On the face of it, I can think of no better recommendation for
the beautiful, mind-blowing possibilities of theater than this wonderfully
optimistic statement from an unknown British dramatist by the name of Zinnie
Harris. Her play at Manhattan Theatre Club, with the nice title Further Than the Furthest Thing , has
been clobbered by those miseries called critics (and I’m afraid that for once
the miseries are right). But let’s look for a brief, shining moment at Ms.
Harris’ memorable article of faith.
Talking to The Times about the huge imaginative
leap theater can take, she said: “Somehow, just to have a play set in a living
room-what a missed opportunity, what a shame, when you can take the audience to
the top of a volcano.”
Now that woke me up over
breakfast, I can tell you. Although you can find a volcano erupting in a living
room, it’s rare to sense simmering danger in our theater. Safety, reassurance
and nostalgia are the name of the geriatric game on Broadway, while a piece as
challenging as Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul
is treated, at least by some, with the extreme caution of people who are
prepared to travel only to familiar, well-lit places. In proposing a theater of
the imagination-a theater that burns with ideas and difference -the 29-year-old Zinnie Harris stands firmly opposed to
the deadly diet of bourgeois drawing-room drama. I’m with her. I’m with all
those who want to be taken to the top of the volcano.
But does Ms. Harris really
take us there? Only in theory. Act I of Further
Than the Furthest Thing is loosely based on the volcanic eruption on the
remote island of Tristan da Cunha that caused the evacuation of its odd, hybrid
population to the English port city of Southampton in 1961 (where the second
act is set). A British dependency, the island is without electricity or trees;
the islanders-Ms. Harris informs us intriguingly-are made up of seven families
descended from the original seven shipwrecked sailors who started the colony
centuries before.
But here’s the rub. The first
act actually opens with a volcanic eruption. But the rest is basically set in a
living room! It’s a pretty bare room, true-the natives are simple folk-but
those are the same conventional four walls of the same small, deadly bourgeois
drama that Ms. Harris would surely like to smash.
What use the top of a volcano if a soap opera is going on
next-door? Ms. Harris’ overcrowded plot twists, involving gang rape,
infanticide, suicide, death by lottery and the battle over the opening of a
crayfish-canning factory, don’t make an ambitious moral fable. They make a
daytime serial. Throw in a thwarted romance, strange rumblings, a factory
explosion, greedy governments and nuclear testing, hellish modern society
versus the sunshine of unworldly island culture, and we have an awesomely
simple-minded melodrama. Add God-“I think this might be God!” goes the cry of
the island’s pastor as the volcano erupts on cue-and I’m afraid that we lose
all faith.
Further Than the Furthest Thing was first produced at the Royal National Theatre-with some success, I
ought to add. Intended to be a poetic fable, the play is written in verse, an
English tradition as old as T.S. Eliot (or Shakespeare). Eliot’s verse dramas
wished to elevate the traditional drawing-room genre into the higher realms of
the spiritual. So does Furthest Thing .
Ms. Harris’ characters even speak in an island patois. But the outcome is
merely solemn and quaint. “England,” for example, is pronounced H’England , “egg” is h’egg . The h’eggs are bigger on the island than the h’eggs are in
H’England. This is because they’re Penguin h’eggs-pronounced Pinnawin h’eggs -and pinnawin h’eggs are
unlucky. Mill, who’s married to Bill, drops two of them in the first foreboding
act.
“We isn’t needing any more bad luck,” says Bill emphatically.
“Tch,” says Mill, who hasn’t had a Pinnawin h’egg since the day
Bill’s pa died. (He was eating a Pinnawin h’egg at the time.)
The cast, directed by Neil
Pepe with broad brushstrokes, has invented a kind of H’English yokelspeak which
must pass for the real thing. The island syntax sure doesn’t help. But again,
it’s meant to give it all the air of the exotically authentic. “I know you’s
maybe is thinking we is simple living as like this,” says Mill to the visiting
factory owner. “But we’s from the island and we’s is used to it.”
H’alas, we’s is not.
Another opening, another
monologue …. There are more star monologues on Broadway than ever before.
“Monodramas,” if we want to get fancy, are cheap to produce and marginally less
dramatic than Olympic curling. Kevin Bacon’s solo performance in Heather
McDonald’s New Agey spiritual odyssey at the American Airlines Theater, An Almost Holy Picture , is a
sanctimonious case study.
Its surreal-moonscape set by Mark Wendland is meant to take us to
the top of the volcano by evoking nothing less than Samuel Beckett. But the
bleak landscape, with its peculiar pyramid of jars and broken chairs, doesn’t
for a second suggest the play’s cathedral and soaring spires. It’s vaguely
there to suggest spiritual Significance.
Mr. Bacon is Samuel Gentle, who’s waiting for Godot. He’s a
former priest and now a cathedral groundskeeper toiling away in the symbolic
garden of life. I like my fallen priests to be drunks, but let it pass. The
troubled yet gentle Samuel Gentle is the Job of New England, whose most
difficult test comes with the birth of his only child, Ariel. She’s an adorable
little girl who suffers from the incurable disease of lanugo, where silky hair
covers her entire body. “Not 10 minutes passes in my day when I don’t think
about hair,” Mr. Gentle tells us mournfully. His wife left 15 years ago, “and
not 10 minutes passes when I don’t think of her,” he also tells us mournfully.
This is an odyssey that begs
for trouble. As hairy Ariel grows, we learn that she has ambitions to be a
baton-twirler. Then she attends a Cape Cod summer camp for blind children. A
cute little joke follows: Ariel has bought them all sunglasses and is teaching
them Stevie Wonder songs. But more tragedy soon ensues-and an important moral
lesson for the faithless Gentle-when the teenage son of Mr. Martinez, the local
gas-station owner, takes arty photographs of 9-year-old Ariel running free
through the forest. The boy, a wild child with the gift of extra-sensory
perception, is named Angel ….
Dramatist Ms. McDonald, making her Broadway debut after acclaim
in Los Angeles, where An Almost Holy
Picture was voted Best New Play of the Year by the Los Angeles Times , writes in simple sentences and platitudes. (“Every
town should have a Wailing Wall.”) Individual scenes are given saccharine
titles such as “Sighs Too Deep for Words.” The prose is of a consciously
“poetic” order: “The sea is calm. The tide is full. The moon lies fair upon the
straits …. ” A good deal of the rambling piece is written in verse:
I come to my garden alone
Grim
Fallow
Windblown.
The untilled, windblown Kevin
Bacon, whether carrying a jar containing 3,427 beans-a symbolic bean for every
day of Ariel’s life so far-or solemnly placing nine bottles of symbolic salsa
verde round the edge of the stage for reasons that escaped me, obviously
believes very much in An Almost Holy
Picture . It’s a free country. He’s a confident, personable actor rather
than a dangerously exciting one. His argument with God-“The hell with
you!”-could be a preppy spat with a traffic cop. He isn’t embarrassed, though.
He sincerely doesn’t mind impersonating The
Glass Menagerie with crippled Laura Wingfield. Tennessee Williams’
gentlemen caller is foolishly evoked here as our “long-delayed but always
expected” savior.
An Almost Holy Picture ,
directed by Michael Mayer, is sincerely awful. Sorry.
