Balm in Gilead at Studio 58

As I've written in a previous post, playwright Lanford Wilson and producer/cultural impresario/all-round force of nature Ellen Stewart (who died within months of each other in 2011) more or less invented Off-Off-Broadway. When Wilson's Balm in Gilead opened at Stewart's La Mama ETC in 1965 and became an instant hit, New Yorkers suddenly cottoned on to the Lower Eastside as a destination for cutting-edge theatre. Vancouver audiences can see what all the fuss was about by heading to Studio 58's current production of the play, on through April 7th. 

Balm in Gilead is set in an all-night diner in New York City frequented by prostitutes, hustlers, junkies, pushers, and the generally destitute. It is famous for its overlapping dialogue; director Bob Frazer and set designer Naomi Sider have additionally emphasized the immersive qualities of the play by placing  most of the audience within booths that form part of the stage space, and that at various moments might be occupied by different characters in the play. It is a most effective choice, as it gives us the opportunity, depending on where we look, to eavesdrop on the multiple mini-dramas that overlap, intersect, and divide the denizens of the diner, an acoustic roundelay that, together with the singing in the round that weaves throughout the two acts, highlights the cyclical structure of Wilson's play and the downward spirals of most of the characters' lives.

That's not to say that individual actors in the large ensemble cast don't get a chance to shine in the spotlight, and standout monologues include those by Stephaie Izsak as schoolteacher-turned-prostitute Ann, Patrick Mercado as a wise and observant Dopey, and especially Chirag Naik as the hopped-up junkie Fick. Even actors who have only a few lines of dialogue still dazzle with their physical presence: Julie Leung, for example, is mesmerizing as Babe, a heroin addict whom we watch shoot up at the top of the play and thereafter spend the rest of Act 1 trying not to fall off her counter stool.

There is a plot buried in all of this, one that concerns the doomed romance between Joe (Chris Cope), a small-time pusher who runs afoul of a bigger dealer, and Darlene (Masae Day), a naive young transplant from Chicago. Act 2 opens with a 20-minute monologue by Darlene describing her former boyfriend, an albino, and their planned marriage that somehow never came to pass. It made a star of Laurie Metcalf when the play was revived in 1984 in Circle Rep/Steppenwolf Theatre coproduction directed by John Malkovich. Unfortunately, it doesn't hit the right notes of wide-eyed humour and heart-breaking pathos in this production because Day's performance, here and elsewhere, is a bit too flat and affectless. This is a problem in an otherwise compelling production, as Darlene is meant to be the empathetic soul of the play.

P.

Early Lanford Wilson at the Fringe

American playwright Lanford Wilson and La MaMa impresario Ellen Stewart more or less invented Off-Off-Broadway theatre in New York. Both died last year, a great loss to the theatre community. But their legacies live on, Stewart's in the Lower Eastside institution that remains a hotbed of creative theatrical experimentation, and Wilson's in a oeuvre that spans iconic works like his Talley family trilogy (Fifth of July, Talley's Folly, Talley and Son), The Hot l Baltimore, and Burn This (which Richard and I saw in a stunning New York revival by Signature Theatre starring Catherine Keener and Edward Norton).

But  Wilson, who was also a co-founder of the Circle Rep Theatre Company, also wrote heaps of short plays. Home Free (1964) was one of his earliest, and it premiered last night at the 2012 Fringe Festival, in a production by the local company Staircase XI.

The play bears more than a passing resemblance to Jean Cocteau's novel Les enfants terribles. Like that work, Wilson's Home Free centers on two siblings, Lawrence and Joanna, who have isolated themselves from the outside world, whether as a consequence or because of their apparently incestuous sexual relationship is never made clear. What is clear is that they live largely within their own fantasy world, one that combines both the worst excesses of arrested adolescent development and wishful adult responsibility. Most of these excesses are borne by their imaginary children, Claypone and Edna, with whom they speak throughout, and whom they order about imperiously. None of this bodes well for what we assume is the real child growing inside Joanna's womb, whose imminent birth, we are to understand, will almost certainly lead to their eviction from their cloistered apartment.

What is real and what is imaginary is the central dialectic upon which this drama hinges, and as tensions escalate between brother and sister each (again like their counterparts in Cocteau's novel) knows exactly how to insert the knife wound into the heart of the other by calling into question what he or she most believes in. However, the stakes are high, and when--SPOILER ALERT--the pain in her shoulder Lawrence accuses Joanna of faking becomes seriously life-threatening, the choice the agoraphobic Lawrence makes--to send Edna in search of help rather than going himself--will prove fatal.

All of this is played with absolute conviction by Jason Clift and Maryanne Renzetti (also producer and, with Becky Shrimpton, Co-Artistic Director of Staircase XI). It is not easy in a house as intimate as the Carousel to direct dialogue at imaginary interlocutors downstage while maintaining the theatre's traditional fourth wall--a division crucially important in a psychological drama such as this. It is a credit to both actors--and director Brian Cochrane--that they make us believe in their belief in Claypone and Edna. Kudos as well to whoever designed the set and sourced the props (Co-Stage Manager's Anthony Liam Kerns and Erin Sandra Crowley?), as the look of Lawrence and Joanna's insular world enhances our own sense of entrapment in the dangerous space of their game-playing. A music box that Joanna winds at one point in the play to annoy Lawrence will come back at the end, an eerily perfect acoustic accompaniment to the play's denouement, and to end of childhood innocence more generally.

P.