[This year’s Contemporary American Theater Festival,
CATF’s 25th season, will run from 10 July to 2 August in Shepherdstown, West
Virginia. I went to the festival 11
years ago with my mother and wrote a report on it (before I launched ROT), so I
thought it would be interesting to look back at my impressions of CATF on the
eve of its silver anniversary.]
Over
the weekend of 23-25 July [2004], I went to Shepherdstown, W.V., to see the
Contemporary American Theater Festival which is held there every year (since
1991, apparently, though I didn’t know it was anywhere near that old).
They do four full productions (though that number varies from time to time) in
rep over a three-week period. There are also occasionally readings of
plays under consideration for future festivals—two plays in this season were
read in previous years. All the plays are new, but not all are first
productions—some have had regional stagings previously, but none have had major
New York or substantial numbers of productions before. All of the
scripts, however, are new enough that changes apparently can be on-going during
the CATF rehearsals, even down to changing casting needs or adding and
eliminating characters, scenes, or songs.
The
festival is staged in two theaters on the campus of Shepherd University, the
main reason that Shepherdstown exists today. (CATF isn’t actually
connected to the school, which acts only as host as far as I can tell.
Shepherd University has no theater program.) It’s a state college,
founded as a “normal” school—a teachers’ college—in 1871 or so (though the town
preexisted the Revolution, but I don’t know what sustained it before the Civil
War—farming, I presume). I never learned how big either the town is or
the university, but I can tell from observation that the town is tiny (the
shopping area of the main street is all of two blocks long)—maybe less than
1000 population. The university, however, seems pretty good-sized,
considering—maybe bigger than W&L [Washington
and Lee University, my alma mater]. (My guess: about 5000 students, a
little smaller than SUCO [State
University of New York, Oneonta, where I once taught].) It has two campuses, one obviously the older,
original area and a newer campus that looks to have been begun in the ‘60s from
the architecture. (Both campuses have new buildings, but the “original”
part has the old buildings, including the school’s symbolic equivalent of
Washington Hall [original
18th-century building of what became W&L University], that all seem to be 19th- and early-20th-century
constructions.) It’s not at all an unattractive campus, though the town
is smaller, I think, than Lexington [Virginia, site of W&L] and I can’t imagine spending four years
there without being able to get the hell out pretty regularly. (It’s only
1½ hours from D.C. by highway, and maybe an hour from Baltimore. The
nearest “big” town is Hagerstown, Md.) It’s a cute town, with a number of
shops and restaurants that are obviously there to cater to and attract
tourists—not the kind of places either students or townies would patronize too
often, both because of the prices and the fare. It’s obviously been
spiffed up sometime in the recent past—like Lexington during the
Bicentennial. One peculiar thing Mom and I noticed is that there were no “regular”
businesses in town that we saw—drug stores, five-and-dimes, McDonald’s, gas
stations, newsstands, 7-11’s, cleaners, even bookstores. (Staunton [Virginia] was like
this, too.) There must be a mall somewhere nearby that we didn’t see
(there’s a small shopping center with a Food Lion near our motel, but it only
has about half a dozen stores)—otherwise where do the students get their
necessities of life and where do the ordinary Shepherdstowners buy their
staples (er—I also didn’t see a Staples). Maybe the university has its
own store for the students, but where do the local folks go? There was no movie theater in town, either—though maybe there’s a multiplex somewhere out of
town.
The
town is historic in the sense that it goes back some. It’s right across
the Potomac from Sharpsburg and the Antietem Battlefield, though there was no
real battle in Shepherdstown as far as I could learn. Harper’s Ferry is
also nearby. (Shepherdstown is very small and there are only three hotel motels in town—plus several B&B’s. However, some people
attending the festival stay in nearby towns, including Harper’s
Ferry. ) Obviously, there was
fighting all around there—the town was inundated with wounded from Antietem—and
many Shepherdstowners fought and died in the war, of course. (West
Virginia seceded from Virginia, of course, but the citizens of the new state
were still supporters of the Confederacy. I’m not sure how that worked
out—the little historical museum indicated that the secession-from-secession
was accomplished against the will of the people. Someone must have wanted
it.) Before the Civil War, back in 1787 or something, the first
successful demonstration of a steam-powered boat was held on the Potomac at
Shepherdstown. That’s something I didn’t know. There’s a model of
the original boat, made for an anniversary commemoration of the event sometime
early in the 20th century—the model’s on display at the little museum.
