'The Mound Builders'

The Mound Builders, currently on stage in the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row, is a relatively early entry in Lanford Wilson’s prolific catalogue of plays.  Written in 1975, when Wilson was 38, it was premièred at the Circle Repertory Company while the author was the company’s playwright-in-residence (1969-95), perhaps the eleventh script he’d written since his first works for the seminal Caffe Cino in 1964 (Home Free! and The Madness of Lady Bright, the Cino’s first popular success).  Wilson wrote about two dozen plays before his death in 2011 at the age of 73.  The STC revival of Mound Builders is the final production of the theater’s 2012-13 Legacy Program which has revisited the work of four artists who were previously presented as playwrights-in-residence at the theater.  Wilson was the subject of an STC residency in 2002-03 which included revivals of Burn This (1986) and Fifth of July (1978) and the New York premières of Book of Days (2000) and Rain Dance (2002). 

Less than a week after being at the Signature Center to see Bill Irwin and David Shiner in Old Hats (see my ROT report of 22 March), I was back again for the evening performance of The Mound Builders on Wednesday, 20 March.  Following its 1975 première, which won an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, the Public Broadcasting System televised the play on Theatre in America in February 1976 (with much the same cast) and then Circle Rep revived the play in 1986 as part of a three-play repertory (with Albert Camus’s Caligula and Anne Chislett’s Quiet in the Land) at the Triplex Theatre of the Borough of Manhattan Community College in downtown Manhattan.  Other than that production, though the play is performed regularly around the country, the Signature staging is the only other major revival of the play in New York City.  STC’s revival started previews on 26 February and opened on 17 March; it’s original closing performance was to be on 7 April, but it’s been extended until 14 April.

Directed at STC by Jo Bonney, The Mound Builders is set in 1975 at the site of an archeological dig at Blue Shoals in southern Illinois.  A team of archeologists from a university (apparently U of I, Urbana-Champaign), is trying to save the artifacts of an ancient proto-Indian civilization known as the Mound Builders before a new dam causes the lake to inundate the site in Blue Shoals.  The play takes place in a house near the dig where the two archeologists, Professor August Howe and Dr. Dan Loggins, are living with members of their families, Cynthia Howe, the professor’s wife and the group’s photographer; their daughter, 11-year-old Kirsten; Dan’s pregnant wife, Jean, a gynecologist; and August’s sister D.K., or Delia, Eriksen, a globe-trotting erstwhile novelist who’s come to recover from her latest bout of substance abuse because the Cleveland hospital she was at couldn’t handle her.  A frequent, though not always welcome or invited, visitor is Chad Jasker, the son of the owner of the land on which the dig and the house are located who desperately wants to be accepted by the academics.  The scenes in Blue Shoals are introduced and interrupted by scenes set the following winter in Urbana during which August dictates into a tape recorder descriptions of the slides Cynthia had taken and narrates the events of previous summer. 

Neil Patel’s semi-realistic set is the living room, which is also the main work area for the scientists, of the house, furnished much like someone’s weekend or summer house at the beach or in the mountains—which is to say, rustically and, more to the point, sparsely so that there’s plenty of open space.  (New York Post reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote that “the place looks like a depressing modernist-rustic lodge.”)  Visible through a wide doorway upstage is the kitchen—the residents make frequent use of the fridge, which is all we see from our vantage point—and a long staircase comes down from the second floor at stage left at about a 30-degree angle.  The house is lit, by Rui Rita, in an often expressionistic style that can make it seem to be a break-away structure.  (The floorboards seem to almost disappear, and I couldn’t figure out how Rita and Patel accomplished that because the floor seemed quite solid when I looked at it under house lights at intermission.  I’m also unsure what this was supposed to indicate, on the assumption that it’s intentionally symbolic and not just an aesthetic effect Bonney liked.  Of course, the fact that it didn’t seem to me to fit is why I noticed it in the first place.)  And as long as I’m commenting on the physical production, I’ll say that Theresa Squire’s costumes were fine and both period and circumstantially appropriate without calling any special attention to themselves (except, perhaps, that young Dr. Loggins apparently favors shorts with work boots, a combination I never really understood—but then, I never worked a summer dig in southern Illinois).  One comment Mel Gussow made in his New York Times review of the Circle Rep première was that the set seemed cramped and “the projections are somewhat diminished.”  That wasn’t a problem in the Linney (although I’m not convinced that the slides—designed by Shawn Sagady and projected on the rear wall of the room upstage right—and the interruptions necessary to show them, are all that dramatic or even helpful).  The cast of seven is somewhat large by today’s standards, but even when everyone was on stage, which happens fairly often in Mound Builders, it never seemed crowded.  There were other problems generated by the number of characters—and their disparate needs—but crowding wasn’t one of them.

