Keizer’s Doll’s House Dreams of Freedom

When, if ever, will women—and by extension, everyone—be truly free? Keizer Homegrown Theatre asks this question in A Doll’s House, Part 2, by Lucas Hnath, a tense chamber piece that reminds us that the personal is always the political.

Theatre people probably know (or at least know about ) Ibsen’s original A Doll’s House: In 1870s Norway, wife and homemaker Nora Helmer sacrifices her entire personhood to support her husband (Torvald) and family. When she finally realizes that Torvald sees her as nothing more than a toy in a play house, she walks out—abandoning husband, marriage, and her own children. The ending shocked and appalled audiences in 1879, and the play is considered one of the first feminist plays in theatre history.

It helps to have read or seen A Doll’s House, but it is not strictly necessary. A program note from dramaturg Jordan Reid (and I do love a good dramaturg’s note, so kudos to that!) tells you everything you need to know. In Lucas Hnath’s 2017 sequel, Nora returns to her family, fifteen years later. The sequel remains Ibsenesque: a simple, four-handed chamber piece with long, theatrical monologues that spark and flare into moments of passion.

Co-directed by Patricia Wylie (returning from a pandemic exile in Edinburgh) and the inimitable Tom Hewitt, the directing is simple, effective, and to the point. The most dramatic move was a cross from one side of the stage to the other, but in this piece, such a move ratchets the tension.

I was disappointed that local mainstay Robynn Hayek had laryngitis on opening weekend and could not take the role of Anne Marie, the family’s foul-mouthed servant/governess. It was a pleasure, though, to see Jennifer Johnson stepping in with script in hand, who occasionally channeled the late Louise Fletcher in the best way.

Elizabeth Ming plays the grown daughter, Emmy. This is the strongest performance I have yet seen from Ming, in her most mature role to date. While she first appears as a wide-eyed youth, happy to see her prodigal mother, it turns out that she has a backbone of steel. Joe Martin makes Torvald sympathetic, and while he shows the capacity for a great, male anger, he does not go over the top with this.

But of course, the play rises and falls with Cathy Willoughby’s Nora. Willoughby gets the job done in an even-handed sort of way. There are no great highs or lows. Her best scenes are with Torvald; the pair has an explosive chemistry that give the play life. The play itself makes Nora almost a villain, her feminism causing women of all kinds to (nightmare of nightmares!) leave their husbands. The older Nora never becomes the badass that I wanted her to be, but she at last finds her bravery by the end.

A shout out to set painter Brigitte Miller, who gave life and texture to the antique wallpaper, as well as to costumer Loriann Schmidt for period-accurate clothing. Keizer’s space was also looking good with new houselights, and they still have the most comfortable seats in the community.

Lessons I learned from this play: Marriage is hard. Life is much easier when you don’t give a crap what other people think. And in 140 years, things have not changed very much as far as rights for women. As Nora discovered when she left her family and moved into the world, she simply moved from a tiny cage into a larger cage. In the United States in 2023, we still seem determined to regulate and legislate what women of all kinds can do with their bodies, their wardrobes, and their minds. Nora and Keizer dream a new world of freedom: when will we finally make it come to be?

Slow Burn Lights up North

 

This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing

By Finegan Kruckemeyer

North Salem High School Theatre Department

 Photo Credit: Tekoa Rose Photography.

 

This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing (written by Finegan Kruckemeyer, performed by the North Salem High School Theatre Department, and directed by North guru Alyssa Bond) is an odd duck of a play. From the excessively long title, to the narrative format, to its mishmash of genres, the play cannot seem to pick a lane. And yet—at every moment this production knows what it wants to be, and it shows a self-confidence that draws the viewer in. Over the course of the evening, this modern fable became a slow burn that had me truly invested and entertained by the end.

The first fifteen minutes of the production are the weakest. It starts not with an action, but with a narration by a chorus of actors describing the birth of triplet girls, each with their own qualities: the eldest loves cake; the middle one loves sunshine; and the third loves to bear the problems of the world on her shoulders. The narration commits the crime of telling, not showing—not in the manner of Brecht’s Epic theatre, where the narration jolts you awake, but more like a bedtime story that wants to lull you to sleep. The opening story is all too familiar: The girls lose their beloved mother. Into their life steps a cruel (or perhaps only indifferent) stepmother. Soon, the inept father is taking them for a walk in the forest to “gather firewood.” We know this story. And try as it might, the production could not really bring this opening portion of the play to life. I snoozed.

