"The Crucible" at Trinity Rep

One desperately wishes that the current production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” at Trinity Rep had not been given such royal treatment. The play is stooped and abashed under the heavy crown – and the errant expectations – placed on it by director Brian McEleney and his cast. Certainly, “The Crucible” is no model of modesty: it is full of declamation and self-righteousness. But it should be allowed to retain its rusticity, its squalor, and its urgency – the elements that make it a human tragedy and not a mere metaphor. McEleney sets it on a throne, from which it issues a series of ungrounded and untestable edicts, before which the audience is cowed like subjects or students. When the audience stands wearily at show’s end, it is as if to acknowledge Miller’s perceived prophetic infallibility rather than the production’s ingenuity. This reflexive display is, of course, anathema to the play’s celebration of the individual.

The premise of this production is that Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials, which he wrote as a way to understand and illuminate the farcical anti-communist hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, is relevant today because of our own febrile and delusional political discourse. It is a metaphor twice removed and, as such, it makes a better thought experiment than theatre experience. But the first proposition of the Theatre of the Sincere is that even the least articulated thought experiment makes a good play. This is a diminishment of theatre and should be a disappointment to audiences. It suggests that the best that plays can do is edify, and that the most audiences can hope for from a night at the theatre is a sound education, or at least an equivalency certificate. It seems as though Trinity has ceded terror to other media, which is as much to give up on theatre, because it is also a surrender of pleasure. Terror is not merely horror – although in a play about witches in an encroaching geographical and spiritual wilderness, horror ought to loom. (It doesn’t, here.) It is also an aspect of empathy: the fear, aroused through the use of sound, space, and performance, that the fate of the characters onstage is as real, consequential, and undetermined as one’s own. The current Trinity production does not work for this feeling of disorientation; instead, it meets us on our terms, as though only our story mattered. The play itself can practically be discarded as long as its relevance is asserted and our own contemporary condition is spelled out.

Crudely put, “The Crucible” does not tell our story but the story of the Salem witch trials of 1692, in which nineteen women and men were hanged because of the wild accusations of pre-adolescent girls. Or, rather, it tells the part of the story that involves the flawed hero-figure John Proctor, a paragon of masculinity and morality whose lone slip is a doozy: while his wife was sick, he had an affair with his teenaged servant, Abigail. From Abigail, Proctor learns that the girls’ accusations are baseless charges issued out of spite, vengeance, and fear – but in order to expose their fraudulence he has to publicly admit to his indiscretion with her. There are at least three stories entwined here: the hysteria of power enjoyed by the accusing girls; the angry convulsions of the besieged moral authority in Salem; and the degradation of John Proctor, who is not a witch but who, to survive this ordeal as the man he thought he was, must confess to some other transgression. We can’t forget that Miller’s work is not a general indictment of society but a sensitive scanning of community dynamics.

The text takes place in 1692; the action in McEleney’s production is set on the recreated steps of Providence City Hall, built in 1878. The house and stage lights are barely differentiated, so the drama appears to play out in the glare of the light of day. In an interview with Bill Rodriguez, in the Providence Phoenix, McEleney said the production was meant to conjure “guerilla street theater,” immediate and confrontational, but what it conjures instead is community theater, earnest and reassuring. Sure, the production is dyspeptic, but in utterly predictable and uncontroversial ways. The actors, looking adrift on the vast set and, occasionally, along the house aisles, recite their lines as though into a strong wind. They are serious and determined, but their performances feel projected rather than inhabited. The show has all the spontaneity and humor of a Puritan sermon; indeed, it is as dull and deliberate as an exegesis. It cries out for the fury and fervor of a revival.

This is not to say that the production lacks all feeling. The long second scene (the second act in Miller’s script) between John Proctor (Stephen Thorne) and his wife, Elizabeth (Angela Brazil), runs hot with the fuel of feeling: Proctor’s guilt, for having betrayed his wife with their young servant, mixed in equal parts with Elizabeth’s insecurity in her husband’s affection. Both know that Proctor must denounce Abigail, and both realize that he will have to confess his transgression to the community to be credible. Their relationship is real – it is no symbol – and McEleney gives it room to expand. Thorne trembles with troubled conscience and slowly budding resolve, while Brazil coolly controls her feelings. “Cool” and “control” are not qualities I have ever ascribed to Ms. Brazil’s acting, but they are apt descriptors here; she is the wonderful surprise of this show.

Other performances don’t fare as well. Reverend Samuel Parris is played by Bob Berky, who, the night I saw the show, was as rigid as a Puritan pew; his cadence was wooden, his posture uncomfortable. Fred Sullivan, Jr., as Thomas Putnam and, even more as Deputy Governor Danforth, was enigmatic. True to form, he has followed his authentic and awesome performance in “Absurd Person Singular” with a performance of exactly equal indifference. (I have only been watching for four years, but I wonder if one might follow this sinusoidal phenomenon throughout his career.) In “The Crucible,” he is fierce and inexplicable, like a summer squall. His instrument, his wonderful voice, is as sure and seductive as ever, but it is really just spit and wind. His Danforth is not fearful or paranoid or vulnerable or vengeful: he is just loud. Olivia D’Ambrosio plays Abigail; and I think “plays” is the right word for what she does with the role. She seems nearly to toy with it, an approach that usually pays off because, of course, Abigail herself is a kind of player. One senses her mastery, and, with her high cheekbones, vulpine eyes, and confident contralto, one can also understand John Proctor’s error. But the role calls for helplessness too, and D’Ambrosio is reluctant to surrender her power. When Abigail must pretend to be possessed by Mary Warren (Rachael Warren) in court in order to sustain the girls’ charade, D’Ambrosio can’t quite summon the necessary girlishness. It is an unconvincing performance within a performance.

D’Ambrosio, of course, is not to blame for the play’s failure, but her inability to access the spiritual anarchy of that historical moment is emblematic of the entire production, which is too measured and controlled. McEleney presents the play as a conclusion rather than an exploration, draining it of contingency and excitement: since we all know what it's about, anyway, there's no reason to evoke a specific time, place, or mood. He leans heavily on the play’s stature and keeps the audience at a long arm’s length. It is an allegory, too refined and remote to be mistaken for a yarn. McEleney has a mission, and “The Crucible” serves his ends. “You will not use me!” John Proctor shouts, in the play’s climactic scene. In this production, at least, his insistence goes unheeded.

Oskar Eustis Profiled in the New Yorker

Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of Trinity Rep from 1994 to 2005 and currently Artistic Director of New York's Public Theatre, is profiled in this week's New Yorker by staff writer Rebecca Mead (abstract here.) Searching for "Oskar Eustis" on the magazine's website turns up a list of references, including to John Lahr's review of the Public Theatre's Hamlet from the summer of 2008, which is summarized thus: "Under the unfortunate direction of Oskar Eustis, Hamlet is currently presiding over the Public Theatre as a melodramatic fool." Lahr's scalding review expresses the paradox of Eustis's career suggested in Mead's profile: he's done great stuff for Theatre over the years, but, it would seem, little great work at any single theater. Mead quotes Rocco Landeman, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, on the Public Theatre: "'It is always a mix of the compelling, the interesting, and the dreadful. And you have to be willing to do the dreadful.'" As an artistic director, he appears to understand his role as more organizer than aesthete: his vision, one feels, is for what a theatre can do, not just each production. Mead really has composed a wonderful profile. Although she is curiously indifferent towards the texture and temperature of his productions, she does capture Eustis's incorrigible energy - his vitality, brio, and fervor. Eustis comes across like a saint of lost causes: to Communism and to contemporary, serious New York theatre. Two more doomed, disappointed allegiances would be hard to imagine.