As I’ve noted before, the only review I read before I see a play is the Times because I subscribe, so I read Charles Isherwood’s critique two-and-a-half weeks earlier.  His chief complaint was about the directing and, particularly, the acting.  Now, I have serious objections to this play (which I’ll try to explain shortly), but it isn’t so much with the acting or the directing.  No one in the cast really stood out, but I don’t think Wilson wrote this play with star turns in mind.  (He apparently did write Delia for Tanya Berezin, the actress who was also a co-founder—with Wilson; Marshall Mason, the première’s director; and actor Rob Thirkield, who played August Howe—of Circle Rep, which is interesting but pretty much irrelevant here.  Delia’s a somewhat outrageous person, but she’s not any more important to this play than any of the other characters.)  There are characters whose importance I dispute—such as Kirsten, the Howes’ young daughter whom Wilson did cut from the ’86 restaging, and perhaps at least one of the two wives—but that’s not the fault of the actors or Bonney.  August’s dictation monologues are anti-theatrical, as I’ve said, but David Conrad did as well with them as any actor could have and Bonney staged them as strongly as I think is possible.  Conrad’s August is too much of a non-entity all through the play, but that isn’t his fault, either; I can’t imagine a way he or Bonney could have changed that, short of chewing the scenery.  In fact, Bonney kept the whole, meandering, amorphous blob of a play moving along for its 2¼-hour length (plus one intermission) in as lively a manner as she could have.

All the women—Janie Brookshire as Cynthia Howe, Lisa Joyce as Jean Loggins, Rachel Resheff as Kirsten, and Danielle Skraastad as D.K./Delia—captured their roles thoroughly enough, with Skraastad making a slightly greater impression because Delia has more quirks and a clearer intention, always much easier to play than a blank page.  (Delia has more heft as a character, perhaps, because Wilson’s original notion for Mound Builders was that the ad hoc “family” heals her over the summer and that she becomes the strong person in the group who nurtures the others in the end.  Aspects of this idea are left over, especially at the end of the play, but no longer have a rationale.)  The two characters with the most going for them (in terms of actability) are Dan Loggins, the younger scientist (Zachary Booth), and Chad Jaskers, the landowner’s ambitious son (Will Rogers).  Given more to play, these two actors attracted more of my attention than all the others (though, as I’ll try to explain in a bit, their roles weren’t any easier to figure out than the rest).  Booth made clear the youthful enthusiasm Dan has for the discovery of new facts, making the young Ph.D. seem even more like a brainy adolescent than he actually is, even if he was a little one-notish.  Booth’s Dan is an irrepressible puppy whose blindness to others’ perspectives precipitates the one actual act that comes at the play’s end.  Rogers makes Chad almost credible, another overgrown teenager (Chad’s in his mid-20’s), with dollar-signs in his eyes, but intellectual pretentions in his heart.  He also doesn’t see the point of view of the others and the lethal combination of him and Dan, who are as close to friends as any two characters in the play, ignites in the end, but Rogers may be a little too puppyish to carry off the emotional intensity that shows up at the end and his performance is a tad mannered. 

