The Republicans are coming! The Republicans are coming! That’s how two new plays begin.
In Sheila Callaghan’s Lascivious Something, Ronald Reagan has just been elected to the presidency, in 1980. In Lisa Kron’s The Wake, the first scene is set almost exactly 20 years later, as the world awaits the disputed decision on whether Bush or Gore won Florida – but by the time the second scene starts, Bush is the president.
Neither play is about the Republicans. The focal characters are horrified by the ascensions of Reagan and Bush. The playwrights sympathize with their protagonists’ political views. But they’re also determined to highlight the characters’ “blind spots,” in Kron’s phrase.
The writers use disparate styles. Lascivious Something, in Circle X Theatre’s premiere at [Inside] the Ford, is relatively short and stylized. The Wake, produced by Center Theater Group at the Kirk Douglas (and soon to be re-titled In the Wake, when this production moves to Berkeley), is long and literal. Both plays are engaging, but both have problems.
Alina Phelan and Silas Weir Mitchell in Lascivious Something. Photo by David Jaworski.
In Lascivious Something, a former Berkeley radical named August (Silas Weir Mitchell) has moved to a Greek island in order to make wine and love with his younger Greek wife Daphne (Olivia Henry). Daphne also has something sexual going on with a very young woman who works on the farm, perversely called Boy (Alana Dietze); August enjoys watching the two of them. Then Liza (Alina Phelan), an ex-lover and radical colleague of August’s from the States, ferrets him out, arrives on the island, and makes a potentially life-changing proposal.
The play offers different takes on several of its scenes. The first versions are startling, sometimes with supernatural special effects. The subsequent second versions are much less provocative. Apparently the former are fantasies reflecting characters’ unrepressed feelings, while the latter reflect the more mundane reality of what actually happens.
References to Greek myth crop up occasionally. Near the end of the play, as in many ancient Greek dramas, enormous events are recalled, not shown. The plot goes into overload as Liza relates a sensational story about events in America after August left. I don’t want to be more specific about what she says – no need to give away important narrative surprises. But the somewhat far-fetched revelations feel like last-minute attempts by Callaghan to cram in more obvious drama – on top of her already obvious and familiar theme about baby boomers sacrificing their youthful enthusiasms as they grow older. By withholding so much until so late in the play, she inadvertently calls into question the structure of her own narrative.
Unlike the Greek playwrights, Callaghan doesn’t provide a chorus. Maybe that’s a nod to budgetary realities, but a chorus could have come in handy to help enrich the play’s political and other allusions.
Not until I read the play, after seeing Paul Willis’s staging, did I grasp several small points. Some of this might be attributable to lines that weren’t delivered clearly enough – in part because of what sounded like inordinately bright acoustics at the performance I saw. But some of it is also in the script. Maybe Callaghan wants to counteract the obviousness of her chosen subject, but her writing sometimes becomes too elliptical.
The opposite is true of Lisa Kron’s The Wake. She spells out nearly everything in her entertaining saga of Ellen (Heidi Schreck) during the 21st century. In 2000, despite her concerns about political events, Ellen – a free-lance writer in her mid-30s – is surrounded by a Friends-style group in an East Village apartment building: live-in lover Danny (Carson Elrod), his sister and Ellen’s friend Kayla (Andrea Frankle) and Kayla’s lover Laurie (Danielle Skraastad). By the last scene in 2007, all that has changed.
Heidi Schreck and Emily Donahoe in The Wake. Photo by Craig Schwartz.
Another friend (Deirdre O’Connell), a couple decades older than Heidi’s circle, has just returned in 2000 from overseas work in a Guinean refugee camp (actually, the origins of their friendship is one of the few things in the play that is not sufficiently spelled out). She and her niece (Miriam F. Glover) serve as the play’s representatives of everyone who’s outside Ellen’s cozy circle, and their main role in the script is to call Ellen’s attention to her insularity and unwitting sense of privilege.
Actually, that’s the main purpose of the entire play. It’s ironic that a script that seeks to expose the narrowness of Ellen’s world is in fact also narrowly devoted to Ellen’s world – for nearly three hours. The other characters are clearly supporting roles, with little independent dramatic life of their own.
Kron tries to depict Ellen as a metaphor for America. Bush’s America also was self-centered and overly confident that it could survive the bad things that happened elsewhere. Yet the problems that develop in Ellen’s life are so personal that this attempt to link the political and the personal feels like an excessive stretch.
It might help the play for Ellen to have some problems that are more closely connected to the larger society – for example, how does she afford to live where she does on the income of a free-lance writer? What would happen to her if she got sick? Despite its excessive length, the play never ventures into such areas.
Perhaps Kron feels that Ellen wouldn’t be as personally accountable for problems like those – and Kron’s goal is to hold Ellen’s feet to the fire. That’s a laudable goal for a playwright when she’s writing about people who are much like her, but here it also results in the same limited perspective for the play that Kron decries in Ellen herself. Leigh Silverman’s staging serves the play well – but the well here isn’t very deep.
Speaking of which, will Kron’s Well, which opened on Broadway four years ago, ever be produced in L.A.? It sounds as if it might be more interesting than The Wake.
Lascivious Something, Circle X Theatre at [Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. West, Hollywood. Thur-Sat, 8 pm; Sun 2 and 7 pm. Closes May 1. 323-461-3673. www.FordTheatres.org.
The Wake, Center Theatre Group at Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Tues-Fri, 8 pm; Sat 2 and 8 pm; Sun 1 and 6:30 pm. Closes April 18. 213-628-2772. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org.
This would be a bad time to trot out another of the sporadic commentaries about how women playwrights get short shrift. Not only is L.A. the site of the premieres of the above two plays by women, but South Coast Repertory just opened The Language Archive, a Julia Cho premiere – and of course Geffen Playhouse recently introduced a new version of Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Female of the Species.
Leo Marks and Betsy Brandt in The Language Archive. Photo by Henry DiRocco.
In Cho’s play, a philologist (Leo Marks) is devoted to preserving dying languages, trying to record conversations from their final speakers – even as his own marriage to Mary (Betsy Brandt) is also dying, aggravated by a severe lack of satisfying communication between husband and wife.
That description of the play sounds very somber. Yet Cho leavens it with hyper-theatrical whimsy – so much so that the central characters, including George’s lovelorn assistant (Laura Heisler), come off more as figments of Cho’s fertile imagination than as real people – at least in Mark Brokaw’s staging.
At first I thought that Cho, like Callaghan and Kron, was also trying to uncover her central characters’ “blind spots.” But now I’m not sure that even Cho knows where these blind spots are. We don’t know why George and Mary ever got together in the first place. Any initial feelings that George is more responsible for the break-up are doused by odd comments and actions by Mary. Perhaps Cho isn’t trying to explain anything, preferring simply to note how some mysteries of human behavior won’t be solved.
Still, she has created two vital supporting characters in Resten (Tony Amendola) and Alta (Linda Gehringer), the last speakers of the fictional Elloway language – who start squabbling in English instead of cooperating with George’s research. They’re funny and, unlike the central characters, we sense the presence of a long history between them.
Cho’s clearly experimenting here with something new, but so far I prefer her The Piano Teacher (in which Gehringer played the title character at South Coast in 2007) and Durango (East West Players, 2007). And why hasn’t her BFE yet been produced in L.A.?
The Language Archive, South Coast Repertory, Segerstrom Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tues-Wed, 7:30 pm; Thur-Sat, 8 pm; Sat-Sun, 2:30 pm; Sun 2:30 pm. Closes April 25. 714-708-5555. www.scr.org.