(I would love to hear about Eustis's years at Trinity. If you remember a particularly challenging, confrontational, or tendentious show of his, please don't hesitate to describe it in the comments section.)

Final Weekend at Trinity Rep: Shapeshifter

With the world premiere of Shapeshifter, Trinity Rep’s 2008-2009 season comes to an end. Actually, one feels on leaving the theatre that it has come to the edge of a bending horizon and disappeared only from sight: the play, and the season, end wistfully, with the promise of further adventures bunched and blurred like a distant and indistinct silhouette. But the prospect of a fulfilling future is no match, as drama at least, for the realization of something meaningful and passionate now, and what Shapeshifter lacks is a moment, a present, in which life is frozen and shown in exultant detail. This is not to say that there are no great moments in the play—there are—but that the play itself only describes, and does not evoke, a long moment of crisis, and so the decision with which it ends is noisy but spurious. More interested in surfaces than depths, in action than in introspection, the show has a shape but no spirit.

It is not for lack of trying. Laura Schellhardt wrote her play around the perplexing and life-long question of identity—which, really, is what most art is about—and she has set it in a magical milieu: the Orkney Islands, off the northern coast of Scotland, which are nestled in mist and enthralled by the inscrutable behavior of shapeshifters, supernatural beings who can assume animal and human form. Midge, a young girl whose erratic behavior since her mother’s death worries her father (Fred Sullivan, Jr.) and her caretakers, the loving and gently teasing Fierson (Brian McEleney) and Maude (Anne Scurria), has a strong connection to the water and its spirits—and, somehow, we know, to the shapeshifters as well. She senses her difference from the others in her small fishing village but cannot express it. Fierson nurtures her incipient awareness of who she is in the dark loam of the stories he tells her about shapeshifters and transformation and love and sacrifice; to Maude, however, these tales are just arid fantasy: life is a series of practical challenges, like keeping one’s house clean and family fed.

But Midge is not the only one in the village transfixed by the power of the shapeshifters: her caretakers’ son, Tom (Stephen Thorne), rescues one from the ocean, falls in love with her, and marries her—all this in spite of her inability to speak English, though her whale is quite good—while other villagers have their own encounters with members of this mystical species. (Rachael Warren plays all of the shapeshifters, finding distinguishing physical mannerisms in each.) These scenes, episodic and elliptical, are animated not by the breath of character but by the machinery of caricature. Douglas (Joe Wilson, Jr.), for example, captures a shapeshifter, imprisons her, and tries to force her to marry him. What accounts for his ugly rapacity we never learn; his prehensile lust is merely a cynical contrast to Tom’s innocent affection. It’s not that the story needs more exposition or supposed psychological realism, but that its emotions need more mass. They are colorful and large, but they are hollow. Douglas is not a compelling character if he simply hates shapeshifters: what is his real quarrel with himself or with the world? What wrong does he mean to avenge, what imbalance does he mean to right, by dominating and demoralizing this shapeshifter? The audience learns as much about him as we might about a neighbor whose windows we walk past in the evening.

The play’s perfunctory characterization may be a function of its debt to the oral storytelling tradition. Plaited through the show is a fantastical story that Midge co-authors with Fierson and that changes direction as Midge herself changes. To reinforce this connection between Midge and the story she tells, Schellhardt has her watching action onstage even when she is not a part of it. These scenes, unfortunately, replicate the play’s problem: it all feels diffused and distorted, as though observed through the murky medium of a child’s avid and unrefined curiosity. There’s nothing recognizable in any of the characters—except for what we recognize from other plays and movies we’ve seen. Like Midge, who thinks that she can find the perfect name for someone by asking what he loves and what he hates, Schellhardt seems to believe that personality can be determined by two-question survey. So: Fierson is sweet-natured and imaginative but casually dismissive of his wife. Maude seems at first merely long-suffering and hard-headed, until she shows Midge a box containing artifacts from her youth—the skin she changed out of, but could not discard, when she married Fierson. Tom is love-struck and naïve, and Douglas is an unrepentant brute. Even Midge, the sympathetic center of the show, is a cipher, although she is rendered excitedly by Miriam Silverman.

Schellhardt thinks that shapeshifters can act as an illuminating metaphor for the story of any person’s maturation, which is a process of expansion and compromise, of fluidity and assertion, but she has worked backwards from this thesis to a play. As evidentiary drama, as Theatre of the Sincere, Shapeshifter is perfectly crafted; it presents its ideas efficiently, persuasively, even attractively. But it should not be mistaken for a show about actual people.

Trinity Rep's "The Secret Rapture"

In contemporary usage, rapture has come to refer to an ecstasy, to a joy, often sexual or sacred, beyond words; but its Latin root is raptus, the past participle of the verb rapere—to seize, to take away—which has multiplied over the centuries into rapt, and raptor, and rape. Rapture, then, is not just speechless happiness, but a sensation before which one is powerless: it steals you from the moment, the self, and, in religious tradition, the world. It is, in short, a joy to fear. David Hare’s The Secret Rapture, now at Trinity Rep, has plenty of feeling, but little fear and joy; its characters believe themselves more pragmatic than that. The play begins and ends with death, and the life illustrated in between is profoundly mitigated by it. Which is not to say that there is no levity or lightness at all in the show—just that it feels more like a tenuous reprieve than a state of rest. What’s natural, Hare suggests, is for us to drift toward jealousy and conflict: even silence, however introverted, however rapt, is a sign of guilt or reproach. Who can be bothered with rapture, whatever it is—awe or terror or transformation or consummation—when life, with all of its mortification, is hard enough?

If this were all that The Secret Rapture were about, we might expect it to feel circular, its ending determined by its beginning and its meaning neatly enclosed within. But the play’s final line includes both a valediction and a summons—“We’re just beginning”—that prevents us from drawing simple conclusions. That line is uttered by Marion (Phyllis Kay), a Junior Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government, who has seemed pathologically incapable of sympathy; her sister, Isobel, by contrast, suffers from the gift of too much feeling. The impetus of the play is the death of their father, but its drama begins when Marion takes back the ring she had given him while he was still alive. Isobel (Rachael Warren), who had assumed care-taking responsibilities and was with their father when he died, watches silently as Marion reclaims the ring from a bedside table, a transgression she justifies too vehemently by insisting that their opportunistic stepmother, Katherine (Anne Scurria), would have taken it herself and sold it for vodka. Marion’s husband, Tom (Fred Sullivan, Jr.), a born-again Christian entrepreneur, bumbles into the scene and proves comically indifferent to moral struggles—the assurance of Christ’s custody has given him a chipper insouciance—and Marion, shamed by Isobel’s equanimity, storms out. The pieces of the show, if not their jigsaw relationships, are suggested immediately: inward calm and furtive busy-ness; the terrible power of silence to rebuke; the possibility of salvation through another person.