In 1975, Mel Gussow in the Times wrote that “Lanford Wilson’s multi-layered new play . . . challenges the actors and the audience.”  Gussow felt that this was due to the “weight and resonance” of Wilson’s subject, but 38 years later, reviewers of the STC revival gave a different evaluation.  In the current Times, Charles Isherwood complained that watching STC’s “slackly acted” revival “is like cracking open a time capsule that’s been buried for years.”  Its “contents,” pronounced Isherwood, “don’t prove as fascinating to us today as we had reason to hope.”  Wilson “gently probes” the “imploding American family of the late 20th century” with a blend of “lyricism and naturalism,” but the “understated emotional currents come through only hazily in Ms. Bonney’s production,” which “lacks the layered, resonant acting” necessary to bring them out.  “Too many of the performances here never suggest the reserves of feeling that are needed to give texture to the loose-jointed dialogue and lightly sketched-in relationships,” reported the Timesman.  Though I don’t categorically disagree with Isherwood’s evaluation, I find far more fault in the script than I do in the production which, I contend, has been ordained by the play that Wilson wrote.

Whatever errors Bonney and her cast made in mounting the STC revival of The Mound Builders, I found that the main problems were endemic to Wilson’s dramaturgy.  Three main faults seem insuperable to me: it’s endlessly talky without seeming to lead to an action; the various speeches and conversations all seem unconnected to anything, much less one another—each character has his or her own topic of concern; and the final, devastating event, which happens off stage, seems to come out of nowhere, as if Wilson were dropping a bomb.  It was as if Wilson had decided that at two hours the play had gone on long enough and he had to end it, so he slipped in a cataclysm to finalize the plot.  Now, possibly Bonney and the actors could have led up some to the explosion in the end, showing aspects of the characters and their relationships that might suggest that something was building up, but the other two script problems are pretty much outside their control.  (It may be significant that the video of the PBS adaptation of the play is available in a 90-minute version, suggesting that the play can be cut by three-quarters of an hour without serious damage, essentially turning it into a one-act.  At the performance, in fact, I said to my companion that the whole play happens in the last two, two-and-a-half scenes and could be a one-act.) 

Apparently Wilson, who reportedly regarded Mound Builders as his favorite among his own plays and possibly his best work, was trying to get at some thoughts about the nature of civilization, both the small, family-circle kind and the larger, historico-anthropological sort, as well as the way people can be so absorbed in their own worlds that they don’t comprehend or even perceive that others also have points of view that may not agree with their own.  The little society of the Howes, the Logginses, and Chad Jasker has fault lines in it and ultimately splits apart, leaving almost as little behind as the Mound Builders’ culture did.  The fault that causes the breach is the way the scientists, especially Dan, are so absorbed in the discoveries they expect to make, the preservation of the archeological evidence they’re finding that they have no concept that Chad and the people of Blue Shoals he stands in for (read: the “real” world) are looking forward to the big, new lake and the interchange for the Interstate that are going to destroy the dig site because to them, it means tourists, prosperity, and progress.  (The academics are looking for the past, but the locals are looking toward the future.)  There are hints, not all of them subtle, in the early scenes of The Mound Builders that this dichotomous worldview persists, but little is made of them either in Bonney’s production or, really, in Wilson’s script; they’re easy to miss if they’re not punched up in production.  While the play is unfolding, I never noticed them, leaving me with the impression, as I stated, that the climax comes out of the blue (until I thought it over afterwards, and, I confess, began to read some of the criticism of the play, both reviews and literary notes).  The actors didn’t have to hit these points with sledges, but a little tap would have been dramatically helpful; the cast, however, seemed to be intent on keeping all their characters playing on a single note. 

Wilson said that he structured Mound Builders the way archeologists uncover the history of a vanished civilization, by meticulously peeling away layer after layer of dirt to unearth the facts.  The play, which Wilson asserted was “one of the few real stories I've written,” was assembled “in pieces, bits.”  As the scientists examine the artifacts left behind by the Mound Builders, we’re supposed to be discovering their relation to ambition and the future.  But just as the artifacts of the ancient peoples has been interred over time by the remnants of later inhabitants, what Wilson wanted us to uncover is buried deep within a surfeit of what ends up sounding like aimless talk.  “[W]hy were the scenes so—what?  Fragmented,” asked Wilson as he rushed to compose the script by Circle Rep’s deadline.  Was he using August’s dictation and narration, a “common (and lousy) way of connecting disparate scenes,” the playwright acknowledged, as an easy solution to the problem of discontinuity?  The draft of the script had been full of the annotation “bridge to come” between scenes, which Wilson explained was “Circle Rep slang for ‘later.’” 

