The Parkland students who survived the horrific school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14 demonstrated their resolve with the massive "March For Our Lives" demonstrations held in cities around the world on March 24. There is no doubt that plenty of adrenaline was pumping as more than 800,000 people packed Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation's capital. The students organizing the event pulled off a minor miracle with a meticulously staged and strategically planned coup de theatre that should leave Marco Rubio worrying whether, at some point in the near future, he'll even be able get a job at Jack in the Box.
Many journalists and television pundits have wondered if the level of energy behind the March For Our Lives event can be sustained throughout the months leading up to 2018's midterm elections. My hunch is that students (who have already spooked politicians enslaved by the National Rifle Association) will keep up their attack with the determination of sharks that can sense blood in the water. It will be interesting to see how easily the practitioners of political graft can be defeated by a younger generation learning how to hone their own political craft.
In his recent piece in The New York Times entitled "The Agony and Ecstasy of Writing Negative Reviews," Jesse Green took a moment to react to some irate responses to his review of the new Broadway musical, Escape To Margaritaville, by explaining part of what a critic's job entails.
"Criticism is a form of journalism, which is, in theory, a form of truth. A critic reports honestly on his own thoughts and feelings, as if they were a war or a trial. They often are both. Arts criticism is in some ways a paradox, like Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Critics try to make objective judgments based on responses they know to be subjective. So when readers are stung (or just annoyed) by my pans, I remind them that fighting about theater is often the best part of the show."In the poem cited by Green, Moore wrote "One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry." Her words haunted me as I tried to articulate my feelings about two recent Bay area premieres.
- One work (a recent finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama) was crafted by Sarah DeLappe, a young American playwright who graduated from Yale. A sports-oriented ensemble piece, it features a cast of ten women, nine of whom belong to an indoor girls' soccer team.
- The other is a "two-hander" by the English playwright who won the 2013 Olivier Award for Best New Play and the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Not only has Simon Stephens crafted more than 20 plays since 1997 (some co-written with other artists), for many years he taught in the Royal Court Theatre's acclaimed program for young writers.
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If, as they say, opposites attract, then it would be hard to imagine a more unlikely pairing than the two characters in Heisenberg (which premiered at the Manhattan Theatre Club on June 3, 2015 and is now being staged by the American Conservatory Theater).Alex Priest (James Carpenter) is a 75-year-old butcher who likes to take long walks around London, listen to all kinds of music, and is quite obviously an introvert. Although he enjoys cuddling more than the mechanics of sex, he has not been with a woman for quite some time. Alex has never married, never traveled outside of London, and never taken a vacation. And yet, after so many years working alone in his butcher shop, he still loves his work because of "the animals" and finds peace in solitude. As the playwright notes: “Alex is a man whose soul has been atrophied by a broken heart. It is only when listening to music that his soul can explore itself, that he feels as though he is not alone.”
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| Sarah Grace Wilson (Georgie) and James Carpenter (Alex) in a scene from Heisenberg (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Georgie Burns (Sarah Grace Wilson) is a frantically conflicted 42-year-old bundle of nerves. A motor mouth who curses like a sailor and immediately apologizes for her vocabulary, she works as a school receptionist. Just as Charles Schulz's Pig-Pen character always walked around in a cloud of dirt, Georgie's desperation is impossible to ignore. She takes great pride in her ability to pigeonhole the people she meets and is quite obnoxious about assigning the worst stereotypes to them. The fact that she is almost always wrong doesn't stop her from prejudging anyone and everyone (which makes it easy to understand why her son returned to America two years ago to "reconnect with his Midwestern roots" and has since refused to have any contact with his annoying mother).
As the play begins, Georgie is apologizing for having snuck up behind Alex (who was seated on a park bench) and impulsively kissed him on the neck, mistakenly thinking that he was her recently deceased husband. From their initial counter it's hard to tell if Georgie is a stalker, a grifter, someone with no sense of boundaries, or some crazy bitch roaming a public park (at one point she tells Alex that she's an assassin). On the other hand, it's the quiet types like Alex -- who work with knives -- that sometimes turn out to be serial killers.
