In
Sam Shepard's
theatrical world the mundane safety of domestic life is surrounded by an
external world that is always threatening and potentially lethal. Most often,
the inhabitants of that dwelling soon discover that they are not so safe with
each other, either. Fear, deception, moral compromise, mis-perceptions and
inadequate communication characterize the relationships in most of Shepard's
work. Those qualities also describe his view of the Bush political regime, and
the nature of governmental intrusion for the Wisconsin dairy farm couple, Frank
and Emma, and their two uninvited guests in "The God of Hell".
This
play, written in hopes of influencing the 2004 Presidential election, is really
a kind of farcical agitprop, blatantly mocking the paranoid excesses of the
Bush Whitehouse with a story that is intermittently funny, frightening,
ridiculous and relevant. Using theatrical gestures so extreme they sometimes
create more caricature than character, it still retains Shepard's gift for
achieving the visceral out of absurdity.
In
this moderately well-performed production by The New Stage in Shoreline, director Chris
Fisher keeps the
80 minute performance entertaining and compelling, but doesn't quite achieve
the sobriety, intensity or danger implicit in the script. As a result, one
comes out of the performance not knowing exactly how to feel about it, whether
it was simply an amusement preaching to the choir (since it is anything but
politically balanced) or a cautionary fable meant to invoke some degree of fear
and pity. Much of the problem is in the play itself, which is more like an
impassioned placard than an organic drama, but some of the problems are also in
the performances.
The
farm couple is very solid, with Kara Whitney creating an entirely consistent
and believable character in the role of Emma. She had just the right quality of
plainness for a woman who has lived her entire life on a rural dairy farm, and
"likes it just fine." More importantly, she always felt grounded and
authentic, as naturally raised in this life as a stalk of corn. That's
critically important when everyone else in the play undergoes such profound
change, especially her husband, Frank. I also appreciated the way she made the
well-designed and decorated set (Katy Higgins) feel like the place where she
really lived, everything just where she puts it, each plant her personal
charge. Her idiosyncrasy of compulsively over-watering them, while funny, was
also just right, just the sort of thing this over-nurturing woman would do.
Her
husband, Frank, is equally compulsive about caring for his heifers, and David
Ledingham brings
a masculine strength, a reality of physical labor, to the dairy-farmer that is
particularly effective when he is converted into something slightly demonic by
the play's end. His performance had the strongest sense of the political,
personal, soul-threatening danger presented by the government agent, Welch, and
in the most investment in protecting his fugitive "old friend"
Haynes. The problem is that the external threat presented by Welch and Haynes
needed to be as expressive and palpable as the response of Frank. It wasn't.
When
Welch (Jason Adkins) intrudes into Emma's home he brings with him a briefcase filled
with patriotic paraphernalia and kitsch. Overly-groomed in a slick, corporate
way, he has the unctuous, unwelcome familiarity of a traveling salesman, which
he is really, except that the buyers cannot decline his offer. When he pulls
out American flag streamers, a flag-patterned tablecloth, small Statue of
Liberty ornaments and a portable neon call-to-patriotism it's all quite funny.
Only when it becomes clear that his pitch is really a demand, his presence a
threat, his autonomy no more than a manifestation of his ideological possession
do we realize we should have felt something else. That streamer of red, white
and blue should have been as chilling as a row of swastikas. We should have
known that the flag-frosted cookie he offers Emma was a kind of sweet poison.
There should have been real pain apparent just below the surface of this joke
d_cor.
That
pain is most realized in Haynes, a "researcher" who has been staying
in the basement, on the run from a job at a top-secret military facility called
Rocky Buttes. The mention of that name causes physical pain, and something that
happened there left Haynes with a powerful electrical charge whenever he
touches someone. Welch is here to get him back, literally towing him away by
his genitals. The government goes after every man by the balls, Shepard says
none too subtly. As played by Geoff Finney, Haynes was just too weak, less a strong man
broken than a weak man weakened. Nor did I really believe this man had ever had
a position important enough for the government to come after him. Had Welch
been more insidious and Haynes been more resistant, the drama would have felt
more like a mortal conflict and less like a Punch and Judy show.
"The
God of Hell" is certainly not Sam Shepard at his best, but it does have
much of his characteristic strength: the insight into ordinary American
character, the broken, inept quality of our conversation, the theatrical
inventiveness that makes anything realistic potentially fantastic, the social
fear that always lies just below our brutality. This production may not
entirely succeed, but The New Stage is to be commended for taking on a
political drama with both immediate relevance and a continuous theme in our
struggle to be a free people. As Emma poignantly asks at one point, "Our
government. What does that even mean anymore - our government?" This play
doesn't give us an answer, but it reminds us how important it is to raise the
question.