Playing at the Reps: A Retrospective

In addition to musicals, the county's two repertory/community theatres produce plays. Comedy and drama are rough classifications, and each includes variations.  It's become more common for plays to be a little of both, so it's a matter of emphasis.

Comedies can be laugh-out-loud funny, or more gentle romantic comedies, or Shakespeare's comedies which have some laughs and some romance, ending in at least one marriage.

 On the continuum of comedy, the far end is farce.  NCRT's Lend Me A Tenor exemplifies the classic farce form (wind it up in the first act, let it spin out of control in the second.)  Noises Off goes it one better by being a farce about a farce.  Its production at Ferndale Rep and "Tenor" at North Coast Rep were both ably directed by Renee Grinnell.  NCRT went back to the author of "Tenor" for another farce, Fox in the Fairway, that despite a classic farce set and a bravura performance by Anders Carlson, proved that the formulas don't always work when they are so, well, formulaic.

Fairly near to the farce end is the 1930s classic You Can't Take It With You, an ensemble comedy performed at NCRT that honors American eccentricity.  Maybe a Jules Feiffer play is truer to our time, when eccentricity seems mated with violence, but there is a certain hopeful model in this script, and maybe some hope in the yearnings it still expresses. In 2009 Ferndale Rep produced another show of the same era with farce written all over it: Arsenic and Old Lace.  (Renee Grinnell directed, of course.)

 Somewhere in here is another oddball, The Madwoman of Challiot at NCRT.  While it's not exactly Dr. Strangelove, it does combine farce with a political point.

Although it's also classified as a musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is classic (in several senses of the word) comedy and close to pure farce, based on tried and true Roman models (as well as early TV sketch comedy). The 2006 Ferndale Rep production was North Coast classic.  The same might be said of  NCRT's 2009 The Producers (by Mel Brooks, another Sid Caesar alum, along with Larry Gelbart of "A Funny Thing" and Neil Simon--see below.  )

About in the middle of the spectrum there are the comedies that most resemble their progeny, the motion picture or television situation comedies. They are basically about one kind of family or another.  The modern American master of this form on stage is Neil Simon, and NCRT has done a number of his plays.  The most recent was about the offbeat family of writers for a television show in Laughter on the 23rd Floor.

But in my time there was also the third in Simon's most autobiographical trilogy, Broadway Bound (2006) and Jake's Women (2007.)  (Both of these, less than coincidentally, involve comedy writers.)  In "Broadway" I singled out Gloria Montgomery for praise, for probably the first but certainly not the last time.  (Both reviews in full are now here.)  In my review of Jake's, I had this to say about Kim Hodel (later Haile):

"Kim Hodel had the plum part of Julie, Jake's perfect first wife, who he fell in love with when she was 21 and he was 24, and who died at 35. She played it with the moral beauty and physical radiance that forces us to wonder where the line is between Jake idealizing his dead wife and remembering her accurately - was she really this wonderful? Hodel is convincing as both fantasy and tragically lost reality, in a memorable performance."

Kim Haile (formerly Hodel) performed a variation on this role in what remains the romantic comedy I remember the best from playgoing at the reps: The Love List.  This was the perfect match of actor and role--the 'perfect woman' needed to be quick and fluid (adjusting to each male fantasy) and always magical, and she was.  The other actors (Edward Olson, Victor Howard) and the direction (by Carol Escobar) were also excellent. (I kind of like the review of it I wrote as well. I don't always.)

There were also comedies (alot of them in summer) that were funny at the time but are hard to even remember.  Many are set in the South and were born there, in a regional theatre or dinner theatre circuit, and they are the equivalent of a live TV sitcom, except not as memorable.  They are forgettable confections like The Red Velvet Cake War at North Coast Rep---funny at the time (at best), but leaving that hollow aftertaste.

All kinds of comedies need to evoke laughter at some point--usually early and often.  Comic energy feeds on laughter, and something that seems so simple and readily available can be very tricky to get. But a few things increase the odds (apart from, well, being funny.)

So as those tawdry Internet ads are fond of saying, here's one weird old trick: ventilation.  A well-ventilated theatre is comedy's best friend.  Keep the audience cool.  David Letterman was famous for insisting that his theatre be kept so cold that the audience could almost see their breath.

  He's not wrong.  If the house is hot and stuffy, the audience gets lethargic and loses concentration.  You might not even notice this in a drama.  But comedy needs active laughter-- that sound is part of the show.  Ventilation also happens to be the biggest problem for many North Coast theatres (along with inadequate rest room facilities.)  Apart from being unhealthy, stuffiness dampens audience energy and attention...and laughter.

Some of the same stage priorities apply to comedy as to musicals: bright lighting (you want the audience happy, right?) and when speaking, characters should be as close to the audience as possible (jokes play well that way.)  One fairly recent show that got this and the lighting right was North Coast Rep's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife. 

The opposite mask to comedy is the one for tragedy, at least according to the Greeks.  But tragedy is a classical form and whether modern plays rise to tragedy is a question best left to academics, at least for the moment.  The term "drama" is used both as a general term for all plays, and a category that basically means everything that isn't comedy.  So it includes melodrama, political and historical or biographical plays as well as tragedy.  

The virtue of the dramas performed by the reps is similar to the musicals and to some extent the comedies:clarity and humanity.  Lacking staging frills and show biz pretensions, they expose the heart.  The negative side of that is a want of intensity and the kind of passion that really superior acting can reveal.  But many plays profit by performances that create characters that North Coast audiences can relate to, in a clear style.

So North Coast Rep produced an interesting and involving version of a modern classic, David Mamet's American Buffalo.  A less star-centered production as this one revealed new aspects of the play, especially its particular humor.  Ferndale Rep's Look Back In Anger is another modern classic that revealed new dimensions, partly by being staged some 60 years after the original production.  The acting was higher octane, too.

Confrontations over law and ethics create drama in a space that the stage at its best can intensify.  So we had Ferndale Rep's 12 Angry Men and NCRT's Doubt.  But especially Ferndale Rep's To Kill A Mockingbird with Brad Curtis.  It's not a great play, maybe not as good as the movie, but its differences are worth experiencing, and just seeing it live was memorable.

I'm going to save Shakespeare for another post, but it's important to acknowledge North Coast Rep's consistent commitment to staging one production each season.

Before this retrospective moves past the reps, there's a pair of interviews I did in the first year of my Stage Matters columns, with the directors of both theatres.  Marilyn McCormick was beginning her 10th year as the artistic director of Ferndale Rep.  That decade plus one year turned out to be the uncharacteristic calm in the Rep's stormy history.  The Rep reputedly sped through and shredded artistic directors before that, and certainly has since.  Most observers I've talked to about it, including insiders, say it's because of the Rep's "impossible" board of directors. (That wasn't necessarily the word used, but the polite form of its meaning.)

Here's a previous post on the last big hiring/firing.  Since then, it seems another de facto artistic director has quietly fled.  Local hopes are now pinned on Leira Satlof, to whom we can only say, good luck.

I also interviewed Michael Thomas, the managing artistic director of North Coast Rep, and he is still there.  I've come to admire his management and his philosophy of play selection which has never wavered from what he describes in this interview.  In addition to the "popular" shows and the stubbornly regular rotation of one or two musicals and one Shakespeare a season,  North Coast Rep has continued to produce "edgier" plays.  They've included not only relatively esoteric modern dramas like Albee's The Goat but, this past season,  a 19th century American melodrama and a pair of plays from classical Greece.  Considering recent trends here, those are bold selections.

