Lion
in the Streets
Theatre
Vertigo at the Russell Street Theatre
116 NE
Russell St., 306-0870
8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays
Closes
July 1
$12
Vertigo will
present a staged reading of Thompson's play I Am Yours
at
7:30 pm Sunday, June 25.
"The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way;
a lion is in the streets."
--Proverbs 26:13.
We're our own worst enemies in life's battles. It's too
easy--slothful--to cry down the world for its evil and wickedness
without recognizing our own participation in the horrors.
Canadian playwright Judith Thompson is known for her refusal
to satisfy an audience's Manichaean craving to see the world
as black/white, us/them, good/bad. Rather, Thompson insists
we see ourselves for what we are: hybrid creatures, part
lamb and lion, with tendencies to turn on ourselves that
set us alone among animals.
Yes, in this world, the wounded hunt the weaker. Yet, says
Thompson, we have a choice. We can finger our rosaries in
a corner and sit shiva till time's end, or we can
actively try to break the vicious circle of human deceit
and harm.
Lion in the Streets is an eviscerating La Ronde,
in which the spirit of a dead girl, Isobel (portrayed by
Deirdre Atkinson), flows between the lives of her neighbors
while she hunts her murderer. Isobel knows her killer as
a lion, yet as she tracks the beast she finds it denned
in every life she comes in contact with, co-existent with
fragility and pain. Isobel's quest finally ends facing her
lion, and her reaction is as powerful and hopeful as the
conclusion of Elem Klimov's Come and See. Thompson's
play is a wrenching plea for forgiveness and transcendence,
or, as director Jeff Meyers has described it, an examination
of grace.
Isobel remains on stage throughout the play, traveling
through the injured lives around her (much like Bruno Ganz's
tour of a crowded U-Bahn train in Wim Wenders' film Wings
of Desire). Pain compounds pain, but Thompson, through
Isobel, finds beauty and poetry just under the lacerating,
thoughtless and scabrous voices, the bestial roars of the
wounded. Isobel is the perfect guide to this world, as she
still views things with a child's eyes, and is able to recognize
herself in others.
On first surveying this play, I worried that some scenes
were too long. Now, though, it seems Thompson's instincts
were correct. Harm and humiliations are seldom tidy; to
wrap scenes up with small flourishes would only diminish
their impact. Brutality is rarely succinct.
Each scene is an intense vignette, and there are a few
that continue to haunt the mind days later: a working-class
preschool teacher forced to defend her way of life before
a hostile room of her wealthy clients; a woman dying of
cancer, whose wish to end her life like Ophelia in Millais'
painting is cavalierly mocked by her best friend--the preschool
teacher. There's a scene of a man freshly humiliated by
his boss, who returns to a more searing moment in his life
when his first kiss condemned him to shame, while his boss
is driven to frightening excess in her dealings with a handicapped
woman.
Meyers has assembled a first-rate cast of seven actors
to take on the play's 28 roles. Though he overplays the
part of David with excessive feyness, Paul Floding is excellent
as an angry and frightened man obsessed by a homosexual
experience at school. Ben Plont moves effortlessly from
a callous husband to a guilt-ridden priest who failed to
save someone from drowning, while Chris Herman again commands
respect for his touching portraits of the weak-willed Rodney,
forever shamed by his desires, and the wandering Maria,
mad with grief over her husband's death and the disappearance
of her young daughter, Isobel. Lorraine Bahr is electric
as Sue, a wife whose attempt to keep her husband leads to
a sad, public strip-tease, and as the crippled Scarlett
with a performance that sends shockwaves through the house.
As the preschool teacher, Rhonda, Lori Ferraro superbly
takes on one of the most difficult roles for its subtlety.
She glows with confidence and pride at her ability to appreciate
the simpler pleasures of life, while being able later to
easily dismiss her dying best friend's last request (beautifully
done by Bahr). Though less shocking than the verbal brutality
of others, Ferraro's rejection of her friend's wishes seems
more disturbing for its casualness. Julia Brandeberry memorably
reveals what crawls behind the placid mask of a suburban
soccer mom, while Deirdre Atkinson is excellent as the vulnerable
spirit who ties these lives together.
Meyers' direction is taut and impressively restrained.
In the midst of the piece's frenetic drive, he allows moments
of stillness of the type that Saul Bellow said characterized
the eyes of storms and prayers. Catherine Egan created the
piece's stunning movement. Matching her radical aesthetic
to Meyers' intellectual vigor, the two have created one
of the most demanding and honest pieces of theater seen
in some time. See this.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 26,
2000
|