The play’s course is tragic; we can, from that first scene, foresee Isobel’s indignities rising like distant mountains. Katherine, a self-loathing and fractious alcoholic, has nowhere to go after her husband’s death, so Isobel takes her on at her small design firm in London. But her disruptive and destructive impulsiveness is too much for Isobel’s colleague and boyfriend, Irwin (Stephen Thorne), who, failing to persuade Isobel to fire her, demands that she leave himself. Isobel runs after her and hires her back. Later, Marion and Tom offer to buy Isobel’s firm, move it to a more comfortable and spacious office, and run it like an investment—with an eye ever on profit. This arrangement, which Isobel never wanted but which she is unable to prevent, proves toxic to her: her relationship with Irwin sickens, her business dries up, and she herself withers. It is hard to convey the ineluctable tectonic movement of the show, which results in the subduction of Isobel’s personality—“No one can remember now, but the big joke is, by temperament, I’m actually an extremely cheerful girl,” she says to Irwin in the second act—and which generates so much heat. If we are horrified by Marion’s, Tom’s, and Katherine’s power to manipulate Isobel, we are also exasperated by her own misguided sense of responsibility that makes her so malleable. Her capacity to empathize—which Marion later calls the effort “to understand everything”—is tested, exploited, and turned against her by those who are supposed to love her the most. The play ends in a setting we know well—Marion’s and Isobel’s father’s house—but its tone is newly desperate. Isobel’s search for peace has itself become a kind of poison: it has made Irwin mad with grief; Marion simply mad; and Tom almost agnostic. Only Katherine, we think, remains unmoved by it.

The Secret Rapture is a steely work, forged in the unforgiving language and the awful silences of the day-to-day. For all of the script’s toughness, the acting is often quite fine. At the tragic center of the show, and subject to all of its unrelenting pressures, is Rachael Warren, who finds Isobel’s familiar qualities—her reluctance to embarrass anyone else, her eagerness to please, her tendency to self-dramatize—and rescues them from bathos or banality. Isobel is a strange character, too: she’s wise enough to recognize the connivance of her family, but not canny enough to resist it. I suppose this is what idealism is, after all, and Warren gives Isobel’s a quality of practicality rather than perfection. She is like a real person, only more so, and we cringe with recognition. Phyllis Kay gives conservatism a bad name (or, rather, an even worse one) as the coldly calculative Marion. To be fair, Marion doesn’t plot Isobel’s downfall; as in the best tragedy, she is only an instrument of a much larger force. Kay’s performance is pitched just right for a politician: she disgusts us not with the extravagance of her nihilism but with the poverty of her affection. And Anne Scurria, who has single-handedly made several Trinity Rep shows worth seeing, is as energetic and believable as ever.

There are problems with the show’s casting, however. The first is that Fred Sullivan, Jr., plays Tom, a sincere evangelist, with a decorative and distracting irony. The script is clear about Isobel’s and Marion’s distrust of religious fervor, but we have to believe that Tom believes himself. As it is, his growing doubt about the efficacy of God’s planning doesn’t touch or sadden us, because Sullivan has played him all along as though in on a joke with the audience. We should be discomfited by Tom’s religious interruptions, not merely amused by them; if we laugh at him, it is at our own peril. Then there is the problem of the characters’ ages. The script calls for Marion and Tom to be in their late thirties, and for Isobel and Katherine to be in their early thirties: Marion is older than her stepmother. Despite impressive performances from Kay, Scurria, and Warren, this tension in their relationship cannot be stretched: Scurria has tremendous youthful vitality, but she is not the same age as Rachael Warren. The casting of older actors bleaches the play of some of its strangeness and energy. When Scurria, as Katherine, worries that she has nowhere to go after the death of her husband, we don’t think twice about it; her concern seems as credible as anyone’s on entering a job market cornered by the young, the unbowed, and the technologically savvy. Imagine a woman hardly older than a child, but already so fatalistic and defeated: to be young and desperate, though still untouched by the fires of experience, is to represent a raw sort of danger. Part of the shame here is that, in Angela Brazil, Trinity may have just the actress for Katherine’s childish impertinence. I can’t help wondering what Brazil’s exuberance would look like, dulled by drink and soured with envy. It might, in fact, be rapturous.

Notes on Trinity Rep's "The Secret Rapture"

We saw David Hare's The Secret Rapture at Trinity Rep Wednesday night. It is about a father's death and a family's splintering: it is also about the death of an idea, or an ideal, and our efforts to outgrow it or grow into it. The play works on its audience subtly, only gradually revealing the terms of its tragedy. What makes it so rich, I think, is that its rapture is a secret not only to its characters but also to us--and even, I suspect, to Hare himself: despite its building momentum and urgency, the play never feels prescribed. It does feel patiently observed, and it is out of the equivocations and epiphanies of the everyday that Hare builds his drama. There is silence there, too, which acts as mortar or magma, depending on the temperature of the scene. The show is, for the most part, honestly acted--the three female leads are terrific; only Fred Sullivan, Jr., as an evangelical entrepreneur, feels like shorthand--and it is directed with real conviction and sincerity by Trinity Rep Artistic Director Curt Columbus. If conviction and sincerity sound like measures of faith rather than tragedy, it's because the show is about conflicts of belief--in politics, in God, in decency--which is the secret we can't help sharing.

I'll have a review posted soon.

Weekend Theatre

Once again you find yourself at the edge of a weekend. You wonder, What can I do in the next two days that will supplant the week's indignities in my memory? You say, Why don't I go to a show? There must be a show in town.

There is.

At the Black Rep, catch Charles Mulekwa's A Time of Fire, starring the ever-pyretic Raidge as a tremulous thief, Cedric Lily (from last Fall's Bug) as a thuggish soldier, and Jonathan Dent as a devout student; they meet in the middle of a civil war in an unnamed African country. It's Saturday night at 7, and Sunday--which is a pay-what-you-can matinee--at 3pm.

Trinity Rep's A Raisin in the Sun has garnered some of the highest praise of any recent show in Providence; it is all deserved. See it Friday and Saturday night at 7:30, and Sunday at 2pm and 7:30.

Trinity is also beginning previews of David Hare's The Secret Rapture. The play may be a distorted reflection of Margaret Thatcher's England, but it is also a clear-eyed and contemporary look at money and morality. Hare fits this epic subject to the scale of the quotidian--an inherited house, a small graphic design firm, a bureaucrat's ambition--and scores it with intelligent, though exquisitely imperfect, language. Performances are Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday at 7:30pm.

Perishable Theatre is hosting the world premiere of Bad Money; previews are Saturday night at 8:00 and Sunday at 3:00, and opening night is Monday the 23rd.

Meanwhile, 2nd Story Theatre's The Front Page is sold out but I suspect you can call the box office for availability. And the Gamm is quiet for the next couple of weeks before opening Grace for previews on March 12th. Its run is short--only four weekends, including previews--so get your tickets now.

Also, you can go to the movies. Cable Car's French Film Festival is in full flower this weekend.