It's worth noting however that, as he's pointed out to me more recently, some sure-fire popular shows turned out to be busts, and some edgier choices were hits.

So to end at the beginning so to speak, here are those two interviews.  

Ferndale Rep with Marilyn McCormick (2006)

Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to immense disaster…
 Fennyman: So what do we do?
 Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
 Fennyman: How?
 Henslowe: I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
--- Shakespeare in Love by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard

 Ferndale Repertory Theatre will begin its 35th year of continuous production in the fall, and Marilyn McCormick will begin her tenth year as Artistic Director. She’s had a hard time settling on the upcoming season but so far it looks like this: The Mystery of Irma Vep (by Charles Ludlum and the Ridiculous Theatre) in late September, then a Young Actors original in November: Ghost of the Hart, which is about Bertha, the resident ghost in the Rep’s home, originally called the Hart Theatre.

 Then the Rodgers and Hammerstein Cinderella for the holidays, plus another original for the school matinee, Cinderelder. Peter Shaffer’s Lettice & Lovage in January, a teen show called Hamlet Through the Looking Glass in March, the Rocky Horror Show musical in April, To Kill A Mockingbird in May, another try at mounting the senior citizen production, Taking My Turn, in July (it was scheduled for this year but was cancelled due when a cast member suddenly became ill), before The Sound of Music ends the season next August.

 When I visited the theatre on a recent afternoon, the stage was dominated by a painted Roman arch. Part of the Young Actor’s Workshop show this past weekend? Or maybe left over from the July 4th pageant? Could it be a bold new concept for Pajama Game, Ferndale’s next scheduled show? Imperial Retro, something like that?

 Not exactly. The director slated for that show got a job in New York, and the new director had a different play in mind. So A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum opens in a few weeks, on August 3. That’s how it goes in the theatre.
“It’s a miracle it comes off,” McCormick says. “I’ve learned not to worry about it.”

 Ferndale Rep is the oldest and largest community theatre in the county, but what does that mean anyway—community theatre? “To me it’s made up of people of our community,” McCormick replied, “for our community. That’s basically how I like to run the theatre—to give opportunities to people in the community to explore this art form, as participants and audience. It’s grassroots theatre.”

 “Some people think of community theatre as amateurish,” she added, “but I don’t think of us that way. We have amateurs, but also people with lots of experience, including professional experience. There are people of all ages who want to be involved in theatre, and this is the perfect opportunity for them to find out if that’s what they really want. We introduce them to this world.”

 A funny thing happened to Marilyn McCormick on her way to the theatre. From the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University drama school (Carnegie Tech in those days), and acting at the legendary Arena Stage in Washington, DC, she came to California with husband and fellow “dramat” (as the CMU alums call themselves), Robert Foxworth. He began a career in movies and TV ( Boston Legal, various Star Treks) but she didn’t like film acting and concentrated on home and family.
 They came through Humboldt on vacation, returned to run a small café in Honeydew as a lark. Marilyn stayed, and raised her children in Petrolia and Ferndale after the divorce.

 Then the long and winding road led back to the stage when her son, Bo Foxworth, was a stage manager at Ferndale Rep, but had a basketball trip conflict with a show and asked his mom to fill in. She’s been there ever since, as an actor, director, board member and Artistic Director. (Bo is playing Hamlet in southern California this summer.)

 At the moment McCormick is especially excited about working with teenagers. “I like being able to give them the opportunity to experience this, outside of school. There are different rules and responsibilities here, with a paying audience.”  Teens are involved in all aspects of their productions, and McCormick is hoping to find financial support for extended technical training, which would help the theatre, too. “I’d love to have young technicians and designers here.”

The Ferndale Rep audience “is mostly from Eureka-Fortuna, mostly family-oriented,” she said, “and the theatre-lovers who support all the theatres in this county.”

 When we looked out at the 267-seat theatre—virtually unchanged from the 1970s—she recalled that “in the late 70s you had to have a season ticket to get into a show at the Rep. But this was the only theatre around then. NCRT and Redwood Curtain came out of here.”

Now McCormick would like to expand and redesign the stage and reduce the number of seats. She’s already made physical improvements to the green room area backstage, and Technical Director Daniel Lawrence has rebuilt much of the theatre’s façade, with lumber donated by Almquist Lumber. (The film-set façade that Warner Brothers presented as a gift to the theatre after the Outbreak shoot turned out to be built with indoor wood and paint, and has been falling apart ever since.)

 Besides ticket sales, Ferndale Rep is supported by local sponsors and grants, notably the Bertha Russ Lytel Foundation. “We have a staff of three—I’m the only full-time,” McCormick said. “It takes about 500 people to put on a season.”

 While she confesses it’s sometimes hard to figure out how to get people to come, the fascination of live theatre is still powerful. “There’s nothing else like it. It all happens right there, in front of you. Someone can make a movie and if nobody comes to see it, they still have that work of art. But we can’t do a play without an audience. They’re just too important.”

North Coast Rep with Michael Thomas (2006)

North Coast Repertory Theatre concludes its current season with Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, beginning August 10. Soon after, its 23rd season starts with Ladies of the Camellias in September, Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado in November, Jake’s Women (by Neil Simon) in January, Henry IV, Part 1 in March, Kiss Me Kate in May and Larry Shue’s The Nerd next July.

 In his office over the theatre, with windows overlooking Fifth Street in Eureka, Managing Artistic Director Michael Thomas was busy with solicitations for next year’s season tickets (you can call him at 442-NCRT and get yours) when I visited one recent afternoon.

The choice of plays for a season is “critical.” he said. NCRT has stayed alive for 23 years by essentially breaking even on season ticket sales and tickets at the door, plus selling ads in the playbill, with help from concessions, donations and grants.

 “But that doesn’t mean we don’t try things that are surprising. There are people who like edgier plays—they may not be a majority, but they’re also part of our community. We have a responsibility to offer plays the community will like, but not just what is safe and guaranteed.”

 “I never use the phrase—or like to hear the phrase—‘well, it’s just community theatre.’ We don’t operate that way,” Thomas said. “It doesn’t enter into my consciousness. We do the best we can with the people we have and the money we have, just like every theatre does.”

 “I work with people who are here because they want to be here, because they want to be part of creating a particular production, not because this is their job. I don’t say that lightly. It’s significant to the atmosphere of what goes on in this building.”

 Thanks to a California Arts Council grant (“before their funding was cut”), NCRT began a policy of paying actors and everyone else involved in a production. They’ve managed to continue it. “It’s not a lot of money—we call it a stipend. But everybody gets something.”

 There are difficulties, not only because NCRT can’t pay a living wage to theatre artists and staff, but because there is no such professional theatre anywhere near here. People tend to go where they can make a living doing what their expensive educations qualify them to do. That limits the talent pool.

 “The most challenging thing is to find competent people to work with,” Thomas says. “I’m always looking. Actors, designers, technical people—it’s difficult. There are talented people here, but not a lot, and they’re busy with other things in life, like making a living. The challenge is to find people who are available.”

 But in the end, theatre is theatre. “In professional theatres you have stronger shows and weaker shows, stronger actors and weaker actors. You have that in community theatre, too.”

 “Part of our mission as a community theatre is to maintain a ticket price that is reasonable for this community,” Thomas said, “ and that means controlling costs.” It also leads to a complex set of mutually beneficial relationships between theatre and community. “We welcome people who are new to theatre, and we’ll train them and use them, when appropriate. Of course, in auditions any director will choose the best actor, and the director defines ‘best.’"