In the end, the dramatist decided, “It was not in fragments, it was in shards.  It was not a lousy way of telling a story, it was logical, it was organic.”  But my impression is that Wilson was simply mollifying his own concerns, putting aside his initial doubts in order to meet Marshall Mason’s rehearsal schedule.  (The production had already been postponed once and Wilson handed in the second act while the work was already underway and the actors were awaiting the new scenes.)  The scenes are fragmentary and the narration is undramatic and untheatrical.  The bridges never came. 

If sifting through the layers of earthen cover to find the revealing bits and pieces of the Mound Builders’ lives and culture is hard and painstaking work, sitting through more than an act-and-a-half of verbiage to get to the kernel of truth in Wilson’s play is hard work, too, and it defeated me before the payoff came.  When it did, it was a shock to me and I sat up, saying to myself, ‘What?  Where did that come from?’  If Bonney and the actors were supposed to fix that, I’m not sure it’s fair to blame them if they didn’t.  (From what I read of the ’75 and ’86 productions, neither did Marshall Mason and his casts.  Frank Rich, for instance, in his 1986 Times review, wrote: “Audiences who visit the Circle Repertory Company's new and revised revival of Mr. Wilson's 1975 play had better plan on doing some hard digging themselves.  There are some fragments of interest in ‘The Mound Builders,’ but they are buried beneath mounds, if not mountains, of talk.”)

(That revision Rich mentioned, by the way, was specifically undertaken for the ’86 restaging and never made it into a published edition of the script.  It included, among other changes, deleting the character of Kirsten and rewriting some of the text to make the play “more melodramatic, less metaphysical,” according to Newsday’s Linda Winer.  Though Gussow, re-reviewing the new staging, asserted that this “minor” reworking made the text “sharper,” Winer pronounced it a “no-more-popular version” than the short-lived 1975 première.)

Dubbing The Mound Builders “a complex play,” Daily News reviewer Joe Dziemianowicz observed, “It takes a fine-tuned ensemble to breathe believable life into” it but that the “actors relate to each other awkwardly and too loudly.”  The STC revival, an “aimless excavation,” wrote Dziemianowicz, needs a cast “who always seems to be thinking, not just saying lines.”  In the New York Post, Elisabeth Vincentelli complained, “The archaeologists in ‘The Mound Builders’ spend a lot of time talking about their work.”  It’s a “meandering show” and “overly dour,” she observed, in which many of the elements “look good but . . . they aren’t strictly necessary.”  In conclusion, Vincentelli asserted that in the end “the show, like the archaeologists, has dug itself into such a deep hole, it can’t get out.”  Winer proclaimed in Long Island’s Newsday, “‘The Mound Builders’ always was one of Lanford Wilson's Big Question plays—easier to admire, perhaps, than to embrace.”  Winer found that “the revival at the Signature Theatre digs passionately for signs of what we've been missing after the loss of Wilson” but “still doesn't pull together the many exquisitely considered threads” of the play.

“Wilson's dark, down-home tragedy” which is “tossed at you in fragments,” observed Michael Feingold in the Village Voice, “infuses a puzzling form with a Chekhovian spirit.”  Feingold explained that “the play's jagged shape and overlapping dialogue make its narrative tricky to parse.”  Though the Voice review-writer felt that the production “lacks vibrancy,” he also declared that “the play, big, powerful, and quirky, demands to be seen.”  The New Yorker dismissed Mound Builders by declaring, “The cultural, historical, and economic issues raised by the play hit their targets, but the emotional ones misfire.”

In Back Stage, reviewer Erik Haagensen asserted that “the show takes too long to start cooking” because, though “the playwright’s subtle slices of exposition [need] to be delivered with maximum clarity,” that doesn’t always happen in the STC revival.  While he pronounced Mound Builders “minor Wilson,” however, Haagensen concluded that “even in a flawed production it packs a walloping final payoff.”  David Cote called Mound Builders “a fitfully compelling but schematic piece” in Time Out New York, but characterized Jo Bonney’s STC revival as a “warm, cohesive production.”  “Wilson’s careful mapping of his characters’ inner territories” is “impressive,” insisted Cote, but “the play wobbles between self-conscious poetics and highbrow soap opera.” 