Who knew? Finally, in recent days, Shepherdstown was the host of
the peace conference with Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak,
and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Sharaa in January 2000.
So
much for the surroundings. The CATF was generally a good and interesting
experience. I’d go again, even though the plays all left something to be
desired. If you consider them all as plays-in-process, it was a good
glimpse at new works from around the country. The acting was almost
universally good to excellent; one actor left me unimpressed in one role—most
appeared in two plays—but I think he was miscast, which isn’t entirely his
fault. The productions were also generally well directed and
well-designed at the level of non-commercial Off-Broadway, say, or a small rep
company. (I had strong objections to the design, and therefore staging,
of one play, which was also the worst of the lot.) Obviously, any given
season will be more or less good than another, so you can’t tell in advance how
things will work out, but the CATF producers are clearly careful to choose
worthy plays which the artistic director reads and even sees in regional
productions before they book them—it’s not a haphazard or unconsidered
selection, though variation in taste might play a role in how much you agree
with their choices from year to year. They obviously have favorite
playwrights—Lee Blessing, who was in this year’s season, is a frequent
participant, for instance. This year’s offerings included a musical play,
a pair of one-acts (Blessing), and a long one-act, as well as the customary
two-act play. Except for the musical, they all had smallish casts (and
even the musical wasn’t a large cast by musical standards).
Okay,
enough mishegoss—let’s
get to the plays. First up for us (Friday night) was the one-act pair by
Blessing, Flag Day
(he subtitles it “A Play in Two Plays”—kind of silly, I think). It’s
billed as a world premiere, but it’s part of a trilogy of plays “about
black-white racial relations in America”; Blessing’s done the first play, Black Sheep (Florida
Stage, December 2001), and he’s working on the third, Perilous Night. I’m
not a big fan of Blessing, and one of my complaints with the few plays of his I’ve
seen is that he gets a hold of a (good) idea and beats it to death.
He does that with this pair, though the second of the two has some interesting
dramaturgical aspects. The first play is “Good, Clean Fun” and takes
place in a two-man office of an unnamed company. (This play and the
musical were staged in the school’s Studio Theater, a black box on the West, or
“old,” Campus.) The set was a minimal assemblage of office furniture—a
large desk, a smaller work table, a shelf with files and office supplies, but
no walls or doors—but the space was criss-crossed by four lengths of string
running at odd angles from about head height to the ground, creating a sort of
square area in the center. The strings looked taut at first,
but they turned out to be elastic as the actors stretched them
sometimes to cross under them or, once or twice, just to distort the “boundaries.”
Since Blessing’s theme is black-white antagonism, and one character is black
and one is white, I assumed this was some kind of symbolic borderline that
would impede each character from “meeting” the other—but that didn’t turn out
to be so. The characters crossed from one area to another without any
difficulty other than that they had to go either up to where the string was
high enough to walk under, or down to where it was low enough to step over—or they
just raised it and ducked under. This entirely shattered my
interpretation of the strings’ purpose, and I never figured out any
substitute. (Maybe Blessing or the director thought he/she—the director
was a woman; she had a baby during the festival—was Richard Foreman.)
Anyway,
the central conceit of “Clean Fun” is that the unseen boss has decided that the
only way to deal with racial antagonism in the work place is not to ignore it
or whitewash it, but to confront it by requiring that the employees voice their
feelings when they arise, but only within the two-minute period allowed by an
egg-timer. So the whole play is essentially a verbal exchange between the
black project leader and his white subordinate. They go about their
busy-work (it seems essentially meaningless checking, typing, and filing),
talking about the project, reports that are due, the newest office policies, as
well as their off-work lives—until one or the other says something that sets
the other off on a racial bitch-session. That worker then pulls his
egg-timer out of a drawer, winds it, and begins his harangue, which lasts
exactly until the timer’s bell rings. The he puts the timer back in the
drawer and the two return to normal behavior. Until the same things
happens again. These bitch fests come more frequently and are expressed
with more vehemence and personal intent, but as far as I was concerned,
Blessing makes his point after the first—or, at most, second—session and
nothing is resolved, either for the two characters or for us. Blessing
tells us—as we surely all already know—that white-black relations are fraught
with tension and suspicion, but he offers no insight either into how this came
about in society or how we can resolve it. He also seems to be saying that
it’s both inevitable and insoluble—which, though it may be true, is a bleak
perspective. Theatrically, the play is also all talk—the only thing the
characters do is their office work, for which they move from desk to table to
shelf and back like animatronic figures. During all of which, they
talk. As I said, however: the acting was good. The white
worker, Lee Sellars, was especially good, and he’s quite versatile as he would
demonstrate not only in the second one-act, but in the two-acter later in the
festival.