In September Michael Thomas will begin his eighth season as managing artistic director, a self-selected title that reflects the jack-of-all trades nature of his job—everything from paying the bills to critiques of shows in rehearsal-- as the theatre’s only full-time employee.

 Thomas studied theatre at Northwestern University, near the North Shore Chicago suburb where he grew up. “My parents took me to theatre in Chicago. It was amazing. I’ve always been grateful they did that.” After studying mime and performing in Paris, he returned to make his fortune in the U.S. Postal Service. “It seemed like a lot of money to me at the time.”  From Sonoma County, he came to Humboldt with his daughter to earn his theatre MFA at HSU.

For most of its life, NCRT has been housed in this former Salvation Army store, built in the 1923, and they’ve owned it since 1996. Improvements are ongoing. “The building’s been painted this year, we’ve had some foundation work, a new ventilation system—air conditioning for the first time—all thanks to the Arkleys. We got a computerized light board with a grant from Simpson’s. We get a lot of support from local businesses. Sometimes they’ll loan us furniture and props for a show, sometimes donate materials or give us a discount.”

 The 139-seat theatre “seems to work well for us. We sell out some nights for any given play, which tells me it’s a good size.” Still, it’s cramped quarters backstage, and a relatively low ceiling above the stage limits second and third levels, and also means “we’ll never do Peter Pan.”

The stage itself is rough and uneven, which is especially hard on dancers. “We’d like to redo the stage, it’s on our wish list. But really, this space can work just fine,” Thomas said. “It’s what we do with the space that counts. This crack on the floor is not important compared with how the acting’s going. If the product is good, that’s secondary. I’ve seen enough to know that.”

Freak and Greeks

In my retrospective plan, I'd hoped my best reviews would be about the plays I remember best, but that's not necessarily the case.  (I should say this retrospective actually began with reproducing my review of Salmon Is Everything from 2006, which was an example of a review I still like about a play I still remember as one of the best I got to write about--although it was some time later.)

At the moment I'm thinking more about the plays than the reviews, and this one--Crawdaddy: A Freak Tragedy, from April 2008 has remained in my memory as a singularly exciting and weird theatrical experience.  There was a quality of surreal danger about it.  At that point it was a strange amalgamation of monologue, music, dark comedy and bizarre family drama.

Almost a year later, a revised version of the show with a different director returned to the Arcata Playhouse. I was disappointed by the changes--it was lighter, drained of danger and life.   (I wrote about it elsewhere on this blog, here. The illustration here is from that production.  I couldn't access my April 2008 review on the NCJ Journal site--that year has mysteriously disappeared.)  But its return allowed me to reap some benefits of reflection.  So what follows is all about this first version, but combining my review at the time with this later description.

The bit that I mention specifically--the puppet's story about his father's job testing the wringers on wring washing machines by literally being wrung through them--has stayed with me ever since.  I mentioned it just a few months ago to David Ferney, who wrote and performed that particular piece.

 Freaks Are Really Greeks? A Promising Work in Progress at the Arcata Playhouse (April 2008)

 Theatre can be most alive when it is rough and unfinished. Some of the most exciting performances I’ve witnessed have been staged readings, script-in-hand or living room cold readings. But what I saw and heard last week at the Arcata Playhouse is more than the raw and even intuitive attempt to explore dramatic material—it’s the living process of creating a play through collaboration, which can include the audience.

 The piece under construction is Crawdaddy: A Freak Tragedy, produced by Dell’Arte, together with Arcata’s Four on the Floor Productions and a troupe from Canada that specializes in mask work and puppetry, the Calgary Animated Objects Society, or CAOS.

 As is often the case here, all these roads lead back to the Dell’Arte company and school, which many of the participants have in common. Script and song lyrics are by Toby Mulford, music by Tim Gray; the director is Stephen Buescher, and head designer is Xstine Cook, the founder of CAOS.

 Only an insider could accurately describe the nature of the ongoing collaboration, but, as most group efforts do, it results in iterations—successive versions that reflect new creative insights, responses to observations of performances by insiders and audiences, as well as technical improvements. So each performance at this stage is likely to be different.

As might be expected with these particular companies, this production is developing puppetry, costumes, props, sound and lighting effects right along with the script, so there is plenty to see and hear (including singing and instrumental performances.) Beginning last Saturday and continuing this Thursday, Friday and Saturday (April 10-12), audiences are formally brought into the process with question-and-answer sessions after the show.

 “Crawdaddy” is about a troupe of sideshow “freaks,” that is also a family, with San Francisco Mime Troupe veteran James Griffiths as Crawdaddy ( he’s got crab claws for hands, and he becomes the patriarch of the clan); Jacqueline Dandeneau in an immense fat suit as his Fat Lady wife; Zuzka Sabata and Esther Haddad as their Siamese Twin-daughters; Tyler Olsen as the son-in-law Val, and David Ferney speaking through a sinister puppet as the Barker. Jerry Lee Wallace is the Outside Talker (who was literally outside talking up the performance before it started, promising “David Spade live,” which is certainly my idea of a freak show.)

 I caught a dress rehearsal and the opening night performance, and there were changes even in the day between. At least one wasn’t planned. Jackie Dandenau, who had been so expressive and animated in rehearsal, had become so physically disoriented by the fat suit that she almost didn’t go on for opening night, and her performance was more subdued, especially at first.

Violet and Daisy Hilton, Siamese twins in the 1932 film Freaks

The knowledge I brought with me to that rehearsal concerning “freaks”—people with real, exaggerated and fake deformities who made their living as exhibits or performers—was pretty limited. There were still some freak shows attached to traveling carnivals when I was a child, though I never entered one, and in the 70s I did see the 1932 Todd Browning film (“Freaks”) with actual freak show performers as the actors. In that movie, the “freaks” were the honorable ones, while a couple of “normal” people in the circus were the villains.

 Things are not so simple in “Crawdaddy.” For one thing, there are no “normal” people in it—their presence is felt only as showers of coins and greenbacks. Crawdaddy describes his show in lofty terms, as “extraordinary people doing extraordinary things” and promising “magic and mystery.” But also “the transcendent and the twisted.” Early on, Veronica has dreams of creating an excellent troupe, but that creation turns out to involve murders and perhaps other violent acts (the degree to which these are specified appears to be an ongoing experiment), as well as the grotesque exhibits of stillborns, who can still be “useful.”

In the performances I saw of that show, Crawdaddy (played by James Griffiths of the San Francisco Mime Troupe) was a dominant and sometimes threatening personality, despite being barely ambulatory due to his grotesque crab tail and feet. His marriage with Veronica, the Fat Lady was interdependent with their attempts to take and then keep control of their freak show, which often involved murdering other freaks, including Crawdaddy’s father.
 
But there was surprising tenderness in their relationship, and in Veronica’s struggle to have children (stillborns that she justified keeping in jars as part of the show), and then in their family feeling when Veronica gave birth to Siamese twins, Lily (Esther Haddad) and Heather (Zuzka Sabata.) The two girls, writhing in each other’s permanent embrace, were lively and real, and of course part of the freak show, playing odd and haunting melodies on saxophone and violin.