However, it is in the woods (the traditional place for transformation in the theatre) that the play finds its footing. Abandoned, the three sisters go their separate ways, each starting their own hero’s journey (heroine’s journey?). This break starts the action. Suddenly, one sister is a warrior, liberating the helpless. Another becomes an improbable explorer, spreading joy through the power of music. The one who remains behind is beset by an army of forest creatures—and suddenly the stage is awash with the full ensemble, each performing the funniest and most expressive physical acting I have seen on in a while. The forest scene is followed by a truly epic stage battle—one that lasts for minutes and brought me fully into the play. When the singing starts—yes, there is singing—it feels perfectly naturally. “Yes,” I thought. “Of course, this is the time for the song. What else could possibly happen at this moment in the story?”

Photo Credit: Tekoa Rose Photography. 

 

The play is truly an ensemble piece, with no real highs or lows. While the three sisters (played by Tayler Samon, Choe Turner, and Emma Wagoner, respectively) are the only real named characters, the rest the cast of twenty-one young actors move seamless between narrators, village people, forest animals, and dancers (of course there are dance numbers!). What the cast excels at is supporting each other—sometimes physically (one actor is carried around in victory) and sometimes emotionally. When one actor went up on her line, another stepped in without hesitation to pick up the story: no judgment or remorse, just one storyteller helping another. This is the self-confidence of the play. It takes an ensembled formed over months (or longer), with a steady hand at the helm, to bring all this together.

The technical elements are likewise quirky and confident. Costumes (by Brenda Jensen) ran the gamut from medieval peasant, to something Dorothy might wear in Oz, to crumpled suits out of Waiting for Godot. And yet again, they tie together as well as the dance numbers that bridge the scenes (of course there are dance numbers!). The set is an abstract of furniture and lights built on imagination, which serves the fable well. I would add that the technical cues—lights, mics, and sound—were the smoothest that I have seen at North all year. The backstage team had it going on.

The play ends with the three sisters assembling in the very place their journey began (hero’s journey to the core). This is no spoiler, as the narrators told us this would happen at the beginning. But even though we know it’s coming, the moment still hits hard. The Greeks knew the power of recognition and reunion (Aristotle has pages on this in his Poetics). The group hug is no less powerful because the trick is old; the joy of reunion in family is an extremely human quality, and this production reminds of that with all its heart. 

This Girl plays through May 14.

“Who Knew Life Could Be So Awful”

"Who Knew Life Could Be So Awful”:

A Review of Revolt, She Said. Revolt Again.

February 22, 2020. Salem, Oregon.

Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again., by Alice Birch, now playing at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, is one of those plays that you experience first and think about later. It punches you in the gut as you watch, and then again in the head when you get home.

Revolt follows in the tradition of British in-yer-face theatre, a genre originating in the 1990s that stages scenes of graphic sex and violence for both political commentary and to create a visceral audience experience. Indeed, some passages of Revolt could have been pulled directly from Sarah Kane’s Crave, while another scene smacks of Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot / Get Treasure / Repeat. The similarities are less in imitation than homage, I think, as Birch definitely has her own flavor. This is a genre that lies close to my heart, and I felt quite at home in Willamette University’s intimate, black box theatre. But this play is not for the faint of heart. There is blood and language and half-naked bodies and even a bit of shopping and f**king (that’s a Ravenhill joke). It seems like these things are all around us now, both in our media and in our politics, but it still makes an audience suck in its collective breath when a women cuts off her own head on stage with a satisfying little “pop.” That’s the power of liveness.  

So what is this play about? Well… it is about the absurdity of language, and rape culture, and intergenerational trauma, and whether marriage eclipses love, and how hard it is to flex your work schedule when you just want to get a few more hours of sleep on a Monday. There are a few times when the play seems to hit its topic a bit on the nose, but it mostly does such a good job of overwhelming the senses that it doesn’t matter. The play is actually comprised of five short vignettes, each separate from the others, but with themes that echo and refrain throughout the piece. In one, a gay couple fights over whether marriage will destroy their relationship, the proposal likened to an invitation to strap on a suicide vest filled with explosives. In another, a woman escapes to a farm to escape her abusive husband, only to pass on that trauma to her daughter and grand-daughter. The language of abuse leaves them few choices: smile in idiotic denial, sing, or cut your own tongue out. The play leans hard on the use of the long monologue (less in-yer-face than an old trick from expressionism)—sometimes minutes long—to beat down both the other characters and the audience. The final minutes of the play descend into chaos as the play undoes itself, becoming a maelstrom of words and violence and bodies that goes on just a bit too long (but would it be in-yer-face if it was not too long?).