The
second one-act, “Down and Dirty,” is based on an actual crime which you may
recognize—it got a lot of news coverage at the time. This one is set in a
woman’s garage (the strings are still in place, for even less clear reason),
and the lights come up with Sellars, bloody and distorted, suspended from the
ceiling and wedged into the shattered windshield of a car.
(There is no car body—just the windshield hanging there, like the Cheshire Cat’s
smile.) The woman, Dot, is sitting in a beach chair, swigging a
beer, glaring at him: “Why you ain’t dead yet?” she demands. Well, if you’ve
read a newspaper or watched any TV news in the several years or so—it happened
in October 2001 in Fort Worth; the driver was sentenced in June 2003—you
immediately recognize this as the case of the black woman—Dot is black—who ran
into a homeless white man who smashed through her windshield. She drove
him back to her house and parked the car in her garage for three days while she
waited for him to bleed to death. And that, of course, is the plot of
this play. Except—and this is the interesting dramaturgical
element—Blessing inserts a playwright who has written this play based on the
facts he read (a little like Peter Shaffer wrote Equus based on the filler article he read about
a boy who blinded six horses—he took the few reported facts and then built
the rest from his imagination). As the play unfolds (that’s being
generous—it sounds more dramatic than it really was), the characters and the
playwright argue over what he can change and what he can’t. Both the
victim and Dot would like the writer to make the man die quicker than he really
did—the writer asserts he can’t save the guy; that’s too much deviation from
the truth—but at first he says he can’t do that. The playwright has
invented a friend of Dot’s who comes by in astonishment—she told her boyfriend
and he had told this guy—and there is an argument between the friend and the
writer about why the playwright made him talk and behave they way he does in
the script. It’s all a little Pirandellian, and could be interesting,
except that it ultimately goes nowhere. In the end, all the writer’s good
for is winding the play up when he decides he can make the poor man in the
windshield die sooner after all. Pirandello did it much, much
better. But, again, the acting was good. Dot is so cold—and
basically selfish and stupid—that she’s frightening—and the actress (Roslyn
Wintner) nailed it good. Sellars was incredible—though he was braced so
he could stay in one position for the hour, suspended in mid-air. Still,
it’s hard to pull that off convincingly, especially so close to the aud.
I just wish the play amounted to more. I don’t really know what Blessing’s
up to here—there’s an element of race, but it doesn’t seem especially significant to
the play. I suppose that Dot might be less cold if the man she hit had
been black, too, but I doubt it. Her real (and stated) problem is that
she has already had several DUI convictions and would face jail if she reports
the accident—that’s not a racial problem.
A
friend and playwright, Kirk Woodward, ascribes this approach—presenting
situations but not making anything of them—as one used by more and more plays:
Here’s a mess o’ scenes, now you make sense of them. That “mess o’ scenes” concept, I suppose, can
work in some cases. Emily Mann said she intentionally didn’t draw any
conclusions in Execution of
Justice because she wanted the audience to do that for
themselves. Leo Shapiro said the same things about his plays, though in
both cases, I think this was a little disingenuous because both people had
definite points of view that guided their work, even if they didn’t state it
directly in the script/production. In the cases I cite at CATF, however,
whatever the playwrights had in mind thematically, the plays ended up being
undramatic—and that’s a serious failure in a play, don’t you think?
(Someone said of Chekhov’s plays, especially Uncle
Vanya/Wood Demon, that a play about boredom cannot be boring. I
think that applies here a little.)
At
the Saturday matinee we saw Homeland
Security by Stuart Flack at Shepherd University’s main theater in
the Frank Center for the Performing Arts, where the two-act play also took
place that evening. Exactly why a school without a performing arts curriculum
has such a large performing arts facility was never explained to me—but it
does. The Frank Center is on the “new” campus and on its back lawn, CATF
pitched a tent where they hold discussions between the matinee and the evening
performancs on some days. This day there was one with Nelson Pressley,
the former critic of the Washington
Times and, after he quit over coverage of Corpus Christi, the Washington Post briefly,
but we decided we needed a break between shows and didn’t stay. I heard
while I was there that CATF is planning to build its own facility. It’ll
be on the SU campus, so the school won’t lose the attention the festival gets
it, but I wonder how much less the theater will get used, especially in the
summer. (I gather that Shepherd has no summer session, which I assume is
one reason they host CATF to start with: the buildings are there—might as well
get some use out of them.)
