January 22, 2018
It's fascinating to think that a
stage drama that has been adapted for the screen (big and small) four times
should be "forgotten," but in America, Hindle Wakes, a 1912 play
by British dramatist Stanley Houghton,
it has been. One can only theorize about why a dramatic work fails to hold a
place in cultural history to which it seemed destined, but I think that most
times, it comes down to a variation on this theme: as the dynamic between
society and the artistic response to it changes, a work dramatizing mores and
attitudes that have no immediately recognizable contemporary parallel will tend
to get sidelined—even if, by the end of the play, the author proves to have
been prescient.
Indeed, Houghton's light
drama—arguably a comedy-drama—seems to be simply about attitudes and
expectations in a small town when it is learned that the son of a rich
industrialist and the daughter of one of the millworkers have had a weekend
fling in the big city. It's not until the play's lengthy final scene that you
realize Houghton was an advocate for the liberal view and making a clear case
against provincialism, and in optimistic terms.
What brings plays like this renewed
attention? It varies from play to play. In the case of Hindle
Wakes, the Mint Theatre
company, who specialize in forgotten works, may have found the right time for
it : that of a polarized society in which, incredibly, women's rights we had
begun taking for granted are now again challenged, and there's a "Me, too"
movement blasting those challenges apart.
Houghton's play, to be sure, doesn't
give us an event anywhere near so cataclysmic as to create a brouhaha; rather, he
dramatizes the futility of brewing a tempest in a teapot, via how doing so
affects three families in father-mother-offspring configuration respectively:
that of the free young woman (Ken Marks, Sandra Shipley, Rebecca Noelle
Brinkley); that of the young man (Jonathan Hogan, Jill Tanner, Jeremy Beck) and
that of his fiancé (Brian Reddy as the father, Emma Geer as the daughter); and tacitly
suggests that letting young consenting adults be young responsible adults on
their own is as good a way of making societal inroads as any.
The design is straightforward and
clean; the direction by Gus Kaikkonen is to the point, sensitive and unobtrusive;
the casting is impeccable; and the case made for the play's renewed life—well,
I'll put it this way. It hurts nobody having it on the radar.
******
At the Irish Rep, you'll find a 20th anniversary revival of Disco Pigs by Enda
Walsh, imported from
guess where, by the Irish Rep. I'm not so sure that this one transcends its
cultural settings. A piece for two actors that is episodic, somewhat abstract,
elliptical, and deliberately a little chaotic, it follows the developing
relationship between two renegade kids, a boy and a girl (Colin Campbell and Evanna Lynch),
starting with the advent of their mutual birthday, and speeding fairly quickly
into their teenage years, which are filled with rebellion, random violence, and
amorality—until the day when one of them starts maturing past the point of no
return. In director John Haidar's
stripped-down production, the actors are energetic and fearless, but the
portrait of disaffected youth seems likewise disaffected by a point, other than
being an exercise in stark theatricality. Or perhaps the portrait itself is the
point. As a plea for understanding? As a social-historical snapshot? These
things can be in the eye of the beholder, of course.
All I can say is that I wish I had beheld more.
******
Also fascinating is the way certain cultural
things can occur at the same time. For example, both John Lithgow: Stories from the
Heart and A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds, which opened with approximately a week of each other, feature
actors performing prose short stories, and each evening contains two stories.
The Lithgow, at the American Airlines Theatre via the Roundabout is somewhat sentimental in its framework, in which Lithgow expounds upon the power of storytelling, and talks specifically about how reading aloud to his father when his health was failing triggered a return of his father's spirit that brought him another several years of life. He then goes on to perform two of the stories—drawn from a favorite family anthology—one per act, by, first, Ring Lardner (US) and then PG Wodehouse (UK). The first is a darkly humorous tale about betrayal and infidelity and worse in a small town (related by a barber to a customer, don't think Sweeney Todd); the second the lightest of light comedy satires about class, a drawing room farce, if you will, with a con man uncle and a haplessly caught-up nephew at the center (related by one member of a gentleman's club to another).
There's a certain convolution to each
of these stories. Both are related by narrators who are themselves characters,
not within the story proper, but of the community in which the story takes
place; observers if you will. So Lithgow dons their personalities first, and achieves all subsequent
characterizations through the filter of their
perception, which, in a certain sense, is the prose styling of each author.
Thus the storyteller portrays the storyteller telling the story. So to call
what Lithgow does here a tour de force puts it mildly, if for nothing but the
achievement of clarity. The physicality, voice and attitude of every
character is so meticulous that you're never confused at the switch between one
and another. If there's a down side, this also makes you very aware of Lithgow's technique, however pristine; because, this
being a theatrical event, he's giving you a visual accompaniment to an audiobook.
