You
know you have come to see a play about the fatal 1978 shootings of San
Francisco Mayor George Moscone and the first openly gay City Councilman Harvey
Milk, about their colleague Dan White who killed them and ultimately himself,
and the legal system's response to all of this. Before the action begins in the
About Face Theatre
production, you view the brutally raw mesh playing surface and video screens
displaying "San Francisco 1978" wonder about the kind of experience
that lays before you. How intense will the playwright and the production team
make this already intense topic? Will there be any humor? Should there be any
humor? And as this played out, intriguingly, I noted a potential problem with
the humor that this production does surface in the events portrayed. In this
end, this is a beautifully acted and realized production that should be seen.
Director
Gary Griffin's
choreographed initial images in this new production of Emily Mann's "Execution of Justice" become a kind of call to ritual
and call to performance with drum (provided by percussionists Andy Jones and Bob Garret) and stylized movement.
Griffin's background in musical theatre is blissfully resonant in choices like
these. We are compelled to listen, with sights and sounds that suggest ancient
Greek theatre, with all characters initially on stage in mute assemblage,
welcoming us, commanding us to learn and ultimately to judge what we are about
to see.
The
Milk and Moscone shootings are presented on the set's nine video screens
arrayed three by three, upstage, in the middle of the compact playing area
dressed and lit by Brian Sidney Bembridge. We live through November 27, 1978 at San
Francisco City Hall and the immediate aftermath through re-enacted news reports
at the time of discovering the bodies, and the familiar footage of a stunned
Supervisor Dianne Feinstein making the announcement. The video design by Logan
Kibens is
lovely, essential to this story telling and this particular staging of the
events and the theatre of this production. The nine television screens are used
in unison or as parts of a larger whole, projecting black and white stage
setting images such as architecturally intriguing courtroom details and video
of a solemn candlelight march interspersed, as needed, with the equivalent of
vaudeville act introduction placards (e.g. "Act One: Murder",
"Recess", "Act Two: Defense"), or the previously mentioned
actual or re-enacted news footage reporting the events of the play. The purpose
is clear; the artistry is strong.
The
play focuses on the people who end up on the courtroom, the misguided judicial
and jury decisions, and selected events subsequent to the trial of Dan White.
In the staging of the court sequences (the prosecution and defense portions
split neatly with the one intermission), the courtroom personnel, including
defense attorney, prosecuting attorney, and all witnesses, face the audience.
When the judge's voice emerges, it is from the back of the auditorium. Despite
the slightly awkward staging that challenges courtroom veracity (e.g. all the
action does not face the jury in a court of law), we slowly realize that we,
the audience, are the jury and are in fact instructed as a jury prior to the
intermission break not to discuss the facts of the case. This conceit actually
works in a tidy, predictable way.
The
play illuminates the challenges of portraying relatively recent social and
politically charged events in a theatrical setting. This piece can be compared
to the more recent oral history/ recitative drama based on the experiences of
detainees at Guantanamo ("Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom") produced last season at
Chicago's Timeline Theatre. While the substance of "Guantanamo" is as
stirring as anything generated by a playwright's imagination, and it was a
gripping piece of theatre as performed by the actors in the Timeline
production, "Guantanamo" suffers from the almost exclusively
sequential, recitative presentation of the words of individuals involved in
observing, legally defending, and surviving incarceration at Guantanamo after
September 11, 2001. Both "Guantanamo" and "Execution"
deserve their audiences. But while one is social theatre as staged delivery of
individual speeches, what Emily Mann has crafted is in fact more theatrical,
selectively portrayed, and involves more than a few actual conversations. In
addition, the world of courtroom dramas stand as peers and partners, while this
production provides some new nuances (the "we the jury" element
placing the audience in the action and the booming, "Judge as Zack"
element in which the judge's voice and never the judge himself appears and
responds to the arguments and testimony provided, much like the director Zack
auditioning hopefuls for most of "A Chorus Line"). So "Execution of
Justice" is both a bit more theatrical and a bit more creative than some
plays that immediately jump to mind in comparison.
Among
the stories discussed and portrayed in "Execution" are the stories of
the two slain men, the man who shot and killed them, the legal system's
challenges (charging, jury mechanics, and other issues), and the response by
people on the street to these events. Perhaps too much is attempted in one bit
of theatre? While we have some video of Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone, we don't
get to know them as individuals. We do get to know the effect they had on a
city and a community through several intriguing characters, e.g. "Milk's
Friend" (Freddie Sulit) and community activist Gwen Craig (Ora Jones). And we do have a chance to
revel in the predictably dramatic "courtroom as theatre" speeches by
Prosecutor Tom Norman (the fabulous John Judd) and defense attorney Doug
Schmidt (earnestly and sometimes cartoonishly played by Sean Fortunato), and
the disturbing words of Dan White himself (Steve Key). This production is blessed
with fabulous acting; the play itself attempts to demonstrate a pivotal event
for a community, for a city, for a movement: the injustice of the trial and the
responsibility of the people who participated in it.
This
play as a play may have some challenges over time. For example, the
presentation of baldly homophobic and bigoted language during jury selection,
during public discourse as reported at the time of the trial, elicited chortles
from the opening night crowd rather than the perhaps intended gasps or
shudders. The challenge will always be to bring the audience into the world and
time and place of the increasingly distant 1978 of the play. The opening night
crowd chuckled repeatedly at the snidely humorous performance by Sean Fortunato
as defense attorney. I wonder if this humor (seen as humor through the lens of
history) might challenge the intended effect of the words and actions. These
were not buffoons representing Dan White or articulating their support of his
repressed and almost separatist/isolationist view but instruments of terror and
injustice, in their own way.
After
our recess, after the jury deliberations, the participants in the courtroom are
a bit aghast, the community responds quietly and forcefully through marches,
and we attempt to make sense of this. None of the participants "win"
in this bit of history. We in our society "win" through the role this
political event played in the evolution of GLBT rights. This is a play worth
producing and tweaking as the times change.