Homeland
Security
is the play with which I had the most problems, including the stage
design. Simply put, the story is of a woman and her South Asian boyfriend
who are pulled from line at an airport and subjected to interrogation because
of the man’s alleged ties with terrorists. During this long one-act (no
intermission, about 1½ hours), the characters—there’s also the woman’s
ex-husband—are interviewed in between scenes in which, in various pairings,
they essentially discuss the permutations of their situation. In the
beginning, of course, it looks like the boyfriend, Raj, is being unfairly
profiled, and, just to enhance this appearance, the interrogator and
interviewer, a Homeland Security official, behaves secretively and
conspiratorially, without actually saying anything. In the end, however,
as we learn more about Raj and his friends—he has apparently let friends of one
particular and mysterious friend of his stay at the woman’s house where they
made strange long-distance phone calls and left behind other heavy hints of
unexplainable acts—we become suspicious of his affiliations as well. At
the end of the play, Raj has actually disappeared, probably having fled to his
native country. (This is never specified—it could be India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, or even Afghanistan.) The biggest problem I had with this
script was that it is, first, extremely literal—the story is what it’s
about. (Remember my little thing about theater not just telling a
story? Well . . . .) The title, essentially, tells it all.
There’s nothing subtle, surprising, or unpredictable about any moment in the
play—except that it doesn’t come down either on the side of paranoia or
legitimate caution. (This, in my book, is another fault—either the author
should show us a paranoid government gone wild, à la 1984, or a truly vigilant
agency on the watch for real terrorists. That may not be real life, but
the namby-pamby middle road we end up with here isn’t dramatic.) Yes,
there are secrets (not very exciting ones) we learn bit by bit, but once they
start to be revealed, they become predictable. And everything unfolds
very linearly, if you get what I mean—there are no curlicues or detours.
No quirks, as one of my teachers would say. On top of this all, the
script is virtually all talk—not only the interrogation and interview scenes,
which are two people seated on opposite sides of a table asking and answering
questions, but also all the other scenes whether they take place in a bed or on
the jogging path of the local park. Furthermore, there are lots and lots
of short scenes crammed into this short play so there were constant blackouts
to punctuate the talk.
Now,
this is also the play with which I had serious design complaints. It was
as if the director or playwright—I don’t know whose concept this was—had
had an idea independent to the play and decided to try it out here.
Two ideas, actually: first, there was onstage, live music, though this was not
a musical; second, there was a large sculpture stage right in front of which
the two musicians sat. Going backwards, the sculpture took up a
quarter the stage area from right center to up center, leaving the only
playing areas for the actors the extreme left and the apron below the
proscenium. (A few standing scenes, like the jogging path, were staged in
front of the musicians’ sculpture.) This not only severely limited what
the actors could do and where they could go—I wonder if they would have had to
be so static if there were more possibilities available for the director—but
almost everything happened stage left while almost nothing happened stage right
leaving half the stage virtually unused. (I suppose this is okay of you
were sitting house right, of course) And that sculpture was always in
shadow—as were the musicians—so I have no idea what it looked like or if it was
in any way evocative of the play. It was just this big,
dark mass behind the musicians. As for them, I don’t know what
effect the writer/director intended for the music, but it had little as far as
I was concerned. The musicians/composers—apparently much of the music was
improvised—were Indo-Pakistani and the music was occasionally
ethnically/culturally redolent, but it wasn’t either really Indian or Western
but a kind of mish-mash in between. Like the sculpture, the music
seemed like an idea that had no real purpose. It was just there,
occupying a large chunk of the play.
The
acting here, like in all the performances, was fine, though the script didn’t
give anyone much to chew on. I can’t say the actors were misdirected
or anything—I just don’t think there’s anything in the play for them to
do—anymore than there is for the characters. All the scenes are
two-person scenes, and with the limited space and the talky text, I don’t know
what they might have done otherwise. (If I’d been the director, I’d have
first found another place for the musicians and given the actors the whole
stage to at least pace around in while they’re talking. That may not have
been action, but
at least it’d have been movement.)
Homeland Security
was produced previously at the Victory Gardens in Chicago.
Saturday
evening we saw what I think was the best play in the festival, Rounding Third by Richard
Dresser. He’s also a favorite of CATF, having participated in several
since the festival’s early years. As the title suggests, this is a
baseball story, and it does take its theme from the on-going Little League
debate over which is more important: playing to win or just having fun.