So how completely one is drawn in may vary from viewer to viewer. But it's
certainly worth seeing as a tacit essay in reading aloud and thespian craft.
(For an interesting contrast, though, Lithgow as a reader without the visual, the curious might seek out an almost infamous 1985
audio abridgement he recorded of Tom
Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. It's
an absolutely brilliant and breathtaking performance, but it's also absolutely
an interpretation. But that one,
working solely on your mind, is so completely
seductive, that Lithgow's same extreme particularization of character and
narrative imprimatur reportedly became a huge influence [some claim an
unfortunate one] on how the director and screenwriter of the film decided to
approach their adaptation.)
Downtown on 4th street, at a studio space I've never before visited, Next Door @ NYTW, which, just as it says, is next door to the New York Theatre Workshop's main space, and that's where the second of these "audio book on stage" shows resides. A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds, though featuring the work of theatre dramatist Mac Wellman, known for experimental stage work, actually draws from that writer's prose material, in particular a collection of science fiction short stories bearing the same title. (Mr. Wellman is not to be confused with another, unrelated science fiction veteran of a previous generation, Manly Wade Wellman.) It's something of a challenge to describe what you're in for, and what these stories are about and try to do, coherently—so let me borrow excerpts from Stephanie Sobelle in Bookforum, followed by Nicholas Birns in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, who have conveniently done it for me:
Sobelle: "A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds
is a collection of short stories or, as the author would have it, an
interconnected series of planetoids that, while comically inventive, rings with
the sound of our contemporary moment. Add the alchemical wordplay of Lewis
Carroll and the satiric geometry of Edwin Abbott to Italo
Calvino's Cosmicomics, and you'll have some idea of
what Wellman has done here. Chronicle is a daunting and subversive rumination
on the relationship between how we live and the language we use when we do so."
Birns: "[the book] provides a series of narratives
discontinuous in both subject and meaning, yet undergirded by a vertebral
jauntiness in the ability of language to still matter after all its customary
props have been denied it. By writing coherent sentences that yet use phony,
concocted, or deliberately absurd referents, which in turn do not carry over
even from paragraph to paragraph.
Imagine now the
sonic bed of these worlds made via musical score—that hews to no particular
genre but might be most easily described in shorthand as jazz fusion—played
live by its co-composers (Anna McClellan,
Daniel Ocanto,
Sean Smith, Graham Ulinny)…and then the inhabitants
of two of these planetoids made manifest by first man, then a woman, each of
whom, for the length of a story-act, will occupy an elevated platform with a
mic, and there simply provide the rest of the worlds, woven by words.
Timothy Siragusa, in a colorful bow tie and loud jacket, performs the first story as
if in the grip of dementia rendered sane, citizen of a society that condones
things like patricide as a mark of maturity's next step, on a planet where
everybody of every gender has the same name: Mary Carnivorous Rabbit. Anastasia Olowin,
tall, willowy, in a flowing silk dress, is
almost the opposite: her rendering of her worldlet
performed as if she has a constant need to deconstruct it, balancing a state of
precision with one of bewilderment—a bewilderment occasionally punctuated by a
syllable that has no explanation or context (at least not when removed from the
entire collection of published stories): "Bup…bup…bup…" Both performers are excellent, but for me,
Ms. Olowin has that extra, alchemical, indefinable insistence that marks a potential star.
At any rate, the evening is highly recommended (though not for the
unadventurous), and both actors, if there's any justice, should be able to
carve out second careers as brilliant readers of audiobooks. Audio publishers
take note.
******
Finally, The Barrow Group is presenting Scott Organ's The Thing With Feathers. It's a disquieting play that seems at
first merely to be about a smart teenage girl of 17 (Alexa Shae Niziak), who is potentially
about to be the victim of an online predator (Zachary Booth), even under the watchful eye of her mother, a career
teacher (DeAnna Lenhart) and
her fiancé, a veteran cop (Robert
Manning, Jr.).
An arguable problem with
the play is that all through its first act, you may well think only that is going on, and steel
yourself for a ride that can only move from apprehension-filled to
unpleasant—despite being very well acted by the cast, under the unobtrusive but
sharp direction of Seth Barrish. But in fact, there are deeper layers, and what
appears at first only to be a story about an incident, turns out to be a
plotted tale heading somewhere unexpected and ironic.
I'm not sure this is a
play one can ever like…but it's
certainly one that earns its keep by never letting its grip on the better part
of humanism succumb to hovering darkness. In spite of everything, this is not
boilerplate territory. And in a grey-area way, that which its title alludes to
(look up the quote if you don't know it), is what it leaves you with.