 Through dialogue and Crawdaddy’s monologues, and particularly the stories told by the vaguely sinister puppet, GW Willikers (the voice of David Ferney), more of the family drama was revealed, always returning to the particular culture of freaks in freak shows, as well as the permeable definitions yet ironclad realities of freakishness and normality. So when one of the girls fell in love with the dim but otherwise “normal” janitor, Val (Tyler Olsen), the mood alternated quickly between acceptance and menace.

 The mood was captured by a story the puppet told with pride and nostalgia about his father’s job testing out the wringers of washing machines by getting wrung through them, and popping back to normal size afterwards. The assembly line as freak show suggested another riff on economic dependence at the edge of existence.

 The essence of a freak show—of the need to satisfy the entertainment desires of normal folk with freakishness and freakish behavior—was a unifying theme, and just how this affected the family was often demonstrated in how many coins and bills showered the stage from the darkness around it. When survival was again threatened, Crawdaddy devised a one-time-only showstopper, the chainsaw separation of his daughters, which ended predictably in their deaths.

In his last soliloquy, Crawdaddy refused to be judged, judging instead his audience and the darkness within human nature which he shared and reflected. Together with the music and bizarre comedy, this was an edgy evening, and with themes shared with Shakespeare and especially Greek drama, it certainly was in the neighborhood of the tragedy in its title.

 The most unexpected element of this show, and the one that most impressed me at the rehearsal, was the central story of a family. The play begins with Crawdaddy telling about a hard lesson his father taught him as a child. Then the relationship between Crawdaddy and Veronica develops, and leads (after several stillborns) to the twins, who appear to be literally joined at the hip. I was taken with Veronica’s innocence and her powerful maternal feelings, and especially the performances of Sabata and Haddad as the twins, literally quivering with life and energy, two girls becoming young women.

 The courtship of one of the twins by Val, the somewhat dimwitted young man who sweeps up after the show, provides humor, vitality and then a sexual tension running between innocence and perversity. Perhaps it was additional makeup and Dandenau’s necessary restraint, or maybe just because I was sitting farther from the stage, but on opening night even these scenes seemed darker, less “human,” whatever that may mean in this context. And the play certainly gets very dark later.

Without giving more of the story away, this darkness brings to a climax another central theme: the identity and morality of the characters and their world, in relation to the audience. How does the audience define them, even to themselves? In starkly reciting Shakespeare’s sonnet # 121, Crawdaddy echoes the God of the Old Testament, as well as St. Paul, the poet Wyatt and of course the poet Popeye, in asserting, “I am who I am.” Yet he justifies his evil in the eyes of observers: “All men are bad and in their badness reign.”

But is that reality, or denial and evil itself? In the end I was struck by how much these “freaks” resemble the freakish gods of the Greeks, especially in their grotesque family relationships. I’ve just started reading Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, and I was intrigued by her suggestion that the Greek myths of gods who murder, rape and torture each other, present a family model that was more perverse and tragic than any in nearby civilizations, and this may have been a product of the preceding “dark age”-- four centuries of chaos and privation.

 This in turn focuses something I noted about “Crawdaddy.” Though the Dell’Arte press release said it takes place in the 1930s, I detected no indication of time or circumstance or any outside world in the production itself. I wonder if that is an avenue yet to be explored. In any case, this piece has extraordinary potential, and it may do extraordinary things.

An Unequivocal Success at Redwood Curtain

David Hamilton and Ambar Cuevas at Redwood Curtain

It is 1606 and the chief minister to the new English King (James I) commissions the most popular playwright of the day to write a play about the notorious Gunpowder Plot that sought to blow up the Parliament building while the king and his family were there. That playwright is William “Shagspeare”--one of several ways Shakespeare’s name was spelled by his contemporaries. The English weren’t big on consistent spelling at the time.

 So begins Equivocation, now on stage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka. It is a comedy and a political whodunit, told in contemporary language by a playwright who also wrote an episode of TV’s political potboiler “House of Cards,” but it's set in the early 17th century: Shakespeare In Love meets All the President’s Men.

Shakespeare’s sleuthing begins with a motive unknown to Woodward and Bernstein, or even Sherlock Holmes. He’s worried that the official version of events just won’t make a good play. For instance, the gentlemen conspirators were supposed to have dug a tunnel. How could they? It needed supports, and pumps to keep the river out. And what did they do with the dirt? “There will be 700 penny-a-place standees at every performance, all of whom make their living with their hands,” Shakespeare says. “And if there’s anything these groundlings will want to know about, it’s the dirt.”

 But the bigger dramatic problem is that the plot was foiled, so the explosion didn’t happen. What was good for the King is bad for Shakespeare, because the play has no ending.

 The actors of the company are very funny as they grapple with these problems (as well as Shakespeare’s latest confusing play about a crazy King Lear. “If we could get through his comedies-don’t-have-to-be-funny period,” lead actor Richard Burbage reassures the company, “we can get through whatever this is.”)

 In search of theatrical reality Shakespeare speaks with two of the alleged conspirators, and the play moves into the darkness of the time: political intrigue involving religion and the state, with the King’s chief minister and spymaster, Robert Cecil at its center. Shakespeare begins to wonder who profits from the Gunpowder Plot, and why.

 Equivocation is by Bill Cain, a Jesuit priest and writer who started a Shakespeare company in Boston. Another Jesuit (Henry Garnet) features prominently in the story, especially in regard to the concept of “equivocation” he championed: telling the truth, but indirectly. The moral questions raised by equivocation turn out to have significance as well for Shakespeare (who wants to "tell the truth but not get caught at it")  and his plays.

 Eventually Shakespeare completes a play, though not exactly the one commissioned, and it is the occasion for more mesmerizing action, including as a sword fight. Prior knowledge of Shakespeare and these times aren’t required, but they’ll add to the appreciation.

 Even more than usual for Redwood Curtain, the acting is excellent. This time the clarity and conviction of the acting are elevated as the actors meet the challenges of a witty, theatrical and multi-layered script. They respond with performances that rank among their best, at least in my experience.

 David Hamilton plays Shakespeare through the moods of his journey, revealing his humanity. Gary Sommers as Burbage and others, especially the Jesuit Garnet, is precise and evocative. James Hitchcock navigates both the wily Robert Cecil and Nate, the most grounded of the players, with economy and force.  Dimitry Tokarsky likewise inhabits his roles with an assurance we share. As both Richard Sharpe (the youngest player) and King James, Cody Miranda has a startling moment playing a scene between the two. With his posture and his eyes, he conveys the cruelty hidden in the cocksure King.

 The play also involves the central role of family, especially the relationship of Shakespeare and his daughter, Judith, whose cynical skepticism is eventually transformed. Ambar Cuevas plays all those colors well, but her performance in the closing scene is exceptionally moving.

 The other elements of this production are equally admirable: the elegant and spacious set by Ray Gutierrez, dramatic lighting by Michael Burkhart, pleasing costumes by Jenneveve Hood, among important others. Director Catherine L. Brown knits all these elements together into a convincing and entertaining world. Though not perfect in preview, this show is an unequivocal success.

This is an unusually rich and thematically ambitious play, and one that takes chances.  After all, it is a play about a play that doesn't get written about an event that doesn't take place. It even violates Shakespeare's rules (histories end in battle, comedies in marriage, tragedies in death): it is a history and a comedy that ends in death.

 To mention more about it would involve too much space and too many spoilers for an opening review, so I’ll suggest some of its textures in the notes below, especially for those who see it. But playgoers should be prepared for some enacted and mostly suggested violence, including torture. (It’s no coincidence that this play was written during the Bush administration.)