That makes this play a bit literal, too, but I think Dresser has a little more
on his mind—perhaps not much more—than a sports(manship) lesson. There
are only two characters, both Little League coaches: the older veteran, played
by Lee Sellars (from Flag
Day), and the younger newbie, played by Andy Prosky, the son of
Robert Prosky of TV, the movies, and, for many, many years, the Arena Stage
company. (Robert Prosky was at the shows over that weekend, supporting
his son. He was always a favorite of ours at Arena.) Both actors
were excellent—and it’s a good acting play, too. (If it doesn’t start to
show up in acting classes soon, I’ll be very surprised.) Dresser says that
the impetus for the play was his own experience as a Little League dad, and he
was, himself, sort of on both sides of the win/have fun debate at one time or
another, so the play does start out a little clichéd and formulaic. (I
think Dresser can fix this, and there’s a problem with the ending I also think
he can fix; he needs a dramaturg.) As you might guess, the veteran coach
is the hard-line, win-at-all-costs guy and the new dad—whose only
sports experience was curling when he was a boy in Canada!—is the
have-fun-and-learn-sportsmanship guy. (One of the reasons Dresser said he
was prompted to write this play is that his son came home from Little League
practice one day and told him that the coach had a new strategy for the
team. Dresser put this is the play, too: when a slower player got on
base, when he was coming to the next base, he should slide and then pretend to
be injured so the coach can substitute a faster runner. That’s not
strategy, Dresser, Prosky’s coach, and I agree—it’s cheating!) Sellars’s
character is, perhaps predictably, a blue-collar guy (convincingly very
different from his office worker and his homeless windshield guy in Flag Day) who drinks beer,
steps out on his wife (with lonely Little League moms), and swaggers and barks
like a minor-league coach. Prosky is doughy, shy, prissy, and inept—a
harried white-collar employee whose stepson is on the team, his first
try at baseball (and, we learn quickly, he isn’t a natural athlete and wears
glasses he often loses on the field). The two men start out a little too
predictably one-dimensional, but by the end of the first act, there’s a bit
more to each of them and they’ve become more complex—more like real people than
cartoons—and an honest conflict, not just a contrived one, is developing.
(This is what I think Dresser needs to address: he should move the characters
beyond the clichés much sooner.) The play unfolds mostly at practices
(and a few games) and though we never see the players—we’re sitting in the
field—a lot of the dialogue, especially for Sellars’s coach, is delivered to
them. The set was a unit, evoking a Little League ball field with
bleachers, a dugout, and the first-base line—though some scenes are set in
Sellars’s van, in a gym, a bar, and one or two other locations for which parts
of the ball field set do double duty—but that works fine.
As
the play develops, the two coaches not only evolve into more complex
individuals—we learn bits of their personal stories that round them out more
and more—but they each begin to absorb some of the characteristics of the other
man a little. Dresser insists that there is right on both sides of the
Little League debate, and neither Sellars’s nor Prosky’s coach is really the
complete buffoon he starts out to seem. Rounding Third is a comedy-drama, but there
are some touching and even sad moments along the way—such as Prosky’s
revelation that not only is his boy his stepson—we know this early on—but that
his wife, the boy’s mom, has died a year earlier and Little League baseball is
an important bonding and healing experience for them both. He also
sincerely wants to be part of the team and the community—he’s a new arrival in
town—but just doesn’t know how to do that. Though the curling thing is a
joke—and a rather obvious one I think Dresser can lose; there must be something
else less clichéd he can replace it with—other stuff isn’t so sit-com
ready. (There are equivalent aspects to Sellars’s
character—dramaturgically, the two characters are equal forces in the
play.) The other problem I alluded to above comes at the end. After
we see that the two coaches have absorbed some of each other’s beliefs, the
play goes on a few scenes longer—essentially just to show that even after
seeing some value in Prosky’s dad, Sellars still isn’t ready to be friends off
the field. Now, that may be worth demonstrating, but as a sort of coda to
the main point of the play, it’s anticlimactic. The play seems like it
runs on after it’s over—like a car I once owned whose engine kept turning over
after I switched off the ignition. Once again, I think Dresser can fix
this—even if it just means cutting the coda. (Cynthia Jenner, a dramaturg
and one-time professor of mine, used to pass on advice she said she got from a
former editor: ”Kill your babies,” she said, meaning cut the things you’ve
written that just don’t work, no matter how much you like them. This
may be a case of applying that advice. Of course, I always add that you
can save them for another piece, like the songs composers drop from musicals
only to insert them successfully into later plays.)