Trinity Rep's A Raisin in the Sun

What happens to a play preserved? Does it soak and swell in the anxieties of the generations it outlasts? Or does it rush like the Heraclitean river in which we submerge ourselves occasionally, both our changing bodies and the rushing waters encountering each other for the first time, each time? Does it soften and rot, or does it harden into a mask of its fine qualities? (And, in any case, which is the worse fate: to decay or to petrify?) Or does the play preserve us? Does a historical play, a social play, keep our aspirations alive through decades of frustration or complacency? We call productions of old plays “revivals” because we believe we are waking something from sleep, or death; but is it also the actors and the audience who, touched by the play, walk again? I don’t know. I don’t know how theatre works—how a company that performs only new works might have a different relationship to its audience than a company that, like Trinity Rep, performs contemporary, original, and classic works; or how plays, actors, and audiences collaborate nightly in the secular miracle of insurrection, each raising the other up against the claims of indifference. But I do know that despite my skepticism, and despite my persistent reservations, Trinity Rep’s production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun does work some kind of miracle. This miracle, I think, is not specifically related to the realization of equality in a crudely hierarchical country, or to a so-perfect production of the play that it sends us into the world, changed forever. It is rather the insistence that art itself can be enough—that water need not be turned to wine, that a dream deferred is better than no dream at all.

When A Raisin in the Sun opens, the Younger family, a working-class black family on Chicago's South Side, is beginning a new day—except that they’re not: it’s the same day they have been living for generations. While her mother-in-law sleeps, Ruth Younger (Lynette Freeman) rouses her son, Travis, for school, and, with equal difficulty, her husband, Walter (Joe Wilson, Jr.), for work. Even after Walter wakes up, dreams still rattle around in his head; his first substantive line—about the life insurance check the Youngers are waiting for after the death of Walter’s father—shows that he lives in a world of fantastic expectation. Walter, a chauffeur, hopes to use the $10,000 dollar check to purchase part of a liquor store with his friends Bobo and Willy. Ruth disapproves of these friends but doesn’t know how to replace their callow encouragement with her own form of succor; his mother, Mama (Barbara Meek), disapproves of the liquor store, but hasn’t yet determined how the money should be spent. When the check arrives and Mama puts a down payment on a house with it, Walter twists into a tighter knot of fury; a tangle of dreams and deprecations, Walter all but disappears to his family and the world. How he comes back suggests that the play is not so much about waking up to the real world as sorting out which dreams are worth chasing and which dreams, perhaps, can wait.

Walter’s inarticulate, impatient rage is set off against his sister Beneatha’s intellectualized sense of grievance. She is in college, studying to be a doctor, but she has also been politicized by her experiences on campus. If Walter’s distinction is his headlong rush into an uncertain future—“a big looming blank space—full of nothing”—Beneatha’s is her idealization of her African roots, which she discusses with her Nigerian suitor, Asagai. Underyling her buzzwords is a deep insecurity, a spectacular naïveté: she holds her tempestuous brother beneath contempt—“there is nothing left to love,” she bristles—but her own yearnings are just as impulsive and subjective. It is to Lorraine Hansberry’s credit that A Raisin in the Sun is not a contest but a collage of ideas. She clearly condemns our avaricious culture, but doesn’t ridicule Walter for wanting to be a part of it. And if Hansberry seems generous in her sympathy towards Beneatha, she also burdens her with lines too serious for any audience to take entirely seriously. This is not to say that the play is indecisive or compromising, but rather that its conclusion is almost radically modest. The Langston Hughes poem from which Hansberry took her title asks if a dream deferred explodes; her answer, it seems, is that all dreams are deferred, so we approach the elusive good life asymptotically. The play begins with a waking up and ends wistfully: “We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors,” Walter says in the last scene, hopeful that life can be a series of smaller and smaller dreams.

Hansberry maps the path to this hope through a nightmare; she follows Walter as he drives himself mad with insatiable want. Walter dreams big, and with all the nuance of a child. He is a bundle of contradictions: a self-destructive dynamo. Joe Wilson, Jr.’s performance is a sometimes shocking evocation of this suicidal energy. It is, in short, annihilating. Wilson, who said in an interview with the Boston Globe that he spent less time developing this role before rehearsals than he usually does, seems to be still prodding and stretching his characterization as we watch. He must show us the depths to which Walter sinks before rising up again, and he has decided to do this without reserving any special dignity, any performative pride, for himself. Walter has no stoic strength, no particular, ennobling resolve: so Wilson gives us a performance that trembles with weakness and sputters impotently. He does not merely act pathetic, but shows the audience what a desperate man can be reduced to. He risks us rejecting his performance, which is an act of almost incredible vulnerability. Wilson gives us Walter’s debasement through the surrender of his own agency: as if mirroring, and not just impersonating, Walter's self-hatred, Wilson challenges us to judge him. Acting like this is brave, but we don’t recognize it as such until the show is over. Simply put, we don’t envy Walter's humiliation. To an audience, vivid depredation has a faintly glowing beauty—it is suffering for our sins—but Joe Wilson wrings the light out of his performance. He, like Walter, suffers in a darkness of his own making.

But he does not do this alone. His fellow actors comprise one of the most impressive ensembles you will see on a Rhode Island stage this year. Barbara Meek as Mama, shaken but still strong, is the show’s empathetic center. Meek suffuses Mama’s bewilderment at the world’s corrosive meanness and her own children’s dissolution with determination and yearning. Mama’s daughter-in-law, Ruth, meets the world’s challenges with pragmatic resignation; if Walter overestimates his abilities and aptitudes, Ruth underestimates hers. Hansberry’s depiction of Ruth is strangely reductive—Walter accuses her of smallness, and the script doesn’t do much to disprove him—but Lynette Freeman gives her size and depth by exploring the limits of her affection and disappointment. And Angela Thomas makes a strident and stubborn—but not humorless—Beneatha. We think we know how their story ends—dream realized; happiness abundant—but we don’t; and they don’t either. It’s not a sad ending, but it’s not exactly victorious either. Our country has been through a nightmare, but perhaps now, in an era lit by the bright words change and hope, we are finally ready, all of us, to try to be good neighbors.

Dreams Deferred

Trinity Rep brings Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun back to the stage this February. It's in previews until Wednesday, when it opens officially; we'll see if the play is an old chestnut, a raisin, or some other organic edible. But if there's any doubt about the show's vintage--about the power and range of its emotion--take a look at Mark Turek's production photo above, in which Joe Wilson, Jr., appears to have aged fifteen years from the last time we saw him as the lead in a show, and, in the back, Barbara Meek looks as though she's practically holding on to the kitchen counter to project durability and dignity. Wilson's Walter, storm-tossed and vacant, looks desperately offstage for somewhere to plant his idea of a dream. Ms. Meek has been acting in Providence for a long time--practically since A Raisin in the Sun's New York debut in 1959--so it's fitting that she is playing Mama, a woman as enduring and capacious as an oak.

Trinty Rep at the Oscars

Former Trinity Rep actor and artistic director Richard Jenkins has been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role in The Visitor. It's a great choice by, um, whoever makes it. My review is here, but don't take my word for it; just google the movie to read the unanimously admiring consideration of the movie and Jenkins's performance in it. And then, if you didn't catch it at the Avon, rent it.

(While we're on the subject, make plans now to catch possible future Academy Award-winning actors and actresses in the upcoming Trinity performance of A Raisin in the Sun. Previews start Friday, January 30th and the show opens Wednesday, February 4th.)

