A Honey of an Anklet

The completion of Richard Dresser’s Happiness trilogy, A View of the Harbor, comes as somewhat of a surprise. The first two parts of the cycle, Augusta and The Pursuit of Happiness explored the worlds of the working and middle classes, respectively, while the new play completes the plan by moving on to the upper classes. But rather than the caustic comedy and steely satire that is Dresser’s wont, this play is a drama about the decline of an old family of power and wealth and the establishment of a new order. The result is a crepuscular piece that suggests Eugene O’Neill more than A.R. Gurney.

The festival’s centerpiece production, in the expansive Frank Center Stage, is The Overwhelming by J.T. Rogers. Viewers of the film Hotel Rwanda or readers of Jared Diamond’s Collapse will be familiar with the events of April, 1994 in this small alpine African country of 10 million souls, but many Americans remain unacquainted with the horrific killings that took place then. Tensions between the two major ethno-political groups of the country and surrounding region, the Hutu and the Tutsi, boiled over into assassination and then genocidal violence, with the massacre of 800,000 people, primarily Tutsi.

The play takes place in the run-up to the killings. Our lens on this world is the American family of Jack Exley (a struggling academic), his second wife Linda White-Keeler (a magazine journalist), and Jack’s disaffected son Geoffrey. Perhaps too conveniently, each of them develops friendships with Rwandans from different sides of the conflict: Jack with a doctor with ties to Tutsi-associated RPF rebels, Linda with a hardline Hutu government minister (the frightening David Emerson Toney), and Geoffrey with average-Joe Gérard (the strong Maduka Steady). Also too pat, the publish-or-perish tenure decision hanging over Jack’s head is a weak reason for him to stay in the country when it becomes clear that something dangerous is going to happen.

Upon hearing the rumbles of forthcoming violence, Jack demands action from the U.S. embassy staff. He is met with pragmatic indifference from Woolsey (Michael Goodwin), who points out how few Americans there are in the country and how unimportant this small country “at the edge of the world” is to U.S. interests. He asserts that effective foreign policy is never based on “doing the right thing.”

The theme of individual action in the face of seemingly overwhelming historical forces is elaborated upon in the person of Jack. In an climax that, unfortunately, feels forced and rushed, Jack must choose which one of two people to protect against the killings. However, the ultimate bloodshed that pulls the play’s narrative toward its conclusion is more alluded to and suggested than actually depicted (and, as in the case of the film, this may be the more powerful choice).

Technically, the play is a masterful sprawl of language and sound, with a cast of more than a dozen speaking four languages on stage (including Kinyarwanda) along with several English dialects. Kudos to dialects coach Kirsten Trump and sound designer Todd Campbell, who provides energetic, sometimes frightening, drumming as transition material across scenes.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
• A View of the Harbor, by Richard Dresser, directed by Charles Towers
• The Overwhelming, by J.T. Rogers, directed by Ed Herendeen

Neil LaBute breaks his pattern of writing for younger characters with Wrecks, a monologue for a businessman of late middle age, executed with skill by Kurt Zischke. We the audience are seated in the white box performance space of Shepherd University’s new Center for Contemporary Arts, which has been outfitted as a mortuary chapel, complete with (uncomfortable) sofas and armchairs for us. Edward Carr (Zischke) has stepped away from the line of mourners who have come to express their good wishes for the passing of Carr’s wife Mary Josephine. As he speaks to us, he reveals private thoughts that he will not, cannot express in public—a LaBute hallmark. LaBute’s final plot twist is less effective than his writing for Edward when he rages against the capricious forces of disease and death and our powerlessness against them.

The key element missing from Greg Kotis’s one-act Pig Farm is a musical score. Kotis, who collaborated with Mark Hollman on the satirical economics morality play Urinetown, the Musical, is here working solo in a close-by field. Tom and Tina run a pig farm along with their hired hand Tim. Times being hard, the farm is operating at overcapacity and Tom has resorted to extramural means to dispose of the porcine effluent. Trouble is, Teddy (Anderson Matthews, who can bluster and menace at the same time), a pistol-packing government inspector with a taste for the romantic agrarian life, has his own plans for Tom’s setup. What begins as kitchen sink drama slides into Guignolesque mayhem, with characters that won’t die (they keep popping up to sing reprises to their death arias) and a quantity of stage blood worthy of Martin McDonagh. This is a play that draws its comedy from our sardonic “yeah, right” reaction to a character’s claim that the Environmental Protection Agency is up to the task of guarding us against pollution by “fecal sludge.”

More representational is Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond, a lovely multithreaded piece that takes place at the Martha’s Vineyard summer house of the LeVays, an upper middle-class African-American family. Diamond explores themes of race, class, and most importantly, the expectations that a family places on its children to succeed—and in turn, that children place on their parents for recognition. Oldest son Flip has brought his girlfriend, who is white, home to meet the family, but he may have had an easier time of it than youngest son Kent, who has also brought his significant other to meet the folks. Multiply degreed Kent is still struggling to find his vocation, while his fiancée Taylor (the flexible Tijuana T. Ricks) brings more baggage to the home than just what will fit in the trunk. In a commonplace trope, Kent has an autobiographical novel that he is preparing for publication, and he needs to present the work to his family—but fortunately the play doesn’t bog down over this point. The place is presided over by the amiable but emotionally distant Dr. Joseph LeVay (the polished David Emerson Toney), a neurosurgeon; but the show-stealer is Joniece Abbott-Pratt as Cheryl, daughter of the housekeeper who has unfinished business with the LeVays.

The play is built from many short (sometimes simultaneous) scenes that take place in three separate rooms of the summer house. What’s most impressive technically is how director Liesl Tommy has worked with her lighting designer Colin K. Bills and the cast to isolate a character at the end of a scene with light, to allow the character to silently reflect on the scene that has just taken place, while the next scene is being prepared elsewhere. All this activity is taking place in the friendly confines of the Studio Theater’s black box. Indeed, at one point, as far as I can tell, a series of cues was built to follow a character’s movement through the house without movable lighting instruments.

• Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
• Wrecks, by Neil LaBute, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Pig Farm, by Greg Kotis, directed by Ed Herendeen
• Stick Fly, by Lydia R. Diamond, directed by Liesl Tommy