Rounding
Third
was by far the best play of the four, though it’s too small for a big New York
production. I see it showing up in
regional theaters around the country (and colleges, too, if it gets circulated)
and in a season of one of our smaller non-profits. (It’s already had a
run at the Northlight Theatre near Chicago and at the Globe in San
Diego. The Washington Post review mentions
in passing that Rounding
Third had had a poorly-received staging in New York City sometime
in the past. I checked: It was at
the John Houseman Theater on Theatre Row in October ’03; I don’t know if the
script was substantially developed since then or not, though.) It might
even go commercial after that, but I can’t see a commercial producer bringing
it here straight away—too sentimental and small. (I’m not saying those
are faults—just not immediately commercial.) Don’t get me wrong: Rounding Third isn’t a
great play—but it’s a nice play, and decent theater if audience response is a
criterion. (It is, isn’t it? Sometimes I wonder.) One way or
another, however, I suspect Rounding
Third will start showing up on stages here and there.
Our
last play, the Sunday matinee for us, was Keith Glover’s The Rose of Corazon, which
Glover subtitles A Texas
Songplay. Glover said he wrote the play because he wanted to
explore “the clash of culture down in Texas and how it enriches” and because he
“wanted to see what would happen when musical theater meets Spanish music.”
Now, those sound like plausible concepts: the clash of cultures can be dramatic
and even theatrical and the confluence of Spanish—by which I assumed Glover
meant Mexican and/or Tejano—and Anglo music has the potential to be theatrical,
too. But I ended up with problems with Glover’s pursuit of both his
goals. (Of course, the musical thing was sort of done in West Side Story with
Puerto Rican and Anglo music, and the cultural clash—not to be confused with
the writing team of Culture Clash—was sort of taken up in Zoot Suit, I think.
But there’s always room for more, if you add something to the
exploration.) Now, I know that the common writers’ wisdom of “write
about what you know” has been pretty much disparaged lately, but I still
think that you ought to have some basic familiarity with your milieu. If
not, you need to do an awful lot of research, probably. Neither Glover
nor any of his collaborators are from Texas, or spent any time there (or
anywhere in the Southwest as far as I can tell), or come from any kind of
Latino music tradition, whether flamenco, mariachi, or salsa. The result
reminded me of the epithet that the press hung on the California production of
the current Fiddler
revival: “Goyim on the Roof.” This came out sort of like a “Gringo in the
Barrio.” (Maybe that’s cruel—too bad.)
Unlike
Homeland Security,
which had so many fundamental problems that I hardly feel it’s worth
revisiting, I feel as if Glover’s idea for Rose
is okay except that he made really bad choices at nearly every turn. (He
was also the director of this production, so he did make some good casting
decisions—and one poor one.) Perhaps his first bad decision was choosing
a subject/theme with which he was so unfamiliar, but he went on to compound
that. Simplistically, the plot of Rose
is the story of a Texas flyer who is shot down over Europe in WWII and badly
wounded. As he’s recovering, he’s nursed by a Spanish—not Hispanic, but Spanish, from Spain, Odd Choice #1—woman
and, of course, they fall in love. The flyer marries Rosa (who loves
roses!) before he leaves, and when he gets back home to Corazon, Texas, he
sends for her. (Corazon,
of course, means ‘heart’ in Spanish—the heart of Texas, as in “deep in .
. .”—but no one mentions this little additional sentimentalism.)
When Rosa arrives, she’s welcomed neither by the local Anglos because she’s
Spanish, nor by the local Chicanos . . . because she’s Spanish. But that’s
the last that this little cultural clash comes up. In fact, there’s nary
a mention of cultural divisions, tensions, or clashes at all. Bad Choice
#2. (I’m beginning to feel a little like Gutman in Camino Real: “Block
2 along the Camino Real!”) I’m going to skip some of the many (too
many—Bad Decision #3) little plot details and skip ahead (this was a 2½-hour
play): There’s a draught and all the crops (including Rosa’s special rose) are
dying. Champ, the flyer, learns, Oedipus-like, that he must fly into the
clouds and seed them (this is The
Rainmaker meets Magic Realism—there’s a crone . . . you don’t want
to know)—and he does. But he crashes in the mountains (during which there
are several totally unnecessary scenes with a band of very old banditos who’ve
been lost/hiding there for decades—one of several entirely superfluous side
trips in the story; Bad Decision #4), and while Champ’s missing, Rosa
encounters a strange (but handsome) itinerant Mexican handyman. He tries
to take her away, but she won’t go. Just then, Champ reappears (one of the
banditos had had a map all the time—he just didn’t want to leave!), there’s a
fight and the handyman kills Champ (speak of West Side Story!). Rosa’s left alone,
and that’s the end. Except what becomes of Rosa? Her husband’s
dead, she still a Spanish war bride among Anglos and Chicanos, she speaks
little English, she has no job, and she can’t drive. She doesn’t even
live in town—she meets the handyman when she’s walking back from shopping in
town because she can’t drive Champ’s car. What’s the ending? Bad
Decision #5.