The Receptionist, Reconsidered

An early draft of my review of Trinity Rep's The Receptionist began conditionally--you may or may not like the show, I thought, depending on what you think theater is best at, or good for--but a friend of mine discouraged me from equivocating. "You didn't like it," she said. "Don't try to be nice." She was right that a reviewer shouldn't try to be nice, but I was wrong, I believe, to retreat from this position, as feeble and impractical as it may seem. I didn't like the show because it was not exciting to watch; it didn't use dramatic form or language to advance a perspective, a concern. But I have thought about it nearly constantly since last week, and if you think that theater--or any art--works better as nourishment than emetic, then it may be that this thinking, that goes on for days after a show, justifies it.

Also, what I wrote? It was wrong. Kind of.

Adam Bock was not suggesting that theater contorts language and theatrical language obscures real problems, but that people who fail to think theatrically--who do not converse in textured, supple language with themselves--will also fail to make moral decisions. The rigorous consideration that is a part of serious theater, that is, the tortured inquiry of the monologue, is also a part of being a moral human. The one character in Bock's play who is given a monologue, Mr. Raymond, is also the closest to distinguishing between the simulacrum and the real--this monologue, which I thought that the play undermined, is actually its own scene and honored by preeminence. Unlike any other character in the show, Mr. Raymond can communicate with himself; he demonstrates what Hannah Arendt called "a root-striking process of thinking." Arendt's notion of "the banality of evil," itself rendered a limp, if not evil, banality by time and overuse, has already been invoked by critics to describe, and inadvertently simplify, The Receptionist's theme; but none has talked about her notion of solitude, thinking, and speaking: To be with myself and to judge by myself is articulated and actualized in the processes of thought, and every thought process is an activity in which I speak to myself about whatever happens to concern me. Thinking is the conversation between the talker and the talked-to; thinking is a monologue. This thinking, which is, after all, only speaking, proscribes extreme evil. There are no other monologues in The Receptionist because there are no other thinking characters. They have no relationship, no conversation, with the people their actions have turned them into, or the people they once were.

One can fault Bock for failing to find the dramatic in his schematic--it addresses the brain rather than the heart, or, better still, the body. Theater can make us tremble; it ought to be tectonic. The Receptionist is a drama in retrospect--it's like finding out from the news that the vague unease you felt the night before was because of a mild earthquake. That phenomenon is explained, but the problem of having a home on a fault line remains unexamined.

One can also, incidentally, fault Bock for giving the male character this heroic insight and for writing the receptionist, Bev, as the quintessential work-drone. Mr. Raymond's crisis may find him unrepentant, but at least he suffers a crisis at all: it is better, Arendt quotes, to suffer wrong than to do wrong. The worst thing about Bev is that she has no sense of what "wrong" or "suffering" are; she is blissfully oblivious to her own responsibility for her fate.

Trinity Rep's The Receptionist

The Receptionist is a new play by Adam Bock, and Trinity Rep should be commended for performing its New England premier—they have taken a chance with an unfamiliar playwright's untested play, and it has been directed creatively and performed adroitly. I only wish I liked it more. The show gleams with novelty and timeliness, and has the gloss of relevance, but one wonders if it is really a jewel or just carefully polished glass. This turns out to be the central question of the play itself: after all, don’t we prefer the fake when the price of the real is too high? I don't want to give away the nature of the awful reality concealed by the brisk professionalism of receptionist Beverly Wilkins (Janice DuClos) and the vapid temporizing of office-worker Lorraine Taylor (Angela Brazil); suffice it to say, the business conducted by the Northeast Office, darkly adumbrated by Edward Raymond (Timothy Crowe) in his opening monologue, is repugnant. This monologue, addressed to an unseen character onstage but directed towards the audience, ends with his ambiguous and sinister professional courtesy, "Let's get you set up." He seems to speak for Bock himself, who has structured his play as a prolonged, elaborate, and occasionally very funny set-up; the problem is that it is also dramatically inert. If satire is an instrument for revealing truth, The Receptionist's mild humor is a crucible with no flame. Only in the second half does Bock apply heat, but by then it may be too late.

The strength of the play is Bock’s language, which splices the theatrical to the vernacular. He has obviously read David Mamet and has most likely enjoyed his share of Monty Python sketches—like them, his writing exaggerates the absurdity of most of our conversations—but his subject doesn't seem worthy of these antecedents or his own formidable talent; it is too easy. Bev chats on the phone with her profligate friend Cheryl Lynn while putting professional calls indifferently through to her bosses' voicemail; Lorraine races in late, a story about her bus spilling preemptively and guiltily out of her; they talk about Lorraine's unenviable love life, which has stalled with Glen, a certified narcissist; handsome Martin Dart (Timothy John Smith) arrives from the Central Office, hoping to meet with Mr. Raymond, who is, unusually, running late as well; Lorraine is smitten by Mr. Dart and finds, to her surprise, that her feelings are—or appear to be—reciprocated; Dart accosts Mr. Raymond when he finally arrives, and tells him he’s needed at the Central Office—a visit, we understand, that is to be censorious rather than congratulatory.

Ricocheting across this banal surface are some terrific (and some inane) jokes and arch observations about office life, all angled playfully and expertly by the cast. Janice DuClos, one of the bright stars of Providence theater, is, as always, powerful. She can be funny, officious, affectionate, and wounded; she always seems so alive on the stage, sensitive to the melody of language and, though she is sitting for most of the show, vulnerable to the force of the world’s pleasures and frustrations. Timothy John Smith, who glowered magnificently as the hulking boxer Le Mec in last spring’s Paris By Night, is given a chance to prove he also knows how to speak. His Dart isn’t nearly so pointed as the name suggests; although he is cunning, he is more lubricious than sharp. I cannot help feeling that Angela Brazil is being used reductively by Trinity these days: for the third consecutive show, she is asked to convulse like a box of jumping beans, and by the end, you wonder which of you is more exhausted. I suppose her hysterics are actually the worm of anxiety shifting inside her—that is, they are effect rather than mere affect, and proof of actorly commitment, but the performance left me reeling. Timothy Crowe, as the boss of the office, also left me unsettled, but because his performance is so quiet, so faltering. His Mr. Raymond sees through the artifice of his life but lacks the temerity to finally renounce it; he stands uncertainly at the intersection of bleak disappointment and pragmatic self-deception.

And so we come back to the problem of the play, which is that it’s a scam, a diversion. The show’s punch is of the sucker variety, not the emotional—though it will knock the breath out of you just the same, because it is delivered suddenly and subtly by Ms. DucClos and Ms. Brazil (whose second-half performance is much more interesting than her first). This punch comes in the form of a revelation that suggests depths to the world of the play that are not tested, or even suggested, by what comes before it. What’s missing from this world is conflict. What’s missing is discovery, which is not the same as shock. What’s missing is the sense that character and language and gesture are tools, or weapons, in the negotiation of principles; that theater is emissary; that drama is revanchist; that words are to be are fought over, persuaded, recruited, and deployed; and something, be it power, or love, or dignity, is to be won back. In The Receptionist’s clever language, there is no plot being forwarded, no loss being measured, no triumph being planned. To Bock, language is merely fun: it is not part of the problem or the solution. So the idiom, the indiscriminate likes and I was all and he was alls, the jokes about Flom, Minnesota--are these all just to show how trivial we become when the alternative is to face hell? Speech, like theater itself, is brought into the public arena and shown to be comically impotent, or at least distracting; the play is about acting, and acting, to Bock, is avoidance. This may, indeed, be true—Bock’s play posits a problem beyond language, although language is certainly contorted to accommodate it—but it cheapens the theater-going experience. We have spent the night laughing with characters whom we are meant to recognize from our own lives and who, it turns out, are merely actors themselves. Theater, then, is all about the audience: Look at what you are, Bock says. He is silent on why we prefer the ersatz to the authentic, or what it is like to choose the one over the other, or what it does to the soul to live with this decision; he sends us out into the world, clutching a bauble--a jewel, or cut glass?--of indeterminate value and vague purpose.

