weebelly.com

I really enjoy this play by Mike Sepesy, as well as the follow-up: The Douglas Tree.  There were things I liked about the production and things that I did not.  Mostly the things I didn’t like revolved around the sneaking suspicion that Mike wasn’t given the resources that his play deserved.  I don’t want to be an ass and make obnoxious suppositions, but I’ll say that I’ve seen two season-level productions at CPT by local playwrights: The Alice Seed and The Stars Fell All Night, (and some others that weren’t billed this way) and I don’t think either was served very well by the production it received.  The directors were either found or acquired last minute, the sets were questionable, and the productions seemed rushed, the choices made were wrong, etc.  I’ve seen other productions at CPT that were of good quality: Boom, Fefu and Her Friends, Our Town, etc, so why, I wonder, not the local playwrights? (Excepting the caveat of Cut to Pieces, which was very well done.)  It may be that the plays may be viewed as extensions of the process by which they come up: little box, big box, production–and resources are allocated lightly in the first two.  If that is the case, then the evolution of resources needs tweaked.  Otherwise, I may have to speculate on some other cause…

Grieving parents struggle in Sepesy's The Alice Seed

I saw a reading of Mike’s play at the Cleveland Play House in 2007. That was an interesting process, as they actually used music stands.  This was thankfully not the way that Clyde approached my reading in Little Box; but even with this restricted process Mike’s writing came through.  It came through strongly again in the production I saw.

The Alice Seed is a play about grief.  The play is draining.  It is well-written and hard to watch.  As a playwright who has written texts that involve draining themes and intense interactions between characters, there are things I might tweak in this play, as the confrontations between husband and wife can become circular and border on tiresome–they weren’t, but there were moments when I began to think, “okay, we’ve been through this…”  And I was afraid it might go into tiresome; but Mike is a good writer and his sense of that is acute. As well, life is like that, and this story is a tough one.

This play is a screenplay–or should be.  I would love it as a movie/film.  There are things that it needs that are difficult on stage–that is, resources need to be allocated.  They were not.  This required an active imagination on the part of the audience.  I think most people were in this space, at least the people I heard from, and this is what theater should be: imaginative. This is not a play that requires a natural/realistic set; but having some pieces set that way would have helped.  The putting green Astroturf was a distraction, and it disturbed the scenes that took place in the house.  I would much rather the set have been a house with a pretense toward the woods, than the reverse that it was.

The one scene that went way over the top for me was the doctor scene.  A doctor comes to the middle of the stage and we seen the dire diagnosis directed toward Alice. She has cancer.  The dramatics that were attached to this announcement were excessive and unnecessary.  The doctor was reduced to an evil machine that kept repeating ‘your daughter has cancer’ with ominous echoes provided by two musicians (chorus?) above.  The starkness and lighting cast the doctor character with a villainy that shifted the focus away from the grief and bordered on editorial.  The theatrics, being way over the top, distracted from the course of the play.  The effect was almost comic.  I understand the emphasis: that this was the moment when things went bad for the family.  But it was played with too heavy a hand.

Other theatrical points were wonderful.  The hands of Alice reaching out of the ground, cast as shadows on the upstage wall were great.  I liked the effect of the trees on the set.  The musicians: shout out to Bobby Williams of con-con fame, where impressive and the sound effects they provided were often very well done.  The one caveat here being the voice of Alice and the really unnecessary “see you soon, mommy” comment.  The first scene with the mother, Dolores (Jackie Cummins), in the woods and the atmosphere and “swamp” sounds, was one of the best for me and still is with me as a strong impression.
Mike draws very strong characters and the best, perhaps, is Paul (Michael Andrews-Hinders) whose fierce moral system and sense of himself is amazing: and the ominous scene between Paul and Dolores in the house, after Judah (Mark Mayo) has run off, is drawn in hard relief and edged with deep threat and menace.  Sepesy hit his target hard here.

Mike’s sense of storytelling is equally compelling.  He knows balance.  He knows how to heighten the tension and release it.  He knows how to bring you down into the emotional trauma, and then return you with light-hearted moments.

In her notes on the play, Alison Garrigan (who directed and is herself a fine actress) comments that there are “conjure-wive” tales from Appalachia that serve as cautionary tales.  This has that element certainly, with Dolores dying in the end over a promise she made to get her dear Alice back.  When I talked with Mike after the show, I asked him if that was in the reading at the Play House: Dolores dying.  He said it was, but that she should be pulled under the ground with Alice at the end (which did not happen as there was no drop floor/trap constructed for the production). I forgot about this ending, and I think, while I understand that it does serve that cautionary purpose, a stronger story has Dolores and Judah going forward together.  I think a more haunting ending is that there is no easy way out and the loss must be endured forever.  As I get older I realize there are some things that happen in life, some damages, that cannot be undone and from which one cannot recover: that people can get broken and not be fixable.  That is deeply sad and deeply frightening.  I know if something happened to either of my children, something deep inside me would break forever; so the grief in The Alice Seed rings true. In terms of a horror story, I think this reality–the living–is the one that is truly awful–that is to say, I wish Dolores wouldn’t die; even though that detracts from the “contractual” supernatural event.