By
the way, you note that I gave you a short
précis of the plot. You’ll never guess how many details I left out!
And those aren’t the only bad choices I think Glover made, both as playwright,
composer, and director—they were just the plot problems. For instance,
there’s a three-person chorus (who also play incidental characters).
There’s nothing basically wrong with a chorus, of course, but this was the most
undramatic and untheatrical use of one I can recall seeing. They’re also
sort of kindly Macbeth
witches—Mayan gods, I guess (they have sort of Mayan/Aztec/Ancient Mexican costumes at the beginning
and end) and they are judging Rosa somehow or other. (One of them says
early on, “To be judged correctly, a tale must be told from back to front . . .
.” Problem is, the story’s told front to back—so we start off with a
dramaturgical error. Not very auspicious.) The chorus, I guess, is
Error #6 (though this is getting all out of order now, since the chorus shows
up right at the start). If it were my play/production, the first thing I
would do with this bit is cast real dancers and get in a better choreographer
to put in some very strong movement rather than the wan, actors-who-move stuff
that Glover used. The chorus’s music was wan, too, but I have a whole
thing about the music on its own. I’ll just say about the chorus
music/songs that they ought to be much more distinctive than they are, and very
identifiable with the chorus rather than blend in with all the other
music. The chorus also speaks (prose), but I’d consider making all their
words into song—recitative or oratorio or something.
Since
I brought it up, let’s look at the music now. As I said, none of the
composers—Glover had two collaborators on this part—has any substantive
connection to Latino music. The result, to my ears, was an unrecognizable
blend of ’50s pop, a little mariachi rhythm, and unspecific sounds. (The
music was live, but since both it and the actors were miked—in a tiny little
black box theater!—it was almost indistinguishable from recorded. This is
probably Bad Decision #7—miking the voices and the music in so small a
space. Nothing sounded live.) Once again, I’ll give you my ideas—if
I were directing: I’d go with something like Latin jazz, maybe off
Santana—strong, vibrant, and its own kind of sound that isn’t associated with a
specific era or cultural milieu. (Remember, the period of the play is
late ’40s, just after WWII. The alternative is to really imitate the
sound of the era, both in Anglo music and Tejano. I think that might
work, too, but my personal preference is for the unique sound that doesn’t
belong to a specific period, but is just evocative of the theme—it is magical
and mystical, though that wasn’t played much onstage.) What Glover and
his team came up with was so unmemorable that I don’t . . .umm . . . remember
any of it! How is that helpful? Bad Choice #8. (Maybe even 8
and 9, if you separate the style of music from the choice of collaborators who
don’t know any more than you do.)
Finally
(and at long last, I hear you mutter), the set/decor. Yes, I had problems
here, too, and I’m not apologizing, either. This one’s simple, I
think: The set, as minimal as it was—some small boxes, a larger box, and a
round floor covering center stage—it was all wrong stylistically. It was
practical enough—I don’t object to the boxes over more literal set pieces; it
kept the play flowing, after all—but the pieces were all decorated like stone
blocks from a Mayan ruin and the center floor piece was reminiscent of the
famous circular Mayan calendar. Now, okay, Mayan is Ancient Mexican—but
the farthest north the Maya got was southern
Mexico. (The Yucatan was already the northern suburbs.) Even the
Aztecs didn’t get up into what is now Texas (so even if my iconography is off,
and Glover meant for this stuff to evoke Aztecs and not Maya, he’s still off by
hundreds of miles). God knows, there are plenty of very evocative Mexican
images Glover could have used that are prevalent in the Texas border areas—all
that wonderful cut tin, the ocho
de dios thingies, the Dia
de los Muertos imagery, the colorful carved and painted animal
figures for sale all over this country (even as far up as New York!)—some I can’t
even think of just now. I’m assuming that Glover used the Maya imagery
and the chorus to approximate a classic Greek drama, and maybe he could have
done that, but he didn’t pull it off. He’d have to make more of it to
make it work—and that would mean a different play altogether, I think.
