Theater Review - Theatrical ambitions

Atlanta’s theater community didn’t go easy on itself by celebrating the plays of Naomi Wallace. The continuing play festival proves that the very qualities that make the playwright so acclaimed are the same ones that make her rarely produced.

Wallace writes work of uncompromising complexity, with action and theme playing out on multiple levels at once. They can be kaleidoscopic in structure and sprawling in scope, letting the past mingle with the present and the dead chat up the living. Sample the productions and readings presented by a dozen of Atlanta’s playhouses and you’ll view Wallace as being akin to one of those chess grandmasters who can play three games at once, while blindfolded. Many of the one-time readings have already been held, but the shows go on at PushPush Theater, Theater Emory and Synchronicity Performance Group, while the monologue “The Retreating World,” directed by Wier Harman of Actor’s Express, will follow Theater Emory’s The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek Nov. 8.

It’s no compliment calling anything “difficult,” but Wallace certainly makes demands on both artist and audience, just as she rewards the patient. It’s telling, though, that of full productions, Synchronicity’s One Flea Spare, which depicts people quarantined during London’s Black Plague, is not only the “easy” show, it’s the one with the biggest laughs.

A company can stage some major playwrights — David Mamet and Harold Pinter come to mind — and produce passionate, satisfying work without fully plumbing the depths of their scripts. With Wallace, though, virtually all aspects of the play must be mastered, and if one side of the narrative falters, the entire show is diminished.

None of her plays is more knotty or ambitious than In the Heart of America, which PushPush Theater, perhaps putting too much on its plate, presents in repertory with two other Wallace scripts, The Bone Gardens and her children’s play The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole in Her Jumper. America involves sexual tension between two U.S. soldiers (David Bruckner and Joshua Waterstone) in the Persian Gulf as well as a ghostly Vietnamese woman (Heather Lee) in search of the infamous Lt. Calley.

Though America touches on the Gulf War, “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” gay-bashing, the Palestinian situation and the My Lai Massacre, the heart of the play is the relationship of a Palestinian-American brother and sister (Waterstone and Suehlya El Attar), whose scenes tend to be the most quiet — and the most stilted — of the production. The vagueness at the emotional center can make the play’s angry politics seem tinny and disconnected. Still, Trent Merchant chillingly embodies the worst aspects of the U.S. military, and the play’s tragic final moments seem to transcend time and narrative to touch the hearts of the audience.

The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek provides a similar balancing act, offering a Depression-era coming-of-age story that involves youthful anomie, the switching of gender roles and the toll of unemployment on families and communities. Theater Emory’s Vinnie Murphy, who spearheaded the citywide festival, directs a dream-like but vivid production shaped by shadowy lighting, haunting sound effects and a train-trestle set that’s nearly life-sized.

In Trestle we see teenager Dalton (Christopher DeRoches) and his strange attraction to tough-talking tomboy Pace (Rachel Garner), who’s obsessed with outrunning the 7:10 train. We see the desperation of Dalton’s struggling parents (Janice Akers and Tim McDonough). And we also see Dalton imprisoned at a point in the near future, apparently after Pace has come to harm.

A play festival allows audiences to notice a writer’s signature devices and obsessions, like how Wallace’s people tend to talk past each other, often with one reciting streams of data. At a dinner, Pace recounts the principles of locomotion, while in America, a soldier describes different kinds of munitions during a seduction. At times the actors do things that don’t make literal or logical sense — Akers and McDonough have a conversation while tossing a plate back and forth — but perfectly illustrate the tensions running through the work. Her writing also can be unabashedly erotic, as when someone in Trestle describes a first kiss as “like breathing water for air.”

Rachel Garner intriguingly embraces the contradictions of Pace’s character, while high schooler Rachel Durston lives up to an even younger and more difficult role in One Flea Spare. Set in 1665, Flea finds an upper-class couple (David Myler and Kathleen Wattis) quarantined in their house with a poor sailor (Robert Shaw-Smith) and a precocious girl named Morse (Durston), who claims to be an aristocrat. Directed by Rachel May, Durston takes Morse through moments of illness, violence and sexual bartering, creating a young woman who’s more tough and less innocent than any adult.

Despite its morbid premise, Flea is less about death than about class, with the plague causing rich and poor alike to undergo reversals of fortune, as when Myler allows barefoot Shaw-Smith to try on his fancy shoes. Stories that look to the Black Plague for modern parallels and apocalyptic images have become familiar, but here Wallace unexpectedly embraces the comic possibilities of having the moneyed confined with the penniless. The whole ensemble conveys the extraordinary pressures the characters face, with Wattis proving to be the kind of actress who’s arresting to watch even when she keeps utterly still.

Getting 12 theater companies to take part in a single event seems like one of those logistical nightmares, like herding cats. The festival’s participating theaters deserve credit not just for coming together, but doing so in support of such a richly complicated writer as Naomi Wallace.

If at times the Naomi Wallace Festival posed greater challenges than some troupes could fully answer, the fact that it happened at all counts as a triumph. u

Curt.holman@creativeloafing.com

In The Heart of America plays in repertory through Nov. 17 at PushPush Theater, 1123 Zonolite Road, Suite 3, at 8 p.m. Tues.-Sat., 7 p.m. Sun. $15. 404-892-7876. The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek plays in repertory through Nov. 10 at Theater Emory, Mary Gray Munroe Theatre, 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 p.m. Sun. $15. 404-727-5050. One Flea Spare plays through Nov. 18 at the 7 Stages Back Stage Theatre, 1105 Euclid Ave., at 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat., 7 p.m. Sun., $12-$15. 404-284-1151. www.naomiwallacefestival.com.??