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| James Carpenter (Alex) and Sarah Grace Wilson (Georgie) in a scene from Heisenberg (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
The Heisenberg theory (from which the play derives its title) claims that an observed particle can never be predicted and a particle whose projection is observed has not been fully seen. As the director, Hal Brooks, explains:
“Heisenberg asks us to be outside of ourselves, to be fully enmeshed and immersed in a relationship of people whom we like but don’t entirely trust or know. What we’re ready for is investing in them and in the possibility that they’ll work things out. That’s the trickiest part about Georgie: making sure that we like her enough that we want these two people to end up with each other. Similarly, it’s important that we invest in Alex, that we see him and appreciate him as far more than merely a butcher and a forgotten man, that we invest in the unlikeliness of these two people together. It doesn’t matter if they find Georgie’s son at the end. What matters is that they stay together. That’s exactly why Alex not only makes the offer to give Georgie money but also offers to travel with her because in the end, as unlikely as it is, sometimes we just have to wake up in the morning and be very personal with the person that we’re with. It takes a layer of faith for one person to be with another person in this very intimate way. And I suppose it always does in real life.”
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| James Carpenter (Alex) and Sarah Grace Wilson (Georgie) in a scene from Heisenberg (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
In an hour and a half, Heisenberg's two characters perform an odd mating dance inspired by need, greed, emotional insecurity, and acceptance which puts a surprising twist on intergenerational relationships. Whether Alex and/or Georgie worry that their time is running out is not the issue so much as what they can do to change the direction of their lives. Just as Alex's steadiness has a calming effect on Georgie's irrationality, her weird form of spontaneous combustion inspires him to make a drastic break from his established routines as a butcher, a bank customer, and a loner. How they get from a park bench in London to an airport hotel in Newark, New Jersey is part of the play's mystery and charm. As the marketing folks at Cunard used to say, "Getting there is half the fun."
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| Sarah Grace Wilson (Georgie) and James Carpenter (Alex) in a scene from Heisenberg (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Beautifully crafted by Simon Stephens, Heisenberg takes wing when two actors breathe life into its text. Bay area veteran James Carpenter delivers an exquisite portrayal of the stalwart butcher, which offers the perfect counterpart to Sarah Grace Wilson's characterization of the manic Georgie. As the two actors inhabit their characters, the audience senses that they are witnessing a beautifully layered exercise in trust and teamwork. An added thrill comes from Georgie's unstoppable flow of profanity.
“I have always been, and remain, astonished by the remarkable, sad, frightening, beautiful things human beings can do to each other," confesses the playwright. "I tried to tell a story that dramatized the way that paradox played out in humanity. I think that the wealth and depth of swearing is emblematic of the English language’s vitality, energy, and capacity for imagination. Unlike other European languages, it is in constant flux and a constant state of reinvention. Nowhere is this reinvention more energized than in swearing. I just love swearing. I would never trust a writer who didn’t cherish the word 'fuck.' It can serve as so many different types of speech: a verb, a noun, a guttural, a conjunction, an adverb, an adjective, an instruction, an exclamation. 'Fuck that fucker! He’s fucking fucked himself and now his whole fucking life is fucked.'"
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| James Carpenter (Alex) and Sarah Grace Wilson (Georgie) in a scene from Heisenberg (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
A special note of appreciation goes to scenic and lighting designer Alexander V. Nichols, whose handsome unit set (which resembles a giant puzzle with an inlaid wooden floor) contains numerous traps and lifts that bring chairs and benches to the sparse playing field. Performances of Heisenberg continue through April 8 at the American Conservatory Theater (click here for tickets).