(Maybe Glover should write that
play!) All this adds up to Bad Choice #9. (Oh, and there was one
other set piece I never figured out at all—a sort of patch of thatch hung from
the flies over a leko spot stage left. I couldn’t figure out if the panel
of twigs was supposed to represent something itself, or if it was supposed to
act as a kind of cookie to make shadows on the stage—it didn’t as far as I
could see—but it was pretty prominent in this small space—about 3’X4’, hanging
just above head height.)
By
the way, I said Glover made a poor casting choice here, too. All the rest
of the cast was good to excellent—even, as far as I could judge through the
miking, the singing. Rosa (Arielle Jacobs) was quite pleasant, though as
a character, she didn’t have a lot of acting to pull off. The best singer
was the itinerant handyman, Joe, played by Perry Ojeda. (He’s also darkly
handsome and smooth. He had a Clark Gable/Rhett Butler pencil mustache
here, which made him seem a little oily, but I suspect he can do a good
straight—no sexual allusions intended—leading man, too.) The one who was
weak was Champ, the flyer. He was all-American good-looking
enough—blondish and youthful, very white-bread—but he didn’t have the singing
chops for the role. His voice was okay, but he was a crooner, not a pop
singer and he looked awkward and out of his element when he had to belt an
energetic number with some physicality. The role needed more Springsteen
and less Paul Anka. (Of course, if you change the musical style, like I
think the play needs, then you have to reconsider the casting anyway. But
the guy isn’t just a pilot, he’s a wing-walker and an aerobat—the part needs
more swagger overall anyway.) This actor, Michael Flanigan, was pretty
decent as the playwright in “Down and Dirty,” the second Flag Day one-act, and I
suspect that CATF wanted to keep the overall cast down and needed to use as
many actors in dual roles as they could, so Glover may have been convinced to
cast Flanigan because he was there. On the other hand, the Flag Day director might
have cast a better singer and solved both problems. (CATF uses a casting
director—there was an article about her in the Washington Post just after we got
home.) I don’t know if I’d count the casting weakness at the same level
as the other mistakes, but I suppose it still counts as Bad Choice #10.
(If I got picky and really went into individual detail about all the aspects of
this play/production, the number of bad choices would probably be higher, but
ten’s a nice round number. Kind of makes my point, I think.)
Like
I said at the start, though: overall the CATF was a nice experience despite
specific problems with individual plays.
I think the CATF folks see them as plays still in process—they do
acknowledge the changes that are made along the way, and since they do readings
of some, they clearly see CATF as a kind of working/development
environment. Maybe not as inchoate as, say, the O’Neill, but not as
finished as ATL-Humana.
I’ve been quibbling and caviling, but nothing was awful—and most of the plays
were better than a lot of the stuff I saw in New York last season!
Besides, as I also said, the stage work was so good for the most part that it
was worth seeing it. As I also said as well: I’d go again.
* *
* *
I
had a look at the Washington
Post review of CATF after I wrote the above report. Peter
Marks (the Post’s
regular critic) pretty much said the same things I did. He thought less
of Rounding Third
than I did, though he conceded it was an audience favorite, and he also found
the insertion of the playwright character in Lee Blessing’s “Down and Dirty”
one-act ultimately pointless, but he didn’t concede that it was at least an
interesting idea. Otherwise, he and I agreed—for what that’s worth.
[CATF
was founded in 1991 by current producing director Ed Herendeen, formerly a
staffer at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts. Before that, he worked with the West Virginia
Governor’s Honor Academy at Shepherd in the late 1980s. Herendeen was serving
as a theater consultant to Shepherd University when the notion of a
professional theater company came up.
That idea grew into CATF, which states its mission as “producing and
developing new American theater.” To
date, the festival has produced 105 new plays, including 40 world premieres by
77 American playwrights and has a budget of $1.3 million. Last year’s audience was just under 15,000
and the productions are reviewed in the Washington Post.
[This
year’s entries in the festival include World Builders by
Johnna Adams (world première), Everything You Touch by
Sheila Callaghan, On Clover
Road by Steven
Dietz (world première), We Are Pussy Riot by
Barbara Hammond (world première), and The Full Catastrophe by
Michael Weller (based on the novel by David Carkeet; world première). We Are Pussy Riot, a documentary play based on the 2012
incident in which five activist Russian women were arrested, tried, and sent to
labor camps for publicly denouncing Vladimir Putin at a performance, was
commissioned by CATF.]