 Craig Benson is the fight choreographer, Brandi Lacy the dialect coach, and various effects are engineered by Jared Sorenson, Jillian Park and Hanah Toyoda. Christopher Joe is sound designer, Shea King assistant director and dramaturg. Equivocation is on stage at Redwood Curtain weekends through September 27. 443-7688, www.redwoodcurtain.com.

Equivocation: Notes and Spoilers

yesterday and today: The Globe

These notes contain spoilers, but mostly they address questions that might be raised by seeing the play.

 Equivocation is so rich in characters, themes and resonance (too rich for some tastes) that to do much more than introduce the basic action, as I did in my review, would just be confusing.

The play is set in 1606, yet in style it's contemporary.  Previous productions in fact have been done in modern dress, as the playwright suggests.  Redwood Curtain chooses a modified period style.

"The Shakespeare Code"

Since at least Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, there have been a number of plays that use Shakespeare's stories with a twist, or in which Shakespeare himself appears, usually as a more or less contemporary person in historical circumstances--from Shakespeare in Love (Stoppard again) to a classic episode of David Tennant's Doctor Who ("The Shakespeare Code.")  Equivocation follows in this "tradition", and depends on what are now the conventions of it.  Especially that we aren't thrown off by people in 1606 talking a lot like 2006, minus contemporary references.

Yet the play purports to show the interplay of  English politics and William Shakespeare's theatre company in the early 17th century, and involves a famous historical event--the Gunpowder Plot, which is still the focus of holiday celebrations in the UK. (We mostly know it as Guy Fawkes Day, celebrating both the anarchic spirit and the survival of the British government, with bonfires and fireworks.)

 So the first question that might arise after seeing the play could be: how much of the history is made up?

Robert Cecil

Most if not all of the characters named are authentic historical figures.  The play begins with Robert Cecil commissioning Shakespeare to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot, based on a history written by King James himself.  Robert Cecil was indeed Secretary of State to both Queen Elizabeth and then James, and was widely regarded as James' spymaster.  James did write essays etc., though perhaps not this particular history.

Elizabeth's long reign had ended in 1603.  She died without children and without naming an heir.  Cecil was (as noted in this play) instrumental in having James installed as King.  James was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, and was ruling Scotland at the time.  By becoming King, he became head of the Church of England.

Since Henry VIII, the official religion in England was the Church of England, with the King as its head.  Previously England had been Roman Catholic (with the Pope as its head), and ever since Henry there had been religious and political conflict between outlawed adherents of "the old religion" and the official Protestant religion.

The Gunpowder Plot was ostensibly a conspiracy of various English gentlemen and perhaps clergy to overthrow the government and establish a new monarch (Mary's young daughter Elizabeth, with a Catholic regent acting on her behalf.)  The idea was to plant a large quantity of gunpowder beneath the room where Parliament had its opening ceremonies, with the King, his family and ministers attending.  (Wikipedia has an extensive entry on the topic.)

King James

The official version of these events--the letter that eventually alerted Robert Cecil to the plot, the arrests that foiled the plot--are as described in this play.  The conspirators were said to have dug a tunnel to a room under Parliament--Shakespeare has problems believing this in the play, and subsequent historians have found no evidence for a tunnel.  Such a room existed (and still does.) Oddly it was in private hands at the time and no such extreme measures as a tunnel were needed to store gunpowder in it.  If the gunpowder said to have been found in this room really was there, it was more than enough to demolish Parliament and kill everyone in the room (according to a British TV experiment.)

Equivocation

Garnet

Two other historical figures and characters in the play are Thomas Wintour and the Jesuit priest Henry Garnet.  They were among those imprisoned, tortured and executed in the manner described in the play.  The play faithfully follows the version of his involvement that Garnet asserted--he knew only what had been said to another priest in confession.  He did in fact write a treatise on "equivocation," although he was not the only one or even the first to relate it to "mental reservation", a concept within Catholic and specifically Jesuit ethics, though it has earlier origins.

"Equivocation," as Garnet defines it in the play: "Don't answer the question they're asking. If a dishonest man has formed the question, there will be no honest answer. Answer the question beneath the question. The equivalent question. Answer the question really asked. And answer it with your life."

This play suggests that Robert Cecil himself was behind the gunpowder plot, or at least the story of it that he wanted told.  This was a suspicion of the time, and was developed as a theory by Father John Gerard in 1897.  Others refute these claims.  That Cecil learned of the plot and let it develop for awhile before exposing it is more credible, and more credible still is that he used it for his own political ends.

Cecil, by the way, was a hunchback as suggested in the play, and both his family's prior history he refers to, and its subsequent important history in British government he foresees into the 21st century (including a Nobel Peace Prize), are broadly accurate.

Besides Cecil and other figures involved in the gunpowder plot and its aftermath, Equivocation makes William Shakespeare a character, as well as depicting members of his theatrical troupe.

Shakespeare and all the King's Men

from Shakespeare in Love

 I could verify all the players in Shakespeare's troupe--the King's Men-- that this play names, except "Nate," but in an interview, Equivocation's playwright Bill Cain claimed that an actor by that name was in fact among them.  Richard Burbage was Shakespeare's lead actor.  Robert Armin played the clown roles and had an excellent singing voice.  He was a more verbal comic than Will Kempe, who he replaced.  Richard Sharpe was indeed a young member, who before he joined the company started out very young playing women's parts.

Shakespeare in fact did have a daughter named Judith, and she was the twin sister of his son Hamnet, who died at age 11.  But it does seem she was back with her sister in Stratford and not living with her father in London, as in this play.  The play also shows her reading and even editing Shakespeare's texts, but (according to Shakespeare biographer Peter Ackroyd) in fact she was probably illiterate.

There are many witty lines about Shakespeare and his present day status made by Cecil and others.  He's all things to all men, Cecil says, and adds later, "People will go to your plays as they used to go to church. Reverently. And they will leave exactly as they went in, unchanged but feeling somehow improved."

  It's also suggested that Shakespeare was a long-retired actor in his troupe, and not a very good one.  However it's probable that he stopped acting just a few years before, in 1603 or 04.  And there are those (including Orson Welles and Peter O'Toole) who looked at the parts he played and concluded he must have been one of the troupe's better actors.

This play shows the company rehearsing King Lear, and then performing Macbeth.  In fact Macbeth was performed for King James probably in the spring of 1606. King Lear was probably performed that December, so the earlier rehearsals aren't outlandish.

Equivocation begins with Shakespeare being given a commission to write a play based on the official version of the Gunpowder Plot, as written by King James.   Being named the King's Men was an honor but it also meant that the company performed many plays a year before the king and the court.  Still, there's no record of such a commission.

But the idea might have been inspired by a slightly earlier event, in which Shakespeare and his company may have been deliberately used as an adjunct to violent political plot, with potentially disastrous results.  In 1601, supporters of the Earl of Essex paid for a performance by Shakespeare's company of his play Richard II, which involves the deposing of the king.  Some of these were also conspiring with Essex to start a rebellion against the government.  It was alleged later that they were using the performance both as a cover for their activities that day, and as inspiration and justification for overthrowing the monarch.  But the revolt failed, and after some uncertainty, Shakespeare and players escaped punishment.

Orson Welles as Macbeth

Shakespeare, in this play and in reality, never wrote a play about the gunpowder plot, but as in this play, the next play he wrote and produced was Macbeth.  Scenes from it, with some theatrical additions, are the climax of Equivocation.