On line, the reviews were mostly parallel to the printed press.  In the Huffington Post, however, David Finkle heaped high praise on the play, spending half his column on the play’s and Wilson’s virtues and the playwright’s and script’s history with the Circle Repertory Company.  Dubbing Mound Builders Wilson’s “best work” (alongside another neglected script, 1998’s Sympathetic Magic), when Finkle finally got around to writing about the STC revival, he stated, “it does very little to recapture Wilson's memorable achievement.”  He insisted that “the finesse required to maximize Wilson's manuscript is completely lacking” compared to the Circle Rep première, for which he blames a cast who “don't rise to the occasion.”  (Finkle actually ended by recommending watching the video of the 1976 PBS Theatre in America broadcast.) 

While Mound Builders “does indeed contain a few glimmering gems,” affirmed Matthew Murray on Talkin’ Broadway, he added, “Good luck, however, locating meaning—or anything else—beneath the teeming excesses of this simultaneously overwrought and underthought production.”  Though Bonney “coaxed workable designs” for the revival’s physical production, she “hasn’t fused any of the other elements into an evening cohesive enough to bring alive either history or those seeking to understand it.”  Murray put some blame on Wilson because, the reviewer asserted, “[t]he play itself does [Bonney] few favors, wobbling as it does unconvincingly between” two disparate locations, but the production doesn’t help as “none of it has the impact it might because Bonney and the actors conduct the action as though they’re sleepwalking through a Bertolt Brecht rehearsal.”  Still, Murray conceded that Mound Builders is “still a well-rounded piece with plenty to excavate.  Unfortunately, it’s difficult to imagine a flatter or more hollow rendering of it than this one.”  On TheaterMania, Brian Scott Lipton described the play as “dense and layered” with “many keen, lyrical speeches and the numerous inherent lessons Wilson wants us to contemplate.”  Lipton warned, however, that Mound Builders “can come off as talky, pretentious, and slightly perplexing.” 

Here's an odd conundrum: I generally don't like clowning, but I delighted in Old Hats.  I generally like Lanford Wilson, but I was completely put off by The Mound Builders.  Despite Wilson’s own putative devotion to the play, it’s generally admired for its intellectual ambitions but not beloved as a stage work.  According to several commentaries, the play is more highly regarded by readers of the published text than by people who’ve seen it staged.  As George Bernard Shaw said of democracy, The Mound Builders apparently “reads well; but it doesn’t act well.”

[STC's The Mound Builders is one of two Lanford Wilson revivals on the boards in New York City now.  The Roundabout Theatre Company is currently presenting Talley's Folley, Wilson's 1979 romantic comedy, at the Laura Pels Theatre on W. 46th Street.  The original Talley's Folly premièred on Broadway on 20 February 1980, won that year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and ran for 286 performances.  It is the second play in the Talley Trilogy which also includes Fifth of July (1978) and Talley & Son (1985).  I said that I liked Lanford Wilson’s plays; Talley’s Folly, which I saw on Broadway with Judd Hirsch and Debra Mooney (who replaced Trish Hawkins) in October 1980, is one reason I do.  The Roundabout production of Talley's Folly opened on 5 March and is scheduled to run through 12 May.]

Lanford Wilson (1937-2011)

[Playwright Lanford Wilson died at 73 on Thursday, 24 March. On 4 April, I published on ROT a memorial to Ellen Stewart, queen of Off-Off-Broadway, the arena that gave Wilson a place to begin his successful and important career in American theater. Not only were his plays among the first to appear in Off-Off-Broadway spaces—it’s hard to call them theaters back then—but his Balm in Gilead was the first full-length play to be written specifically for Off-Off-Broadway, produced at La MaMa in 1965. Wilson was one of the playwrights, along with Jean-Claude van Itallie and Sam Shepard, on whom La MaMa and other Off-Off-Broadway theaters relied for new plays, and in 1969, Wilson and his friend and directorial collaborator Marshall W. Mason joined with actors Tanya Berezin and Robert Thirkield to found their own theater, the Circle Repertory Company (which ceased operations in 1996). 