The Farm Scene. Photo Credit: Bobby Brewer-Wallin

As always at Willamette, the production values are superb. The set (designed by Leazah Behrens) is a metal cube enclosed with scrim and a bare, tiled floor. It is not minimalism, so much as a place of confinement, confrontation, and battle. The costumes (by Bobby Brewer-Wallin) evoke archetypes more than specific characters: A pencil-thin business suit for the boss in the office scene, opposed to a wooly sweater (?) for the worker who just wants a day off. The fighting couple look like they have just escaped from a wedding party, perhaps by the skin of their teeth. The sound design (by Robert Vaughn) sets the mood and the place. In the pre-show, feminist power ballads by Lizzo and the Eurythmics give us a taste of things to come, while punk rock and pulsing lights covers the transitions. Ambient sounds in the office and the supermarket at first had me looking around to shush the people next to me (no—it’s all part of the show).

The directing, by guest artist Marina McClure, emphasizes language and bodies. The first few minutes are played in virtual darkness (provocative backlighting designed by Sarah Hughey) so that we can only focus on the language and on the silhouettes. I admit that I was a little worried at first, as the highly sexualized dialogue (a back-and-forth description of a sex fantasy) was played in a decidedly anesthetic way, but that was the point: to take the language of sex and then subvert it. And so it goes through the rest of the play. McClure says in her director’s note, “She [the playwright] seems to be arguing that the trauma language can create is actually a method of wielding power and controlling people,” and this idea is brought to the fore with bits of text (little messages of revolution) hidden in various places around the set. The rest of the directing is highly theatrical, with movement in some scenes stylized to the point of choreography. McClure keeps both the tempo and the actors moving, with the entire piece clocking in at a tight 70 minutes. Above all, the production does not hold back, which is exactly what the piece needs.

Brava to the courageous ensemble of young actors who fully commit to absolutely everything, five women (Bradford, Emily Embleton, Shelby Fenn, Grace Goodyear, and Lani Southern) and one man (Garrett Blackburn). They showcase not only the technical skill to master their endless monologues and choreography, but bravery to bear themselves so openly—both emotionally and physically (credit to intimacy director Amanda Cole). It is difficult to single out any one performance for praise when each one had a moment that hit home, but my personal favorite was the monologue in the supermarket scene. We watch, helplessly, as the character (played by Grace Goodyear) disintegrates before our very eyes, her body pressed into nothingness by a tidal wave of culture, so that smashing a pair of watermelons on the floor of aisle 7 served as one small revolt against generations of oppression. I was moved and affected. Kudos.

The Supermarket Scene. Photo Credit: Bobby Brewer-Wallin

The production had no curtain call. On one hand, I was disappointed, because I wanted to applaud these fearless actors. On the other hand, the choice allowed me to sit and breath and process. The play ends with a lament: “Who knew life could be so awful?” The statement—and the play—could be construed as nihilism, but like all in-yer-face plays (and all absurdist plays), I think it is ultimately optimistic. To revolt is to hope.

Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again. plays through Feb. 29. 2020. 

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion is a woman with a secret. A secret she is eager to share with the audience: “This will happen to you,” she asserts, with quiet certainty. Some day, some year. Out of the clear, blue sky. Death will strike. And you will be forced to face it.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a powerful, one-woman production in performance at The Verona Studio, starring Pamela Abernathy as the Author/Playwright, Joan Didion, and directed by Jo Dodge. The play is an autobiographical account of Didion’s struggle with the closely-timed deaths of both her husband and her daughter. It is based on her novel of the same name. (You can find more the background of the play in this preview.)

Unlike most dramas, which save the pile of bodies for the end, tragedy strikes before this play even begins. In the opening moments, Joan recounts her husband’s sudden aneurysm, leading to his almost immediate death. The rest of the play follows, as Joan suffers through various stages of grief and denial. Her magical thinking is that if she keeps belief in her husband alive—if, for example, she keeps his old shoes—he will come back. And by “back,” the grief-stricken Joan means literally back to life. This kind of thinking is not rationale, but it is logical, and it is totally human. It is a defense mechanism to protect against pain. Haven’t we all had those kinds of beliefs as children? I know several sports fans who still cling to such beliefs (if I wear my lucky socks, my team will win!). Certainly, there is nothing mad about Joan’s coping mechanism, despite her own doubts.