The Week That Will Be...

Trinity Rep finished previews of Adam Bock's The Receptionist last night and opens the show officially this evening. By the puckered look on audience-members' faces after the show, one suspects that it is an antidote to the plague of holiday cheer that threatens to lift our spirits and distract our thoughts from the sourness of life. I have looked at the script--briefly and superficially--and can't wait to hear Trinity's actors interpret its rich, repetitious language. (At Trinity Repertory Theater through January 11th.)

In the same neighborhood, the Brown/Trinity Consortium is performing Charles Mee's Full Circle, a re-imagining of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, which itself re-imagined an interpretation of the 14th-century Chinese play Circle of Chalk, by Li Xingdao. Mee contributes this economy of ideas by making all of his scripts available, for pleasure and for plunder, on his website. Take a look, and then see the show (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday at 7:30; Saturday at 2:00 & 7:30; Sunday at 2:00 and 7:30; Monday at 6:00).

2nd Story Theatre had intended to wrap The Miracle Worker this weekend but, one hopes because of universally positive reviews, has instead extended its run through next weekend.

For something less cerebral, I suspect, but provocative in its own way, try the Gamm Theatre, where Casey Seymour Kim, savage in last season's Boston Marriage and irrepressible in the recent An Ideal Husband, stars in Miss Pixie's Cable Access Extravaganza!!, an original one-woman play. Interestingly, Miss Pixie's Cable Access Extravaganza!! is not based on Caucasian Chalk Circle.

The Relevance of Antigone

Bill Rodriguez, in the Providence Phoenix, begins his panegyric to Antigone with this indefensible and contradictory paragraph:

The problem with Greek tragedies is that they tend to be Greek to us. Losing too much in translation isn't a problem with the intelligent and relevant The Dreams of Antigone, now in its world premiere at Trinity Repertory Company (through October 26).

I have nothing against presumption--indeed, criticism is considered presumption--but I resent being implicated, as a fellow theater-goer and as a reader, in Rodriguez's vapid generality. I don't know that this is "the problem" with Greek tragedy. I didn't know Greek tragedy had a problem in the first place. And actually, I'm not sure now that I know what he means. Does he mean that many of us don't speak ancient Greek? Or that clumsy translation confuses us (which would mean, paradoxically, that translated Greek is Greek to us)? Or that we don't know much about the ancient Greeks themselves, so we fail to detect the dynamic range and the music in their tragedies? I don't get it. Perhaps the problem with Greek tragedy is that we assume it has a problem: we're all doctors prescribing pills and recommending surgery to an aged but perfectly healthy patient. Being old is not a disorder, we know, and youth is not synonymous with vitality; last season's Blithe Spirit was written during World War II, and in English, but it felt brittle and barbed, like broken bone. Maybe if critics and artistic directors stopped insisting that the old is also the onerous, the rest of us would stop believing it.

Trinity Rep's "The Dreams of Antigone"

In 1981, during the long, gray evening of the Leonid Brezhnev years, Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze began writing a movie about the death of a small-town dictator named Varlam Aravidze. The problem is that Varlam doesn't stay buried: the daughter of an artist whom he had persecuted exhumes his body and props it up against a nearby wall. When authorities re-bury him, she digs him up again and leans him against his own family’s house. She knows her dissent is illegal and she welcomes the trouble that follows; she chooses a proper reckoning over intentional forgetting. With her defiance, Abuladze was making a case for iconoclasm and confrontation in a society conditioned by years of totalitarianism to idolatry and meek acquiescence. He was also calling on ancient tragedy; Repentance, as the film was called when it was finally released in the Soviet political thaw of the late 1980s, inverts Sophocles's Antigone, in which the act of burial is a statement of principled rebellion. Repentance evokes Greek tragedy without naming it, so, if it endures, it will endure not only as a reflection on the timelessness of the conflict between the prerogative of the state and the moral responsibilities of the individual but also as a record of its specific time and place. Curt Columbus and his collaborators, the cast of Trinity Repertory Theater, have taken on Antigone as well; the result of their revision, The Dreams of Antigone, is an interpretation, a modernization, and a meditation, and, unsurprisingly, its effect is diffuse. They have maintained the plot (more or less) and the setting of Sophocles's tragedy, but they have ceded the territory of the Greek mind without convincingly charting the landscape of our own modern paranoia, anger, and hope. The show feels neither as foreign and transportive as a traditional performance, nor as immediate and urgent—as dangerous, really—as a more radical revision. It is, in the words of another great tragedian, to double business bound: too committed to Sophocles’s framework to shock us, and too intent on proving its relevance to challenge our imaginations.

Antigone itself is an elegant and spare play, distinguished from its predecessors in the so-called Theban trilogy by its brisk determinism: it dispenses with the self-discovery of Oedipus the King, and abandons the philosophical paradoxes that animate Oedipus at Colonus. Antigone is about people who have already discovered themselves and who have settled their moral and existential questions. Creon, ruler of Thebes after a civil war and the simultaneous killing, each by the other’s hand, of the two sons of Oedipus and rightful heirs to the throne, decrees that one son, Eteocles, will receive a hero’s funeral, while the other, Polyneices, who had tried to take over the city himself, will be left unburied and dishonored. Anyone who buries the treacherous Polyneices will himself be killed. Antigone, his sister and Creon’s niece, defies the order and her own sister’s admonition and buries Polyneices; Creon, determined to restore order after years of bloody battle, insists that she must suffer the established penalty. He condemns her to death in a sealed cave, but is persuaded to spare her by Haemon, his son and Antigone’s wife. His clemency comes too late: a messenger—Greek tragedies bustle with the comings and goings of messengers—brings news that Antigone has hanged herself in her cell. In his grief, Haemon kills himself; to complete the cosmic punishment, Creon’s wife Eurydice kills herself as well. The violence and chaos that was supposed to be curtailed by the restoration of legal order has simply been forced inward. As much as Aristotle, Sophocles understood that establishing peace within a city’s walls is more difficult than defeating the enemies outside of them.

Antigone is not merely a study in civics, of course, and Sophocles was not only a philosopher or moralist; he wanted his audiences to feel the tremors that emanate from the collision of strong wills. Indeed, Antigone and Creon appear to be will alone, removed from a sense of caution or contingency, which accounts for the austerity, the glacial impenetrability, of their drama. Still, there is terrible beauty and frightening resolve in their lines. When Antigone’s sister, Ismene, confesses in the play’s first scene that she is not interested in following Antigone’s terminal path, Antigone retorts, “I wouldn’t urge it. And now if you wished to act, you wouldn’t please me as a partner.” The scene goes on:

ISMENE: I shall do no dishonor. But to act against the citizens. I cannot.
ANTIGONE: That’s your protection. Now I go, to pile the burial-mound for him, my dearest brother.
ISMENE: Oh, my poor sister! How I fear for you!
ANTIGONE: For me, don’t borrow trouble. Clear your fate.
ISMENE: At least give no one warning of this act; you keep it hidden, and I’ll do the same.
ANTIGONE: Dear God! Denounce me. I shall hate you more if silent, not proclaiming this to all.