[Lanford Wilson was always a playwright whose work I enjoyed. Of the American dramatists who came of age in the second half of the 20th century, following in the footsteps of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, Wilson was the writer who most intrigued and engaged me. His lyrical use of language almost approached Williams’s prose poetry, though his characters were a step below the iconic figures Williams created. (Wilson was the librettist for the 1971 opera adaptation of Williams’s Summer and Smoke, with music by Lee Hoiby—the only one of Williams’s major works set to music during the playwright’s lifetime.) I’ve seen eight of Wilson’s plays performed, starting with a university production of The Hot l Baltimore when I was at Rutgers getting an MFA in the mid-1970s (I wasn’t involved in the production). I saw Tally’s Folly, Redwood Curtain, and Burn This on Broadway; Burn This, Book of Days, Rain Dance, and Fifth of July Off-Broadway; Angels Fall Off-Off-Broadway; and Fifth of July and Lemon Sky on TV (American Playhouse). Unfortunately, I only wrote on two, Fifth of July and Rain Dance, both part of the Signature Theatre Company’s Lanford Wilson season in 2002-03. (As it happens, I didn’t start writing theater reports until January 2003, so I lack reports on both the earlier two plays in the season, and anything that I saw in the almost 30 years since I’d moved to New York City. There are passing mentions of the earlier Signature productions in my brief reports, however.) As a homage to Wilson, I’m publishing those early play reports, however inadequate they may seem now (I seem not to have had much to say about Fifth of July), on ROT. ~Rick]

FIFTH OF JULY

(10 February 2003)

The Signature Theatre Company production of Fifth of July was really excellent. I was looking forward to seeing this show because I've never seen Fifth of July on stage before—only the PBS TV version in 1982. I had seen Burn This, which Signature revived earlier this season in September-December 2001, on Broadway, but with Scott Glenn instead of Malkovich. Ben Brantley's New York Times review of Fifth of July came out three days before I saw the show on Friday, 8 February, and ironically, Brantley drew a comparison between the two sets of stagings, noting that Swoosie Kurtz's stellar performance in Fifth of July on Broadway in the early ‘80s overwhelmed the other performances just as Malkovich's had done in Burn This later in that decade, but that the Signature's productions had evened out the acting so that all the work was balanced. (Truthfully, I can't say I liked Edward Norton's performance much. I haven't liked his film work much, either, really.)

A couple of the performances were a little over the edge, but the rest were terrific, and the play comes off tremendously. It is a little dated, being too tied up with the experiences of the Vietnam generation in the aftermath of the war, but it was well handled, and even if Lanford Wilson's dramaturgy harks back to the '50s well-made play era, it still works as theater. The two performances that I didn't like were Parker Posey, who was just trying too hard to be a flake—she wasn't quite credible—and the girl who played Shirley, the 13-year-old kid, who was just too much of a precocious brat. Posey, whose problem may stem from the fact that she's mostly a film actress and not a stage actress, seemed more like she was playing at being a flaky flibberty-gibbet than being one. The little girl (and I have no idea if the actress, Sarah Lord, is as young as the character, but if she is, her problem may come from inexperience) was way more annoying than I think the character is supposed to be. She should be amusing and quirky—this one you just wanted to get off the stage. The rest of the cast, including Robert Sean Leonard, was good, and a couple of the supporting characters were really great. Anne Pitoniak as Aunt Sally was terrific; I never quite knew if she was failing and frail or as strong as a bull, dotty and gaga or sharp as a whip. She didn't so much flip back and forth, but be all of that at once, spotlighting some characteristics one time and others another time. Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who played the musician friend, was a little like that, too—he was either a burned-out flake or a perceptive guy who just happened to hear different music from the rest of us. And Michael Gladis, the fellow who plays Ken Talley's lover, doesn't have a flashy role, but he's just solid and believable. It was just nice work all around. Diane, who shares the subscription with me, complained that there was little that was happening—she even called it Chekovian—but I don't think that's necessarily a fault. It's a kind of portrait of part of a generation—mine, as it happens. (My guess is the gang depicted here, who all went to Berkeley together, were there at just about the same time as I was in college, myself.)