The performance by veteran actor Pamela Abernathy is stunning. She held the audience absolutely rapt for a full one hour and forty minutes without so much as moving from her chair and taking only three sips of water (I counted). At first, I worried that the tempo of her delivery was too fast, but I should not have been. Helped by the equally talented director Jo Dodge, Abernathy hits all of her beats, levels, and tempo changes precisely. Abernathy’s Joan is by turns steely and sly, and invites the audience into her personal world like an old friend. Yes, there are moments of pain, but her performance never veers into the maudlin.

Going into the performance, knowing only that it dealt with grief, I expected something of a sad play. But it is not. A tragicomedy, in the formal sense, is a play that skirts close to tragedy (usually, with one character thinking another is dead) that recovers with a comic ending (the loved one is really alive). In this play, the reverse arc takes place: Joan believes her husband alive, and comes to accept that he is dead. In her epiphany lies the catharsis. Really, this is a play full of hope, showing that out even amidst great personal adversity, the individual can survive. The world changes, but it continues.

The Year of Magical Thinking plays for one more weekend, through October 1, and Verona’s small house fills up quickly. See it if you can. 

The Salem Pimpernel Returns!

This week, the Salem Pimpernel returns to the Salem Weekly with a review of The Diary of Anne Frank, at Pentacle Theatre in Salem: http://www.willamettelive.com/2016/arts-entertainment/political-diary-young-girl/

Blasted: Relevant Piece of Filth

Portland’s Defunkt Theatre is currently staging Blasted, by Sarah Kane, directed by Paul Angelo, with performances by Elizabeth Parker (Cate), Matt Smith (Ian), and Clifton Holznagel (the Soldier).

I have no objectivity at all when it comes to this play. I wrote a dissertation chapter about it. I read every review, every book, every article in the play’s short history. I have a complete picture of the play in my head. But until last night, I had never seen it performed. I was terrified.

It was devastating. And in some ways, it was easy.

Some background: Blasted was first performed in January 1995, at the Royal Court Upstairs in London. Its author, Sarah Kane, was a 25-year-old newcomer. The headline of the Daily Mail’s review the next morning read, “Disgusting Piece of Filth.” It was universally condemned as vulgar and obscene, and the reviews (more than the play itself) sparked an uproar that spread into the nightly news and led to calls for revocation of funding for the Arts Council. Five years and four plays later, Sarah Kane killed herself at the age of 29. Her plays were reevaluated, and Blasted has since become part of the canon. It appears in textbooks. I have taught it to undergrads.

It is no surprise that it is rarely produced: it is not exactly a crowd pleaser, and the technical aspects are, shall we say, demanding. The first New York production was not until 2008. Full credit to Defunkt Theatre for tackling this piece, Portland’s first production. Defunkt has previously staged Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis along with other plays from her in-yer-face brethren. Blasted will probably not play again in Portland for twenty years.  

If you know the play, Defunkt’s production is exactly how you would imagine it. If you don’t know the play, think of all the worst parts of Game of Thrones—yes, those parts— but taking place in your living room, with live actors. If the Hound sucked out Sansa’s eyes and sent them to her mother in a box. That kind of play. Blasted is to True West what True West is to The House at Pooh Corner. It is Titus Andronicus, but with everything on stage and not as happy.  

The original production of Blasted took place in the Royal Court Upstairs, a tiny black box that sat 60 people. Defunkt’s Backdoor Theatre—literally found at the back door of a Portland coffee shop—is perfect. I think, perhaps, there is no better way to stage this play than with absolute intimacy.

Director Paul Angelo follows Kane’s admonition to “treat all of the stage directions like lines” quite faithfully; therefore, the production follows the script beat for beat, down to details such as  Cate flipping the lights on and off, the scattered flowers, and an ominously bloody towel on the floor. Here is what surprised me: 1. Ian was scared. All the time, even of Cate. This was on the page, but I never imagined it so strongly. 2. I liked Cate. I never really liked her while reading, but there was a definite point in scene two where her strength and resolve came out, and I found myself genuinely impressed. 3. There was chumminess between the Soldier and Ian, a relaxed camaraderie that I did not expect. (At least, right up until the point when the Solider threatens to rape him.) I realized, Ian is not really surprised by the Soldier; it is what he expects all the time.

The pacing was excellent, with a slow build through the first scene as the domestic tension builds, and rapid fire chaos after the disaster of scene three. I was incredibly impressed by all of the technical design. Knowing what was coming, I looked for clues (and seams), and I was still utterly surprised by the end of scene two. Sound design especially contributed to the disturbing atmosphere: loud “winter rain” covered the transitions, while a high-pitched whine created physical and emotional unease in the second half.