Antigone is as single-minded and intractable as Creon; even if we find ourselves sympathetic to her notion of compassion, we must concede that her sense of justice is as arbitrary and remorseless as his. As a dramatic motive, Antigone’s conviction is so strong as to be alien to most of us: Sophocles has given us a model as impossible to resist as she is to understand or to emulate.

This is where Dreams of Antigone departs from its source material. Columbus’s Antigone is sensitive, empathetic—she apologies to her servants for not honoring their husbands and sons killed in the war—and insistently human. In Sophocles, Antigone’s life may be cursed and wretched, but it is, at the last, hers. Her victory, and her tragedy, is in renouncing the Theban community; she is, she boasts, “not ashamed to think alone.” This is independence but it is also foolish obduracy. It is also not entirely true, for she believes that, by burying Polyneices, she is doing what the gods wish. But Columbus has exorcised the gods from his version, as though their disapprobation or advocacy were purely metaphorical to Sophocles and thus incidental to the play. (The gods are not jealous and meddling characters in Antigone, but a solemn and severe presence.) If we understand that their vigilance was more real to Creon than his subjects’ and their judgment more important to Antigone than her sister’s—that the gods represent universal order in a way that abstract talk about “the rules” cannot—then we realize that their exile from Dreams of Antigone mollifies the play’s despair and foreshortens its tragic dimensions. Antigone, in presuming to know the gods’ wishes, aspires to godliness herself: without the gods, there is no measure of Antigone’s hubris; without her hubris, there is no tragedy. Dreams of Antigone is so fascinated by its own central, intellectual conceit—that, to this day, well-meaning individuals clash fatally with self-justified governments—that it neglects the existential thrill of Sophocles’s particular vision: there is real terror not only in Creon’s intransigence but also in Antigone’s presumption. The show abrogates one of the theater’s unique responsibilities: to force an audience to imagine, if only briefly, the world as it appears to someone else. Instead, Dreams of Antigone tells us that we understand the past only as much as it can be made to resemble the present.

So gone are the gods, gone is Tierisias, the blind seer whose counsel Creon brashly ignores in Antigone, and gone is the Chorus—or, rather, gone is the Chorus as a poetic, metaphorical entity. Here, the Chorus explicates and demystifies; it is didactic when it could be suggestive, and obvious when it should be oblique. The Dreams of Antigone opens with an antiphonal recital of the preamble to the U.S. constitution, and is interrupted halfway through by a meditation on the nature of heroism. But this is what the play is about! Antigone is performed because it addresses, better than an essay and as acidly as any play since, the isolation of the moral individual and the perilously sharp edge of hubristic heroism; the story gains nothing by the addition of ruminative diversions. If Antigone is a straight line between points, direct and irreducible, The Dreams of Antigone is curved, tentative and provisional. The Dreams of Antigone must not be confused with Antigone, I am sure to be reminded—then what is it for? As a remark on contemporary anxiety it is elliptical, and as a performance of Sophocles it is timid. It appeals when it ought to offend; flatters when it should scold; and, at the very end, folds, when by rights it should burst. Antigone, I think, would have liked that.

Thursday Arts Spectacular

This afternoon, José Rafael Moneo, the architect of the new Chace Center--which will serve as gallery, storage, classroom, administrative, and commercial space for RISD--spoke, with his associate, to RISD students in the Metcalf Auditorium. The house was packed; and Moneo did not disappoint. I didn't take notes so I have no documentation of his brilliance, which is generous and exacting at the same time. The building, which opens officially in an all-day celebration on Saturday, is evidence enough.

I just got back home from seeing the Gamm Theatre's Don Carlos, which, as everyone who pays attention to local theater knows by now, is a loosely adapted and severely abridged version of Friedrich Schiller's six-hour call to revolution. The play is not subtle--one doesn't think of "subtle" and Schiller in the same room--but it is surprisingly swift, and its two and a half hours pass, if not quite nimbly, than at least determinedly. That dogged adverb is appropriate, and signifies the play's only real problem: its plot is all plot and I found myself, too often, untangling its strands instead of enjoying its artistry. Credit must go to artistic director Tony Estrella for having the vision to imagine Don Carlos onstage and for respecting Schiller and his audience enough to leave its relevance to our own era implied, and to the actors for weaving something so fine and precise from material that is, for all of its processing, still rough.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

On Sunday I saw a preview of Trinity Rep's Dreams of Antigone, in several ways the sibling project of Gamm's Don Carlos. Like D.C., it is a liberally interpreted version of a formidable classic with surprising parallels to our contemporary political scene; but Dreams of Antigone (abbreviated, unfortunately, D.O.A.) has been made longer and less incisive than its source material, and the lines that connect its political reality to our own have been traced over with a dark pen. I left feeling that I had been subjected to a book report rather than a tragedy. I'll have a longer review posted soon.

Trinity Rep's Paris By Night

In his program notes, writer Curt Columbus explains that Paris By Night (at Trinity Rep through June 1st) is the realization of two dreams: an old dream, of writing a musical set in Paris; and a more recent dream, of writing a musical about two men falling in love. Even in a pop culture replete with examples of gay characters and ever-more comfortable with gay romance, this project still has something adventurous about it. The familiar love story, in which a man falls in love with a women, or vice versa, is still prevalent, though it has been supplemented, and even buttressed, by a new one—a man might fall in love with another man, but he will most likely die from it. In other words, sexuality is destiny: heterosexuality promises abundance and satisfaction; homosexuality is a sentence. What makes Paris By Night exciting and resonant is that it dares to show two men not only falling in love but living, we are encouraged to imagine, happily ever after. The terminal trajectory of gay life, its tragic arc as traced by countless movies, novels, and plays, is inverted: in Curt Columbus’s Paris, it tends upward and opens outward.

For all of its sanguinity and approachability, Paris By Night has at its center a disquieting question: Can we ever become anyone other than who we think we are? Or, to put it another way, is who we think we are who we really are? Sam (Joe Wilson, Jr.), an expatriate tattoo artist living in Paris, thinks he is a rose: most dangerous because he is treacherous. Having attracted and betrayed a lover in San Francisco, he has fled to Paris to live quietly in his self-abnegation. He practices his craft—a craft, after all, of the arm’s length and the skin-deep—and lives in a sort of suspended maturation, knowing that he can never go back to San Francisco but too wary of his own perfidy to move on. Into his studio, which, we understand, is also his refuge, stammers Buck (James Royce Edwards), an America G.I. stationed in Germany and on leave in France. Buck is inveterately open to the world: his guileless wonder is an antidote to Sam’s weary, practiced cynicism. For Sam, the world is dark with occluded possibilities, the OPEN sign of his parlor the brightest thing in it. Buck believes that somewhere on his life’s periphery glow the warm lights of a home; he just doesn’t know what home looks like, or which road will lead him there. He explains to Sam that boxing will be his path to self-hood—he has come for a tattoo that will identify him in the ring—but his innate sweetness would seem to undercut the toughness needed for that sport. Indeed, Columbus has given him a charm as powerful as a left hook, and for which Sam has no defense. He reluctantly agrees to house him and show him around town during his short stay.