The relationships of Macbeth to James I, the gunpowder plot and the concept of equivocation drawn in this play are drawn elsewhere in the critical literature. From one point of view, Macbeth is about the consequences of killing a king.  It's the Scottish play, James was a Scot, and (according to Ackroyd) "King James had been greeted by three sibyls at the gates of an Oxford college and hailed as the true descendant of Banquo."  In Shakespeare's play, Banquo is declared the father of kings by three witches, and Macbeth murders him.  Shakespeare differs here from previous stories about Macbeth, in which Banquo is among the conspirators against the rightful king Duncan (who Macbeth also murders.)  This can be seen as illustrating of the charge Cecil makes in Equivocation, that Shakespeare, a master of equivocation, made sure to stay on the right side of the powerful.

In Equivocation, much is made of King James wish that there be witches in Shakespeare's play.  James was known for his interest in occult or malign spirits, and had written on the subject.

Judith Shakespeare

At the end of  Equivocation, Judith makes a powerful point about Shakespeare's last plays, and the father-daughter relationships within his general theme of family.  Peter Ackroyd makes much the same point in his biography of Shakespeare--in fact, since this book was published in 2005, it may have suggested this observation to playwright Cain.  "The essential bond is father and daughter. It may not be the pattern of his life," Ackroyd wrote, "but it clearly is the pattern of his imagination."


Contemporary Flavors

Equivocation was first produced up in Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2009, so it's reasonable to assume Cain wrote it during the G.W. Bush administration.  There certainly are echoes of the Bush administration's use and justification of torture.  There's suggestion of the political exploitation of the plot that succeeded (9/11) as well as the plot that failed (the gunpowder plot.)

There's also some echo of today's polarized politics. In the play Robert Cecil admits that his political purpose is to keep the country sharply divided. "When a country is evenly divided - and plots can be so helpful for that - the slightest touch of a royal finger on the scale changes the balance."

But contemporary as well as historical relevance go beyond these specifics, at least in Cain's stated intent.  He'd visited the Tower of London, seen where prisoners had been tortured, and noticed that the Globe theatre was close by.  He said that this play is about "the relationship of the Tower and the theatre," and that Shakespeare's troupe "was the only functioning democracy anywhere in the world in 1605."

Symmetries

There are several witty comments on Shakespeare's dramaturgy, and the nature of plays in general that this play turns into elegant symmetries.

In Equivocation Shakespeare complains that the gunpowder plot can be made into a dramatic play because the explosion never happened--it's a story without an ending.  He tries various ways to write this play, but does not succeed.  Yet what is Equivocation itself about? A play that never gets written about an event that never takes place.

But this Shakespeare also wants to revolt against the strictures of what must be in a play. He tells Judith he yearns to write "A new kind of play. Not the clash of opposites, but their union. Not tearing; joining. Forgiveness, not blame." "A play that's not about revenge?" Judith retorts. "It can't be done."  But he does it in his later plays.

Several times Shakespeare also bemoans other conventions of the stage--histories end in battle, comedies in marriage and tragedies in death--and longs to write a play that defies these.  Arguably Shakespeare also did this in his later plays, but so does Bill Cain: Equivocation is a history and a comedy that ends in death (Shakespeare's.)

Far East: People in Changing Times

The immense and brutal warfare between the United States and Japan raged from the surprise attack by Japanese forces on Pearl Harbor in 1941 to the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. American forces occupied Japan after its surrender.

The Occupation brought close to a million Americans to Japan at its height, and even after it was officially over in 1951, a sizeable U.S. military presence remained. By 1954 new U.S. military officers were too young to have served in World War II, and perhaps even the Korean conflict, which ended the year before. Wallace W. “Sparky” Watts is one of them, in A.R. Gurney’s 1998 play Far East, now on stage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka.

 His arrival for duty in Japan begins the story but not the play. Playwright Gurney (who served in Japan at about this time) provides the framing device of a Japanese drama. It’s a combination of Kabuki (stylized dance and music to depict historical events involving codes of morality) and Bunraku (puppet theatre, with a single Reader off to the side saying the lines.)

 At Redwood Curtain, director Craig Benson modifies some elements and expands on others. In particular, he and scenic designer Daniel C. Nyiri create a stunning entrance for the Americans with the best physically realized metaphor I’ve seen on a local stage.

 I won’t spoil the surprise of it. But even with no prior knowledge of Japanese drama, it’s pretty clear what happens: the drama is now about Americans, with the Japanese in decidedly supporting roles.

 The basic story of a young officer who falls in love with a Japanese woman in an era of comprehensive racial prejudice, and a parallel story of another young officer dealing with another kind of prejudice, suggest it will be much like some familiar and turgid predecessors. It’s tempting then to assume that the Japanese elements are there as arty distraction.

 But neither is true.  The well known stories of Americans in Japan were told closer to the period--Gurney has the advantage of time gone by to reconsider the common situation with a contemporary perspective.   As for the Japanese elements, the entire play can be seen as the Japanese drama as taken over (for awhile) by Americans and their problems.  That adds an intriguing layer to the evening, but it still works most obviously as a framework for the central story: the young officers avid for their unfolding lives in a world remade and still changing, the Captain dealing with the weight of the past, and the Captain's wife, dealing with the effects of both on her attitudes, behaviors and ultimately her own life.

  Director Benson’s deft moments of humor and the subtle physical commentary of the Japanese characters aside, this is most overtly an absorbing character drama with elements of comedy, and strong cultural and historical undertones. It reveals the living weight of the past and the first signs of the future, but through the lives of these characters in their changing present.

 What makes the play most admirable —and in a way very American—is that without histrionics the characters exhibit and act on self-examination and self-knowledge as well as particular drives and traits. None of the Americans are the same at the end of the play as they were at the beginning, and their decisions about themselves are involved in the changes. Nor are their fates yet decided.

 Potential theatregoers shouldn’t fear heavy weather onstage. There is a kind of buoyancy to this production. It’s a skillful and substantial play with various shades of comic wit by a veteran American playwright that is likely to keep an audience musing about it long after its end.

Thanks to the Japanese drama framework, the small touches added by the production or in the script (the American siren song of "You Belong To Me" linked to the acknowledged appropriateness of Julie Anderson having worked for the Voice of America, for example), all suggest that this play rewards repeated viewings.

 Apart from Benson’s directorial touches, Nyiri’s set and Karen Kenfield’s cinematically vivid costumes, what makes it riveting and real is the cast. Josh Kelly as Watts, Valerie Buxbaum as Julie Anderson, Cody Miranda as Ensign Bob Munger and Lincoln Mitchell as Captain James Anderson are both emblematic and completely convincing as their individual characters.  They look their parts, which works so well because they act so well.

 Theirs are the naturalistic roles. Denise Truong, Craig Kuramada and Jeremy Webb must negotiate roles as both traditional Japanese actors and everybody else, which they do with grace and nuance. This is a play and a production that is a highlight of Redwood Curtain’s season, and of the North Coast season so far.

 Michael Burkhart designed the lighting and Ian Schatz the sound. Far East plays weekends (Thurs.-Sat. evenings at 8, with a Sunday matinee at 2p.m. on Nov. 17) through November 23.