I love seeing Sepesy’s plays: he is funny, draws startling characters (is himself an excellent reader and character voice), and has a profound mythic sense when it comes to theater and a strong sense of theatrics in the theater space.  I hope CPT considers The Douglas Tree and provides the resources to make it a truly fine production–and I look forward to Mike’s new filmic work.

So, I’m catching up on a play-viewing backlog and, unfortunately, this review will seem a bit terse from the lapse of time. I’ll start at an uncomfortable place: as I reported in my entry dated September 16th, I was pretty pumped about seeing Finn in the Underworld at convergence. But the seeing didn’t translate into what I thought, and the seeing actually accentuated some problems with the script that I didn’t notice earlier in reading it.

Probably the most glaring problem was a rather large plot hole in Harrison’s script that undermines the credibility of a substantial element of the thing. Toward the end of the first act, Rhoda tells Gwen (the two are cleaning out their family home) that she just had a conversation with Carver Bishop, a neighbor who lived in the crummy little eye-sore of a house down the street. The only problem being that Carver died a year before. This fact is pointed out in a rather dramatic moment by Gwen and a stunned Rhoda has to deal with the fact that, like her weird sister, she now sees ghosts. This would be a compelling moment, aside from the fact that Rhoda has lived in the town her entire life and visited her family house all the time during that period. The fact that she somehow lived in the town for 30+ years and did not know that Carver Bishop died and somehow failed to notice that the house down the street (the house that everyone hated) had been (finally) torn down, is just beyond believability. The whole moment was thus revealed as a fraud–that is, a plain writing device for effect that is destroyed by its own misconception; and I found myself asking questions about the integrity of what Harrison was doing. For instance, was this ‘hole’ an intentional thing? Was it an oversight? Neither really sit on the palate so well. Also, the revelation of Carver as a ghost, as a structural thing, (in light of the error and unusual dramatic focus) becomes comic rather than titillating. The fact, also, that the revelation happens late in the act reveals that the construction of the piece was directed too much toward an emphasis on this point.

In reflection, this was not so much a factor in the reading as it was in the watching, as the ghost reveal seemed to take forever as I watched–maybe because I was expecting it? On top of this, the horror effect is not elevated enough in other aspects of the play–or maybe not enough emphasis was placed on it in the production. But I think Harrison himself seems to highlight Gwen’s addiction to pills as if that is enough of a placeholder to carry the horrifying aspects of the house–when, really, too many things can lead to addiction today, and too many things in Gwen’s life particularly, so the house seems to take third fiddle to a broken down marriage and a bad mother-son relationship. It is suggested that the pills are precisely because she sees ghosts, but I don’t think that point is pointed enough, nor does it, inandofitself carry the weight that true gothic tension would carry. And the fact of a past murder or “accident” in the house is really moved over too quickly to be a concern.

Ultimately, I think, Harrison tries to do too much, so that nothing is in focus. The mother-son issues aren’t given enough attention, the horror element (house) isn’t given enough attention, the ghost story isn’t given enough attention, the sister relationship isn’t given enough attention, the sexual relationship between Finn and Carver is given too much attention–almost nauseatingly too much attention. There is a cell phone conversation with a distant character that has nothing to do with the action of the play. The confirmation that reading a play and seeing a play are very different is here demonstrated as the script and commentary read like a nice little book and the play played out like a disorienting exercise in confusion. As Mike Geither, said about this play, it’s almost like Harrison isn’t finished with it–or it was rushed to completion.

The production at convergence led to confusion in the second act, I’m sorry to say, as the direction in the play script is explicit that the second act takes place in the bomb shelter. The space constraint would have led to intense claustrophobia and intensified character relationships and definitions by the physical proximity. This instruction was cast aside and the cast spread out across the set. This fact led to confusion amongst people I’ve talked to since who could not understand why the characters changed relationships like they did and were confused about the clock and why it was used before but not after and so on. The constriction to the bomb shelter would have made the “underworld” apparent and would have highlighted the captive nature of the family in the house and the surreal nature of it all. I am reminded of the quote from Hamlet, Scene II, “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space.” But here the bounding is cast aside altogether and the characters wander freely about the set, confusing the boundaries that should have been strict. Small technical things, too, were odd: choices such as moving from the hands of an analog clock to a digital clock were disappointing, as the movement of hands showed direction (forward and backward), but the digital clock threw things out of state. I can understand that (unfortunately) some people may not be able to tell time, but if movement by the hands is done correctly, people will understand without even needing explicit times.

The character of Finn drawn by Gorbach was too much of a spoiled brat rather than a caustically disconnected and injured character and that further undermined what tension there could have been and I wished there would have been a bit more sophistication in him.

I still enjoyed the fact that Harrison played with time and that the play was delivered in pieces that were out of order. The fracturing gave some weight to a piece that, in the end, seemed thin.