All three performances were intense, raw, vulnerable. The working class London accents from Ian and Cate were impeccable and added to the authenticity. Ian’s screams of agony over his disintegrating liver were literally gut wrenching, and not the least among the night’s atrocities. All three actors were stripped bare, physically and emotionally, in a way I could not imagine sustaining for a single evening, let alone four nights a week for five weeks. Director Anne Bogart calls actors heroes; playwright Howard Barker says that actors are not quite human. Both are right. Parker, Smith, and Holznagel deserve the highest commendation.

The final moments of the play were absolutely cathartic. The best of tragedies evoke silence, a heaviness and a presence from the audience that sets in during the last five minutes of a Hamlet or a Lear. In Defunkt’s Blasted, the silence started in the middle of scene two and lasted the entire performance. The final image released a collective sigh.

So was I shocked by this disgusting piece of filth? Experiencing the play was easier than I expected. Most of the horrors I anticipated, knowing the script. Some still surprised me. My viewing companion—who knew nothing about the play except what I had old him—“had a good time.” This was not quite what I expected to hear. But then it struck me: This play is twenty years old. Since 1995, we have had 9-11. We have had 7-7. In this country, we have mass shootings literally every day. In 1995, Kane was writing about Bosnia. Today, she would be writing about Syria or ISIL. The world, essentially, has not changed. (Indeed, Ian’s xenophobia would not be amiss under a Trump presidency. And yes, the play is, essentially, political in nature.) If anything, Blasted feels more familiar, more plausible, and that is very much not a good thing for the world.

My only disappointment was that the house, small as it was, was nearly empty. This is one of the boldest productions that you will ever see with a play that transformed British (and American) theatre history. It is not especially pleasant. It is not a play for your mother or your kids. It is not neatly packaged for your consumption and viewing pleasure. As Ian says, it is a story “no one wants to hear.” But it is necessary.

So to Defunkt Theatre, to the actors, the director, and Sarah Kane, I say, in Ian’s words: Thank you. 

Time Stands Still, at Keizer Homegrown

Keizer Homegrown Theatre’s production of Time Stands Still, by Donald Margulies, is an intense interrogation of responsibility in the face of atrocity. Taylor Pawley directs a strong performance that does exactly what theatre should do: ask moral questions in a public setting.

The play, written in 2010, follows in the tradition of Iraq War plays of the early 2000s. The plot follows a civilian war photographer (Sarah) physically and emotionally scarred by an IED, attempting to put her life back together state side. Like Margulies’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Dinner with Friends, he tells the story through two adult couples who come together and break apart, in part due to Sarah’s experiences. The dialogue is snappy and naturalistic. The play could easily translate to film, except for some key moments of explosive intensity that work better on the stage.  

I have seen all four cast members in other performances, but none quite so strong as they are here. Paul Malone’s James, Sarah’s boyfriend, is sympathetic, caring, and conflicted, forced to choose between doing something for the world and his own mental survival. Michael Swanson is the best I have seen him as Sarah’s friend, Richard, caught in an ethical trap between friendship and professional duties. Hannah Patterson I remember most as the wide-eyed girl from Pentacle’s Trip to Bountiful. Here, she is a Millennial unjustly picked on by her more mature friends for her lack of life experience. But really, she is a stand-in for the audience, the regular person who cannot really do anything about the horrible things she hears about on the news. The star of the show is clearly Christa Karschnia’s Sarah, far more at home in this dramatic role than in comic parts I have seen previously. She carries the burden of the camera, of the witness. Her anger and bitterness strive visibly against hope and optimism, but not only because of her injuries.

The story starts slowly, as a bit of a mystery, put the major conflict picks up shortly. The second act is intense, emotional, and powerful. In addition to adult language, the play contains graphic descriptions of war time violence; there is probably nothing you have not heard on the nightly news, but be warned.

This play asks deep questions: What is the responsibility of journalism in the face of atrocity? Is it better to document or to act? Is it better to know or not to know, and what good does knowing do on the other side of the world? What does it mean to look from a place of privilege on those who suffer, only to walk away from them? But like all American plays, the politics are explored through the domestic lens of family and relationships.

This is a fine piece. As a follow up to Doubt, Keizer is clearly in the mood to ask the tough questions and explore them with gutsy performances. I can’t wait for The Guys. Time Stands Still only runs through March 12, so see it soon.