A.R. Gurney is in some ways the American equivalent of the British playwrights like Alan Ayckborne or Michael Frayn among others, who regularly turn out plays--often comedies-- of theatrical inventiveness and social moment. Born in 1930, his plays seemed to be everywhere especially in the 1980s.  Gurney's best known plays are  Love Letters, The Dining Room and The Cocktail Hour but there are so many more, like Sylvia, in which the title character is a dog (played originally by Sarah Jessica Parker.)  He's literate, witty and theatrical.  Though his characters tend to be upper middle class whites, there's enough cultural universality for recognition and laughter beyond that demographic.  I'm frankly surprised his work isn't done more on the North Coast.  Here's an interesting interview with him, by another playwright, Romulus Linney.

This North Coast Weekend: Our Town

Ferndale Repertory Theatre opens Our Town with a preview on Thursday and opening night Friday.  

A year after Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, Thornton Wilder won it for Our Town. You Can’t Take It With You ends its run at North Coast Rep this weekend, while Our Town opens at Ferndale Repertory Theatre.

 Both plays emerged from the 1930s, when bad economic times encouraged evaluating life in terms other than dollars.  But if the plays had some ideas in common, the playwrights were very different.  Kaufman and Hart knew Thornton Wilder socially, but his background and life were worlds apart from these Broadway playwrights.

With a classical education (including Latin) and degrees from Yale and Princeton, Wilder was a teacher and successful novelist who felt drawn to the stage. He called theatre “the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being...We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.”

 Legendary director Tyrone Guthie described him as a “ceaseless traveler,” “a savant, a notable wit” who has “been everywhere and knows everyone,” sprinkling his conversation with anecdotes that might begin “Ernest Lubitsch leaned over my plate and whispered to His Holiness...”  But he also said Wilder's work expresses “between the lines of story or play, one human soul speaking to another.”

Wilder playing the Stage Manager in Our Town in a
Wellsley, Mass. production

 Wilder’s wanderlust began in childhood, as he rarely lived in one place for more than a year or two. He was born in Wisconsin, lived in China and Europe, but also attended high school down the coast in Berkeley, and during some of the early 20th century years Our Town takes place, he attended the Thatcher School in Ojai, California, which described the surrounding towns as having "the moral and intellectual atmosphere of a New England community." He acted and wrote for the stage in both places. By the time he started college at Oberlin, he had the reputation of being “worldly yet somehow ‘small town.’”

Thornton Wilder had been born a twin, but his brother did not survive the birth.  This other half haunted him and his writing for the rest of his life.

After writing one act plays and translations, Wilder embarked on writing two full length plays.  One would eventually become a comedy that failed until Tyrone Guthrie revived it, though it would become world famous mostly as the basis for the musical Hello Dolly!  The other was a drama, at first titled Our Village and later Our Town.

Inspired partly by the Spoon River Anthology book of poems by Edgar Lee Masters, and partly by Gertrude Stein and her writings about America, Wilder also applied various classical models.  He wanted it to be a play of "recollection" in Plato's sense.  "Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante's Purgatory)" he wrote. " It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life."

 As his first staged original full-length play, Our Town had a rough beginning. After a well-received tryout at Princeton, it bombed in Boston. By then the director and the playwright were no longer speaking. It went to Broadway for one performance and was saved by enthusiastic reviews, but its 10-month run lost money despite the Pulitzer Prize.

 It quickly got new life in revivals around the country—a number of them featuring Thornton Wilder playing the key role of the narrator, known as the Stage Manager. He did so again in 1946 at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut, where Paul Newman would play that part in 2002.

 Today it’s said that Our Town is performed every day of the year somewhere in the world. Partly because of its simple staging, it’s become a high school staple. But a 2009 off-Broadway production directed by David Cromer became the longest running Our Town in history. Cromer stripped the play of the nostalgia and sentimentality that had upset Wilder in the original production.

Cromer as Stage Manager in his production

 In Cromer’s configuration, the audience was seated on the same level as the actors, almost within the playing area. I saw a professional production at the Pittsburgh Public Theatre in 1991 (directed by Robert Allan Ackerman, now a lauded TV movie director) that also did this. It especially made the key scene of the play (you’ll know it when you see it) very powerful, one of those unforgettable theatrical moments.  (Coincidentally, Pittsburgh Public Theatre is mounting a new production of Our Town this very month.)

 But the play has endured because audiences connect to the words as spoken, whatever the staging. Specific lives are portrayed, governed by the universal truths of life and death. In his Harvard lectures on American Characteristics, Wilder said that poet Emily Dickinson solved the American problem of loneliness “by loving the particular while living in the universal.”

 Audiences can now enter into this unique American classic at Ferndale Repertory Theatre. Directed by Patrick Porter, it features Tina Marie Harris as Stage Manager, with Brandi Lacy, Gino Bloombery, Willi and Bill Welton, Charles Beck, Stephen Avis, Carol Martinez, Scott Monadnoick, Dana Zurasky, Shelley Harris, Laureen Savage, Michael and James Swiker. Sets are by Les Izmore, lights by Liz Uhazy, sound by Peter Zuleger, costumes by Denise Ryles and Rosemary Smith.
   Our Town previews on Thursday October 9 and opens on Oct. 10. It continues Fridays and Saturdays at 8, Sundays at 2 through November 3. Tickets: Ferndalerep.org, 707-786-5483.

The Pitmen Painters

A synopsis of The Pitmen Painters, now on stage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka, has a familiar sound: based on a true story, it’s about coal miners who take up painting and astound the art world. But this is not The Full Monty (unemployed British steel workers triumph with a male striptease), Calendar Girls (Yorkshire housewives raise money with a nude calendar) or even Billy Elliot (though that film about a coal miner’s son seeking fame as a ballet dancer is by the writer of this play, Lee Hall.)

 For one thing, it’s no rags-to-riches tale with a big triumphant ending. More impressively, it isn’t a movie, and in its present form wouldn’t work as one. The Pitmen Painters is a peculiarly engaging piece of live theatre.

 It’s 1934 in Ashington, a coal mining town in the north of England. Five men gather after work for a class sponsored by the Workers Educational Association, an organization backed by labor unions and universities that still exists in a thousand UK communities.

 Three are lifelong coal miners: George (played by Lincoln Mitchell,) Oliver (Craig Benson,) and Jimmy (Jerry Nusbaum.) Harry (Gary Sommers) is the Marxist dentist, and a character identified only as “Young Lad” (Joseph Hunt) is unemployed. That he says he’s never had a job is just about the only suggestion of the ongoing Great Depression.

 These men have requisitioned a course in art appreciation, but when their teacher, Robert Lyon (JM Wilkerson) shows up from King’s College, they aren’t interested in his slides and references to the Renaissance. They want to be taught how to look at a painting and know what it means. They want to know the secrets “of what’s going on.”

 Lyon decides that looking at paintings is not the best way for them to focus on such questions. He suggests they paint their own pictures, and they do. The dynamic first act centers around the paintings they produce (images of these works projected above the stage are of the real Ashington Group’s paintings.)

Through their sometimes heated, sometimes funny discussions, we learn about each of them, their lives as miners and their community, while they explore perennial questions about art and life. They talk about everything from where meaning resides (the painting, or the viewer?), intention and effect, and inevitably art, identity and class.

 Even if their vocabulary doesn’t always ring true, they deal with weighty questions through the experience of painting as real and practical work. (Jimmy paints something yellow because he had a lot of yellow paint, which according to Gertrude Stein was the secret of Picasso’s Blue Period.)

 All of this is surprisingly mesmerizing, thanks to the writing and the live interaction physically in front of you. It turns out that entertaining ideas can be entertaining. There is some emotional and plot development, particularly when a wealthy art collector (Cassandra Hesseltine) offers Oliver a stipend equal to his miner’s pay just to paint.

