as Eddie tosses his lasso over the bedpost and somersaults onto the bed backwards at one point. And May can also wrap herself around Eddie, drape herself over the side of the bed and hit him upside his head a few times as well. So much youthful energy! Too much for me, in the end, as what was lost in this production is the reality that these two lovers have been ground down over a long period of time, over 15 years, by the tragedy of their father's abandonment (his presence in the play is a device, a wish-fulfillment perhaps, for these two) and the murder of one of their mothers by the other one, both of whom were married to the Old Man and ignorant of his 'other' life and family. Add onto all that family history the complete and uncontrollable passion Eddie and May have felt for each other since the moment they met. It's no wonder these two are barely surviving their lives, and I feel that actors in their mid-thirties can bring another level to the play that is missing in this production. This Eddie is too vital, too positive, to sure of himself as played by Smith. And Fischer's May is sexy and lithe and nobody's doormat, but she doesn't show us the cracks enough, the deep wells of despair. When she screams into Eddie's ear that his mother shot her mother dead, she sounds like an hysterical teenager, rather than the howl of grief (which can even be whispered) that is the reason (more than their being half-siblings) that keeps her and Eddie from ever being able to stay together. Their history haunts them too much. In my mind, these characters are scarred and wrinkled, her body is not what it once was, she's been a drinker (now 'on-the-wagon' but for how long?)...she lives in a motel room fer chrissakes...He's driving from town to town across the west, from rodeo to rodeo, damaging his body, drinking too much, sleeping with dangerous women who can't prevent him from finding his way back to May. There's nothing wrong with these two actors, although I felt Fischer to be a bit disconnected and mannered from time to time, and Smith a bit too stereotypically a 'cowboy.'
To put it plainly, I want to feel these characters' pain more than I do in this production, and my only suggestion is to let these young actors live life themselves for a decade or so, learn about the kind of toll that time takes on us all, and revisit this marvellous play sometime down the road. It's certainly a play worth revisiting, for we go to the theatre as a human laboratory for the examination of scars and scar tissue, and Shepard never disappoints with offering up plenty in this regard.