RAIN DANCE

(23 May 2003)

Lanford Wilson’s Rain Dance at the Signature Theatre Wednesday night, 21 May, was a disappointment. That's especially due to Ben Brantley's New York Times review, which was very positive all in all. (He had some quibbles, but came down in the end on a laudatory note, I thought.) I've had trouble with Brantley before on this score, but in this case I’d thought maybe he’d been more accurate because his evaluation lined up with Wilson's track record. I probably should have stuck with my usual skepticism with respect to Brantley's reviews.

(My problem with Brantley isn't simply that he's too "gentle." I've had dichotomous disagreements with his reviews from both sides—he's panned plays I thought were good and praised some that I thought were not. This has happened both so often and in such extremes that I almost always discount his evaluations and read only for descriptions of the shows. I’ve read that he holds himself entirely aloof from the theater world—so he isn't contaminated with personal associations—and that he lives far from the city and only comes in to review his shows. It sounds like he lives in a separate world in his head, isolated from everything real the rest of us use as measuring sticks. I first came up with this notion when he gave an elaborate description of a smell associated with a performance that was entirely imaginary on his part and associated it with memories that only he could have had. I interpret this to mean that when he sees a play, he sees something in his head that's not the same as what the rest of us see.)

The play’s set in 1945 at Los Alamos, on the day—or rather night—before the first A-test. It's June, I think (the first bomb was dropped on August 5), and a young scientist, played by James van der Beek, is hanging out in some outbuilding with a sergeant who is a Pueblo Indian (Randolf Mantooth). Shortly, the wife of one of the senior scientists arrives, and subsequently her husband (Harris Yulin) shows up. I won't bother with the little plot details like the apparent affair between the wife and the NCO—it doesn't go anywhere in terms of the play—or even what they were doing in the building (especially since I never really figured out where it was anyway). The play was almost entirely talk, with a lot of dropped factoids and, especially, names (though they were all just last names—you'd have to know the history to figure out who they were really talking about—like Szilard and Teller, or nicknames, like "Oppie"), that was supposed to be expressing the mixed feelings of the scientists over what they were about to do. (Oppenheimer's famous Baghavad Gita line, "I am become death, destroyer of worlds." is alluded to, but not quoted.) There was a little side issue between the sergeant and the young guy—he's very taken with the Indian culture and beliefs, and he waxes philosophical about what he thinks he's learned, to the amusement of the Indian (who had had a career in the '20s performing Indian dances in Europe with a troupe that had turned the sacred rites into show-biz entertainment, à la Folies Bergère). There was also some talk about the strange attractiveness of the desert and Sangre de Cristo Mountains—lots of references to the colors and the light, as if they (it was mostly the young guy again) were channeling Georgia O'Keeffe—but this was all just atmosphere. The play ends before the A-test, though we know it succeeded, and virtually nothing else happens in the two-hour, intermissionless performance.

As Diana pointed out, the main point—the dichotomy of the scientists' feelings—has been treated and discussed a lot by now—it's not really a revelation, and Wilson didn't add anything new or startling to it. He also didn't arrive at any conclusion, one way or the other. I mean, we know they went through not only with the test, but with the development of the bombs themselves, and Los Alamos continues even today as a weapons development lab. (In the one ironic note of the play, which was not developed—and may have even slipped everyone else's attention—Yulin's character talks about the future of the Manhattan Project and predicts that it will be disbanded after the successful test because there'd be no further need for it. The young guy tells Yulin that he's been recruited to stay on with some other scientists, but this little exchange doesn't go any further. Probably everyone in the audience knows that the lab is still functioning—it's been in the news a bit lately.) Anyway, the conflicted feelings don't really go anywhere, either.

Personally, after thinking about it, the play I'd like to have seen Wilson develop is the one that works through the contrast of the young scientist's response to the Indian culture he's observing and that of the older Indian man who sees it as just the way his people live, nothing extraordinary. (The young scientist's from the Bronx, by the way, and an Italian-American—obviously meant to be as far away as you can get from a Southwestern country boy with any previous contact with native cultures. And the Indian man has left the reservation and lived not only among Anglos, but in Europe, so he has a somewhat distanced perspective on his own people. When the scientist—you note that I can't even remember the characters' names—remarks that the mountains are sacred to the Pueblos, the Indian guy says, "Well, yeah. Everything's sacred to the Indian.") It might have been really interesting to see the "noble savage" image of the scientist put up against the more realistic, even skeptical, view of the Indian. I'm not sure where that might have gone—that's why I'm not a playwright—but it strikes me as an interesting idea to look into.