 But partly because these are true events, the second act is more diffuse, and aspects of British history are probably obscure for a U.S. audience. Still, the conflicts of individual and community, specifically in a working class context, may well resonate in Humboldt County.

 The cast is uniformly engaging. Craig Benson is especially effective in the most individualized role. Joseph Hunt is impressive in switching from a working class to upper class character (and accent) for a key scene. Lillian Damron steals her scene as a model who scandalizes the puritanical miners by insisting on posing in the nude. The Pitmen Painters is ably directed by Peggy Metzger and James Hitchcock, with scenic design by Jack Shay, lighting by Michael Burkhart, costumes by Catherine L. Brown, sound by Jon Turney and properties by Laura Rhinehart. It continues at Redwood Curtain weekends through March 9.

The Real Pitmen Painters: the Play and the Reality

The play begins in 1934 in Ashington, a coal mining town in the north of England.  The Great Depression, which began with the New York stock market crash in 1929, had spread worldwide.  England had not fully recovered economically from World War I so it was not as hard a fall, but the consequences were still severe, especially in places like Ashington.  Unemployment in the coal mining north reached 70%.

Though the worst of the Depression may have been over by 1934, it's still odd that it doesn't factor more in this play. It was a horrific time.  In his book The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell details the conditions: lack of food and fuel, terrible sanitation and housing, and the general drab deadening drag of life.

 The Depression is not even mentioned by name.  (One character refers to "the recession," an odd choice of word, especially since it wasn't a familiar term for some years yet. It was more likely to have been called a "slump" or the Great Slump.) One suggestion of the impact is that the youngest character ("Young Lad") says that he's never had a job in his life, even though he looks for work every day. Yet the conditions of mining plus the Depression were factors that helped make socialism popular among the working class, which is embedded in this play.  The Marx-quoting dentist in the play is something of a joke, but it's not unrealistic.

There are references to the cramped, damp, dark and dangerous mining conditions, and the fact that the older characters started in the mines at the age of 11 or 12.  Boys would not start quite that young by 1934--a law passed in 1917 required children to stay in school until 15.

Beginning in the mid to late 19th century, the British government began consciously expanding educational opportunities. There were new colleges to educate the lower middle class, partly because growing industrialization required more technicians and "scientists" (a word that was born in this period.) Eventually the working class was included.

Also in the mid 19th century, the Cooperative Movement became established in the UK, and particularly in the industrial north of England, where local co-ops formed an association.  Cooperatives functioned in different ways in different places and times, but education for workers was an early priority.

By the turn of the century, universities were offering extension courses.  So it happened in 1907 that university extensions, the Cooperative movement and particularly trade unions combined to form the Workers Education Association.This is the group that sponsors the art appreciation course that is at the center of The Pitmen Painters.  

  The WEA grew quickly to 70 local branches, and by 1945 there were 800 branches. The Workers Education Association continues to this day, with nearly a thousand centers in the UK.  Throughout its history, the WEA campaigned for worker education, and it was instrumental in getting that 1917 law passed extending the compulsory school age, as well as other laws, such as the 1944 Education Act which promoted equal educational opportunities for the working class.

George--one of the characters in the play--is comically officious, and concerned about the WEA regulations.  But the WEA did have careful regulations.  It centered on a system of tutuorials for classes of no more than 40 members who committed themselves to participating for three years.

There was a WEA art appreciation course that began in the Ashington YMCA in 1934, involving at least  the people named in the play (5 of the original 13.) Ashington had a concert hall, a theatre (home to the Ashington Labour Players) but no library and certainly no art gallery or museum.

 They'd just completed a course on evolution, and--as in the play--a college art instructor, Robert Lyon, came to teach them art appreciation.  He started with slides and lecturing.  In the play he gives that up almost immediately, but in reality it took a few classes for him to come up with the idea of the class members doing their own paintings and talking about them.

Though the play uses images of actual Ashington Group paintings, it probably takes some liberties.  In the play, Jimmy paints a picture of whippets, which he may well have.  But the best known painting of that subject produced by this group was by George Blessed ( a later member not in the play. His nephew is the famous British actor Brian Blessed.)  This might partly be because much of the early work didn't survive.  Having paintings around was often wasted space in a working class culture.

They did formally call themselves the Ashington Group in 1936, and they became somewhat famous in the art world through the 1940s, though they were mostly known as "the pitmen painters."  Though their fame slipped, they continued painting.  By the time they were rediscovered in the 1970s, they had accumulated a large collection of work.  It was writer William Feaver whose book led to their resurgence, and it was his book (which Lee Hall found in a secondhand book shop) that eventually led to this play.  A Guardian article recounts Feaver's eureka moment:

  Their rediscovery began in the 1970s when Mr Feaver, then teaching in Newcastle, noticed some Geordie pensioners at an exhibition in the city's Laing art gallery. "They invited me up to their hut in Ashington and I was amazed," he said. "There were all these paintings, cobwebby and in stacks against the wall, which they called their permanent collection. They spat on their fingers - there was a lot of spit involved with the Ashington Group - and rubbed the paint so that I could see what they looked like when they were clean.

"When you're a critic, you often get invited to discoveries which people describe as wonderful. This is the one occasion in my life when that was absolutely the case. The best of the group would certainly have gone to art school today. Their dedication was humbling."

Oliver Kilbourn and original member Jack Harrison in 1982

The play spends most time with Oliver Kilbourn, generally considered the most talented painter among them.  He never left Ashington, and continued to participate in the painting group.  The play makes much of his opportunity to take a stipend to paint, and his decision to remain in the mines instead.  This may raise all sorts of issues for Americans in or from working class cultures.  The relationship of the individual to the community, and the community's attitudes towards individuals with different ambitions, can be very complicated.

 The play refers to this, and is suggestive, though it goes past it pretty quickly.  But it can be a major issue.  It certainly was where I grew up.  At the time this play is set, my father was growing up in a coal company town in western Pennsylvania.  His father and grandfather were coal miners.  Though the coal mines are long gone, and even the steel mills and much of the other industry, the area retains a working class cultural cast, and certainly did when I was growing up there (though not in that town.)  I suspect there are resonances of this for some of those who grew up in Humboldt County as well.

But Kilbourn himself apparently did not stress this issue.  He claimed to like mining, and he believed that the mines gave him his subject.  Others had painting skills and education, but no subject, he insisted.  It was better to have the subject and acquire the skills.

Kilbourn was the last surviving original member when he managed to preserve the collection before his death in 1993. In 2007 their permanent collection was exhibited and housed in the Woodhorn Colliery complex, with a ceremony officiated by Princess Anne.

The play ends with a scene that is probably puzzling to most Americans, especially in the context of what "socialism" has come to represent these days.  But in England, the period just after World War II was a time of promise and hope, especially for the working class.  The postwar Labour government nationalized coal, steel, rail and utilities, in an attempt to consolidate and modernize these industries, and revive the economy. It was not a controversial move. For workers, especially miners, it meant immediate improvement in working conditions and safety.  Miners were given paid vacations and sick leave for the first time.  The National Health Service was about to begin, bringing free medical care to people who could never afford it.

An historically-minded British audience would know this, and also know that this hope--and the ethic of we're all in this together-- didn't last.   In fact, Lee Hall's film Billy Elliot takes place during the 1980s of union-busting and Maggie Thatcher's budget-cutting and aggressive capitalism that was its antithesis.