Perhaps a show as strenuously apolitical as this feels a particular obligation to demonstrate its awareness of bigotry and irrational distrust. In that corner stands Frank (Mauro Hantman), one of Buck’s fellow G.I.s. His intention is not to savor Paris but to conquer it: having already won the heart of good-natured chanteuse Marie (Rachael Warren, whose voice has a new confidence and luster), he nevertheless indulges his appetites with the many ladies who linger around the sleazy hotel where he and the other G.I.s—like romantic underdog, Patrick (the rubbery and winning Stephen Thorne)—are staying. Aside from casual misogyny, Frank displays an overt homophobia and a thinly veiled racism: he is this show’s ugly American. Hantman plays him with a slow swagger and an unkempt accent—vowels settle only gradually into place, and all of his sentences have a downward cadence—so his menace takes on the quality of shorthand: we know what these symbols are supposed to mean. I don’t mean to say that Frank is a weak character, but that his role in the show feels dimly realized. When Sam and Frank finally do confront each other, their collision is both inevitable and enervated. Sam gets to demonstrate his formidable power, but over what?

The real power of this show is in its evocation of different kinds of love. The friendship between Sam and Buck that blossoms into a vibrant love; the long-standing, unspeakably close bond between Sam and his old mentor and benefactor, Harry (beautifully played by Stephen Berenson); the unnourished, wasted romance between Frank and Marie; and Patrick’s febrile infatuation with Marie that may, with time, be reciprocated. People may not be immutably flowers or thorns, but love is, by nature, aculeate. Without belaboring the point, Paris By Night reminds us that love has always been a hazardous enterprise, and that neither the sexual revolution nor HIV/AIDS despoiled an erotic Eden. The only mention of sexually transmittable disease is Patrick’s comic rejection of a prostitute’s come-on: “Je ne veux pas…le syphillus!” He blurts. No orientation has a monopoly on love’s potential to scar. Paris By Night is studiously not about gay love in a straight world, or straight love as an oppressive, otiose institution; it is about the risk that all of us take when we acknowledge who we are and who we want to be ourselves with.

Anchoring the play to this serious uncertainty are Joe Wilson, Jr. and James Royce Edwards. Wilson gives Sam’s resignation a realistic willfulness; like anyone stuck in a torpor, he is alert to the possibility of being jarred from it. The performance, then, has a terrific dynamism. Wilson can convey gravity and impishness in sequential gestures—though, when asked to express wonder or awe, he occasionally confuses his gifts and offers us something more like impartial judgment. (It is strange being told that Paris is beautiful in a way that suggests that disagreement would be imprudent.) Just as sensitive and enthralling as Wilson is Edwards, who was brought to Trinity specifically for this role. His Buck is full of yearning and confusion, but steadied by an inarticulate moral sense, a basic decency. Columbus’s writing has a tendency towards exposition but Edwards finds the energy that animates it; the words come out of him like dammed-up waters released. In fact, the grace of release is at the heart of Paris By Night. Tattoos, though permanent, can take on new meanings; roads home thought straight can swerve.

Paris by Night Review Round-Up

Sandy MacDonald's astringent review for TheaterMania.com is unapologetically negative. PBN is a "watery pastiche," its musical mode "reductive," and its characters "hackneyed." It wears its musical and narrative influences too obviously on its sleeve and is "a tedious, if earnest, slog." Her writing is bracingly saline.

Louise Kennedy at the Boston Globe recognizes the same influences but evaluates the show on its own merits. It's "an old song in a new key." Her review is lively and admiring.

James Merolla at the Sun Chronicle gushes but can't quite get over the gay love story. He calls it "controversial" (there's no better way to provoke controversy) and asserts, broadly and blandly, that one's response to the show "depends completely on [one's] liberal or conservative bent." Merolla is so liberal that he can't contain himself: his review is a wonderful collage of extravagant adjectives.

Channing Gray rebuts Louise Kennedy: PBN is an old song in an old key. His is a dull-edged piece with some legitimate questions--what does the lovely and urbane singer Marie see in the troglodytic and duplicitous Frank?--but, as always, it's strangely vacant. Gray seems to have no interest in human nature or in expressive language; reading him is like reading joyless notes, carelessly scrawled, casually disposed.

Channing Gray: This is Not the Show You're Looking For

Channing Gray is back with a review of Trinity Rep's Paris By Night that is as inoffensive as it is indifferent. That is, until the penultimate paragraph, when he unwraps this jewel of a reassurance. It glitters with tactlessness and curiosity:

And for those who are not big on guy-on-guy relations, not to worry. This is not a racy show. There’s very little face-to-face contact, and nothing like simulated sex or hard-core leather-bar action.

(Thank God, the doyens of the East Side exhale; if I have to sit through one more hard-core leather-bar musical at Trinity I'm just gonna puke.)

I love how this paragraph builds to an erotic climax, gratuitous and trivial. Don't worry about this show, he says; I'll give you something to get all bunched up about. From "guy-on-guy relations" to "leather-bar action," the paragraph swells with its own heated concupiscence. There are so many honest, discrete ways to say what he's trying to say, but Gray has an irrepressibly carbonated imagination. So it's not enough to write--as though even this were necessary--that the show is basically PG-rated; he has to vividly describe the salacious show from which Providence would have to be protected by his warning. But in the process of approving the show's character he actually impugns its provenance and genre: he limits the show by association. I suspect Gray was trying to allay theater-goers' concerns, but his effort is leering and disingenuous.

Therefore, as a service to the people of Providence, I offer a comprehensive, alphabatized list of all the other things that are not in this show: avacados, bears, cars, data, everything not related to the love story between Sam and Buck, flocks of geese, Gary Hart, Heart, imprisonment (except for the metaphysical, symbolic kind), Jell-O, karate, lassos, maps indicating Paris's numerous leather-bars, narcotics, origami, parakeets, quintuplets, Reaganomics, severed heads (!!!), terrorists, underpants, verandas, whipping of hot hot men with a cat o' nine tails and then tying them to a bed and going CRAZY on them all night, xeroxing of data, yogurt, zebras (duh).

These things were also not in such plays as Antigone, Much Ado About Nothing, and Death of a Salesman. (Oklahoma! did have lassos and, possibly, underpants, so it's not on this list.) Now you can decide if Paris By Night is really the show for you.

Paris By Night Preview

I saw the open dress rehearsal of Trinity Rep's Paris By Night Friday evening. It's unwise and unfair to comment on a dress rehearsal--I've heard since then that the writer and the cast have collaborated on nearly twenty minutes of cuts, including at least one entire first-act song--but I don't think it's imprudent to say that the show is immensely enjoyable. I'll post a review when I see a more-finished version.

Monday Sundries

First, please take a look at my amendment to Friday's review of Blithe Spirit. Reviewing is provisional, and I think no judgment, no matter how certain its dispatch, should ever be considered irrevocable.

Also, I saw Gus Van Sant's beautiful Paranoid Park last night at the Cable Car. I'm still working on how to say something--anything--about it. Support Cable Car and support strange cinema: see it.