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I’m pretty excited about the upcoming production at convergence-continuum. A few years ago I went over to see Act a Lady by Jordan Harrison which was an hilarious romp. So, this next piece by Harrison is to be anticipated, too. However, this one is not a funny romp. In fact, it is the exact opposite: dark, brooding, and sinister.

Finn in the Underworld at convergence-continuum

Clyde Simon, the artistic director for convergence, is pretty careful in laying out the season–placing comedic hits like Charles Mee’s Big Love right in the midst of summer to catch that breezy, sunny disposition that keeps us all optimistic, happy, and alive; but coming right back as the weather changes over to windy, overcast, and cooling to stoke our more fearful and depressed autumnal dispositions. Finn in the Underworld is the perfect direction, as Lucy Bredeson-Smith (who plays Gwen in the play) points out, for Halloween.

I recently sat down and interviewed the cast and director of the upcoming production, so I went to Playscripts and read much of the play that they have freely available online: http://www.playscripts.com/play.php3?playid=1542. Then, when I got to The Liminis, as I waited while they all ran tech, I finished up the play with the scripts that were laying about on the set. I was not disappointed.

It was initially a strange sensation, reading the play. I am used to finding books through Google Books, reading happily along, and then encountering pages missing from the middle of the book–Google’s meagre concession to copyright concerns. This extraction of pages leads to a choppy reading experience. So, as I read Finn in the Underworld I was suddenly greeted by jumps in the script that sent me looking for page numbers to make sure that pages weren’t missing…that Playscripts hadn’t done the same thing. They hadn’t. Harrison’s script plays with jumps in time and it caught me off guard.

The jumps in time are what most attracts me to the play. It is fascinating to see an encounter at 7:35 pm only to (later on) pick up the thread of what happened earlier at 2:00 in the afternoon. The jumping fills in the details on events in strange ways, creating connections that go different directions in time and create a curiously timeless, eerie feeling…as if one were, I don’t know, in Hades? I was very much reminded of Fefu and Her Friends by Fornes which creates a similar feeling through the four mobile scenes in the mid-section of the play. There is something strangely vibrant about seeing scenes out of order and then connecting pieces of information from one place back to another. Harrison’s play handles this very competently and it creates a spine-tingling experience.

Harrison has described his play as a ‘psychosexual gothic horror story,’ which is an apt description, as there are elements of all of this in the play. Gothic stories, especially stories with horror elements, remind me of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights–the mad woman in the attic or ghosts on the moors. But the elements are present here, too: a dark house, an unexplained death, a family mystery that spans generations, and, very like the tales by the Bronte sisters, a jagged-love that is doomed from the start. Appropriately, Harrison quotes Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House at the outset of his play: “An evil old house, the kind some people call “haunted”, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored.”

For those of you who want a surprise, go and see this play! It will deliver. For those of you who want to see the play, but don’t mind having your surprise compromised, spoilers follow.

Warning: Spoiler Alert — What follows reveals plot, story, and will ruin your fun.

The quote from Hill House is more than just support for the Gothic horror feel of the piece. Other than the way Harrison plays with time and play structure, the one event that threw me the most was the revelation that Carver Bishop was already dead: thus putting the ghost element squarely at the center of the horror story. But, this is not nearly enough. Harrison, like Jackson, continues, with a house that is itself alive and that wishes to consume all of those within its walls, to keep the men and women forever, tucked inside of some unearthly plane of semi-existence.

This plane is where the second act of Harrison’s play occurs, and very like the Hades mentioned briefly above, the action that transpires is very Greek in its notion of the Underworld: very Greek because the river Lethe, which flows through Hades, erases the memories of the dead who drink from it. As with those poor dead folk in Hades, so it is with all the characters in the play who are consumed by the house–and as it no doubt is for those consumed by family grief or a tragic history–memory becomes questionable, personal history is drowned or left in a murky twilight, and logic begins to run in circles. For me, this last part of Harrison’s play is the most disturbing. It is oppressive, suffocating, and claustrophobic–and it is by no means an accident that it transpires within the confines of bomb shelter.

This play runs through October 17 at convergence and I can hardly wait to see it.

I’ve read this play a half-dozen times and read even more articles and even some dissertations on it. I have to say, seeing it is a completely different experience. What’s more, a great lot of that experience has to do with Clyde Simon, who directed it.

Things at convergence-continuum are always done a bit differently; the foremost reason being that the Liminis space puts the audience member right in the middle of the action. In this case, you are in the living room of the Illinois farm house. I saw the surprise tonight on a young man’s face when a piece of shattered saucer hit his shoe. And the odd moments when Shelly or Dodge looked for support or humor from an audience member made one feel right at home with the dysfunctional family.

There were other moments though. Places in the conversations that never struck me as humorous suddenly sprang to life and had a punch that they didn’t before. Clyde stopped the action at moments of character reflection that made them more poignant and meaningful and deeper than had they existed simply as the long-winded speeches they seem to have been—the next speaker waiting awkwardly for the one before to stop the rambling. Then there was the multimedia, which thank God con-con is famous for. Vince’s mad entrance in Act II took on new life with a blaze of explosion and World War II footage. Military armaments, airplanes, and soldiers dead and dying filled out the whole rage in which Vince was mired. The vision on the windshield drew new power from the montage of faces swirling out of the darkness like Vince’s nightmare of heredity and future inheritance. But most powerfully of all was the sickening, shock of Dodge’s confession. The disturbing revelation that convulsed Halie on the stairs and shattered this Illinois farm family as much as the incestuous breeding that preceded it.

Shepard’s play is a powerful commentary on the rotten center of the American myth and a terrible reminder of how this country has broken loose of its moorings and is drifting, like Coleridge’s ship, across a dead and merciless sea. Clyde Simon and convergence-continuum reached in and amplified the hellish nature of the thing and reminded me, again, why experiencing a play is so much more than flipping through its pages.

Special props, again, to Clyde for his fantastic directing; props on the sound and video; and a shout out to Michael Regnier, who steals the show as Dodge, the rotting patriarch of the whole untethered ship; as well as to Cliff Bailey as Tilden, with a dominating presence on the stage as the burnt out eldest son and father of the buried child. Lucy Bredeson-Smith, per usual, is powerful and frightening as the formidable Halie.