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I wish I could be more enthusiastic about The Wolves (which is receiving its Bay Area premiere from the Marin Theatre Company), but I was severely underwhelmed by the entire experience. What started out as a series of warm-up exercises turned out to be an exercise in futility. |
| Members of The Wolves warm up for a game (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Sarah DeLappe's play is designed to take audiences behind the scenes of an all-girls indoor soccer team. The nine women in training represent a cross-section of adolescent problems:
- One girl is a bleeding heart liberal; another is bleeding profusely from her period.
- One girl has abandoned her youthful ponytail in favor of a self-inflicted buzz cut; another has recently had an abortion.
- One girl has to deal with two parents who are therapists; another girl's mother is a famous travel writer.
- One girl's sinuses are clogged from allergies; another frequently runs off the playing field to vomit.
- One girl's exceptional skills at playing soccer are due to having lived in cities around the world; another girl gets hit by a car early one morning while jogging.
- After one girl gets asked if she is getting enough protein, she replies that just about all her family eats is peanut butter and cheese (which led me to wonder if she is on welfare, receiving government surplus foods, bulimic, or diabetic). Following a photo shoot in which each team member poses with an orange slice in her mouth, she devours the unused slices as soon as her teammates have left the playing field.
The Wolves takes place during a series of warm-up sessions prior to a string of competitive games. As DeLappe explains:
“I was attracted to the idea of a stage where we are watching young women whose bodies are active throughout. I was inspired to think of these characters as a pack preparing for battle. The writing was like cooking: a bit of parsley here, a sprig of rosemary there. My desk was littered with charts which tracked action and character traits. I also thought of the writing as music, an orchestration for nine voices, each representing one of the girls.”
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| Members of The Wolves warm up for a game (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
While director Morgan Green keeps the girls stretching, running, and passing soccer balls to each other throughout much of the evening, there are certain structural elements of DeLappe's play which are simply counterproductive.
- In her attempt to create "an orchestration for nine voices," DeLappe's characters frequently talk over each other, carry on multiple conversations at once, and occasionally must face upstage while speaking. The overall effect makes it extremely difficult to hear them or figure out who is saying what. After about 20 minutes of this, I lost interest and gave up trying to follow the conversation.
- Because the girls are only identified by the numbers on their shirts, it becomes extremely difficult to remember who is who. Primarily due to their physicality, certain actors stand out from the crowd, notably Betsy Norton (#00) as the goalie who keeps throwing up, Portland Thomas (#11) as the girl whose parents are therapists, and Sango Tajima (#25) as the team's gung-ho captain. The rest quickly fade from memory.
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| Members of The Wolves warm up for a game (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
Late in the play (after one teammate has died), a mother who has always brought orange slices to the team's warm-ups makes a nervous appearance. Liz Sklar delivers a beautiful soliloquy in which she tries to maintain her composure until her emotions get the best of her. This scene would have been much more effective if the audience clearly understood which girl had died and if a solid foundation had been laid for the mother's appearance. Instead, it felt as if the adult's soliloquy had been written as an assignment which was then cut and pasted into the script.
The Wolves has been staged on Kristen Robinson's stark unit set with costumes by Katherine Nowacki, lighting by Masha Tsimring, and sound design by Madeleine Oldham. Other members of the female ensemble include Nicole Apostol Bruno (#13), Jannely Calmell (#14), Carolyn Faye Kramer (#8), Isabel Langen (#2), Neiry Rojo (#46), and Emma Roos (#7).
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| Members of The Wolves warm up for a game (Photo by: Kevin Berne) |
One of the basic challenges for drama critics is whether or not they care about the characters that appear before them on a stage. Sadly, after spending two hours watching the Wolves exercise, I couldn't have cared less about any of them. In the case of DeLappe's play, that's a really big problem which is a feature rather than a bug.
Performances of The Wolves continue through April 8 at Marin Theatre Company (click here for tickets). Here's the teaser:
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