This was the second "new" play in the Wilson season, as I mentioned earlier, I think. Both seemed to have been written, or at least staged, in a rush—going from concept to production without a lot of noodling and rethinking. Book of Days had too many different points, all jumbled together and none really developed or concluded. This one has a sort of half of an idea that hasn't been fully probed or examined. But both plays look to me like they were conceived out of topical politics that angered Wilson. The first was the sort of take-over of American politics by (phony) conservative religiosity. (If the William Bennett revelation concerning his gambling problem had happened before Wilson wrote Days, I'm sure it would have ended up in the play—it fits with the rest of the stuff he included.) Dance seems to have come out of Wilson's feelings about the saber-rattling and war-mongering of the Bush administration over Iraq. He had to have written the play before the final build-up and war, but the atmosphere has been present since 9/11, and it looks like the "debate" (it wasn't one, unfortunately, but I imagine he meant it to be) among the scientists at Los Alamos over the morality of what they were doing vs. the pure science of their accomplishments (and the specter of more Americans dying in the Pacific if the war goes on—that was raised a couple of times, especially by the Indian man because some of the young men from his pueblo were fighting the Japanese) is meant to be a stand-in for a debate over a war with Iraq—a debate that never took place in the real world. In the case of both these plays, I feel Wilson wrote out of immediate anger—a strong feeling that he needed to express. That may account for the sense I have that they were both rushed into production without much revising and rethinking. Artistically, unfortunately, that seems to have been a bad decision. (This is all rank speculation, of course. As my former teacher Aaron Frankel used to say—I don't have Wilson's phone number.)

It's really too bad about both these plays, especially in terms of the Signature season. Revisiting Burn This and, especially, Fifth of July only show what wonderful stage pieces he can write and has written. His program bio lists some of the best contemporary plays of the past three decades. It makes these two seem all the more wan and unworthy by comparison. (That's why I wonder if Wilson's slipping.)

I didn't say anything about the performances, mostly because they were basically fine. Brantley singled out Suzanne Regan as the wife, but she's really no better than anyone else. Mantooth had the most interesting character to play, so he stood out for me—but he did just as good a job as Yulin and Regan. Actually, van der Beek, whom Brantley criticized as miscast, had one real fault. He pushed too hard (as I said about Parker Posey in July). He came off a little louder than everyone else, but I don't think he was just shouting. I think—and this is also just spec—that he saw the character as being over-enthusiastic and this is how he played him. Brantley said he wasn't complex enough, and he's right, but I wonder if that wasn't partly the director's fault. (Maybe TV acting ruins an actor, even one with stage chops, but my bet is that one-dimensional performances work on TV because the writers manipulate the scripts to benefit the limited range of the actors, and stage and film work won't accommodate that. When a good actor, say, Patrick Stewart, works in TV, he gets more to do as an actor because he can do more—his talent opens up the possibilities that the writers have to work with. Sometimes, however, the TV screen just can’t contain an actor with tremendous range. I think that's why James Earl Jones, for instance, has never succeeded on TV. It's too limited to handle him.)

The whole play was pretty one-note in terms of character work. (The director was Guy Sanville, of whom I’d never heard.) Anyway, I take my cue for van der Beek's performance from the things he says onstage: he's wowed by everything, from the landscape, the Indian cultures and art—he goes on about a platter by a famous (real) Pueblo potter—and, not least, that as a 25-year-old, he's rubbing shoulders with the most famous physicists in the Western world, including his idol, Enrico Fermi. (Oh, I do remember one name—the young guy's Hank, which he explains is the Americanized nickname for his real name: Enrico.) Yulin, of course, is one of those consummate pros who can go on automatic pilot and turn in a credible performance; the hardest work I think he had to do here was put on a slight German accent (he and his wife are refugees from Hitler's Germany). Since all any of the cast had to do for the most part was talk—an actor's stock in trade, after all—it wasn't all that demanding. (There wasn't even all that much science in the dialogue that might have made it hard to learn.)