From the Road: "I've gone to look for America"

by David Dower

With the classic chorus of Simon and Garfunkel's "America" running through my head, I got my scouting gear on earlier this month and went to take a peek at some singularly American voices in action.  It didn't exactly take me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw, but it did involve trains, planes, and automobiles. And a lot of plays.  It's a pretty good gig, as I've said.  Here are the highlights:

Peter and Jerry:  Edward Albee is being very well served by his director, Pam McKinnon, and his cast (on the left are Bill Pullman and Johanna Day—you may remember her from Rainmaker here) in this Second Stage production.  This evening is comprised of two interrelated one-act plays.  The first half is Homelife, and was written as a prequel to Zoo Story six years ago (and 45 years after Zoo Story's premiere).  It's a fascinating snapshot of a moment in a marriage, sparkling with Albee's wit and wisdom and leading us through some brutal terrain, just skirting the abyss, without histrionics, without big warning signs of the road ahead. Your skimming along the surface of a quiet evening at home when all of a sudden the conversation takes a sharp turn into intimate revelations that surprise them both. The husband is Peter, the man on the bench at the top of Zoo Story, and these are the moments before he heads out to the park to read.  Beautifully staged and acted, with poise and charisma and totally present performances from both actors.  The second act is Zoo Story.  I found Dallas Roberts mesmerizing as Jerry.  But the big surprise of the night, for me, was how successfully the first act had balanced this second act, turning what's always read like a monologue into a true duet.  Pullman's listening, informed by the events we'd witnessed in Homelife, brought the bench-sitter fully into partnership with the dangerously unhinged motormouth who's disrupted the peace and quiet of a read in the park.  This production is closing this week, alas.  If you saw it, let me know what you thought about it.

The Receptionist: If you haven't seen it by now, you've also probably missed it in New York. There was talk of a Broadway transfer but I'm guessing the Great White Way is overstuffed with plays at the moment. If Vijay's review of the production piqued your interest, though, watch for it to come around—someone will likely do it here. Playwright Adam Bock is a prolific writer (his Shaker Chair is now running in Berkeley as well, btw) with a fresh and unruly voice. This play gets under your skin in a way that will keep you talking about it for weeks. After the performance, I had the great pleasure of hanging out with Jayne Houdyshell, and she was approached repeatedly by people who had seen it and "hadn't stopped thinking about it." Now, to be fair, some of those people had stopped her because it annoyed them.  At 70 minutes, it's a quick ride. And, to torture the metaphor, it drops you off in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a moonless night, and you have to walk home by yourself.  But it's a play that takes place in the real (murky) world, not the world of 24, and Jack Bauer is not on his way to save you (or Jayne). Lots of debate in the audience as to whether this was a paranoid fantasy or a scarily plausible series of unfortunate events.  You'll have to see it to judge for yourself.

Yellowface: David Henry Hwang's latest play is now extended at NY's Public Theater.  I found it very funny on the surface, while trawling its own deep and troubled waters—this time of race and identity in America. The play cheekily blurs the lines between fact and fiction, between hipster humor and 'docudrama' in retelling the tale of DHH's complicated and convoluted involvement in the politics of race. Here's the NY Newsday review.  DHH is familiar to Arena audiences from the sparkling production of M. Butterfly from the 2004/05 season.  He is also a member of our Writers Council. Check it out when you get the chance.

I also saw a reading of Tracey Scott Wilson's The Good Negro at The Public. The play was read in our Downstairs Series back in October. It's impeccably researched on the Civil Rights movement, and you'll easily recognize the figures she's based the work on, but Tracey's made the characters and the events her own so that she can explore the challenging questions embedded in the idea of 'the good negro'. It continues to grow in confidence and impact, and I can't wait to see a full production of the play. It feels to me like something major in the making.

Jump cut to Austin, Texas. There's a very distinctive regional voice to the theater being made in Austin, and I was there to catch a workshop presentation of the next piece from The Rude Mechanicals. You may have caught Get Your War On at Woolly Mammoth last season. This piece is called The Method Gun, and it mines the history and mystery of the bizarrely eccentric acting guru Stella Burden, aka "the other Stella". I fully admire the chutzpah of the project, as well as the discipline and the whole-cloth commitment to the enterprise. There's beautiful stuff in the piece already and a boatload of potential on display as it continues to grow. And it's filled to bursting with their signature merry mischief-making.  Definitely keep your eyes open for it—it will begin performances next spring and begin touring after that.

I also caught up with the work of Refraction Arts, a company new to me. They operate out of a space called Blue Theater. I hadn't been to this neighborhood of Austin before, and I was on a scouting trip after all so I hailed a cab early to get there in time to explore a bit and grab a bite. Mistake. First clue should have been that the cab didn't know the address. We muddled along on the road to the airport, the further he went the more he seemed to think there was some joke being played on one of us.  We turned off the airport road to an even less likely street, a mix of industrial lots and bungalows. And we arrived at the address to find a big Goodwill warehouse and parking lot.  But there was the sign assuring me that somewhere behind this building I'd find Blue Theater. And sure enough, in an outbuilding at the back of the lot, there was going to be a performance of The Assumption.  I was an hour early in the middle of what felt like the actual place we mean when we say "middle of nowhere". No offense intended to the people who live in the area. I can tell there's a community there. But come on, folks—you gotta admit that even the neighbors don't know it's a theater. And they say 6th and Maine is light on pre-performance options! I wandered various back lots and railroad tracks and thoroughfares and found nothing open but gas stations. Got lost trying to backtrack to the place. Arrived late, just moments before the performance began.

The show is a very loosely adapted Hamlet set in a used tire lot cum drug den.  It's an alt-rock musical.  And there's Kung Fu, line dancing, and a fetid pool of water for O'Lila to drown herself in.  Actually she electrocutes herself by diving into the pool with a lit headlamp.  Oh, and a beer can chandelier that comes crashing down in the big finale. The funky/comfy garage space, the loose and high-energy performance style, and the abundant imagination on display quickly erased the hangover from the trek out there.

The thing about this sort of travel is that it really reveals what it means to be a theater dedicated to American Voices.  In the space of a little more than a week I saw the work of an American master (Albee), a classic Broadway musical (The Color Purple and, no, Fantasia didn't perform), a new work from the leading Asian American playwright, a work-in-progress from a fast-emerging African American playwright, a breakthrough work from a Canadian transplant (Bock) starring one of our theater's leading lights (Houdyshell), an irreverent and anarchic ensemble performance sprouting in Texas, and a band of theater rebels running Shakespeare through the junkyard detritis of American pop and drug culture set to a Southern drawl.

The trick is to try to bring that experience to you—where you can take that kind of tour of the nation's theater without ever leaving the city's limits.  We're working on that.  I can't wait for the Mead Center to show you what we mean...