'The Mound Builders' Is Defeated By An Insipid Production

Will Rogers as Chad Jasker and Lisa Joyce and Dr. Jean Loggins in The Mound Builders

Has the Signature Theatre fumbled the ball?

After last year’s mostly successful opening season at its new Frank Gehry-designed home  (first-rate productions of three works by featured playwright Athol Fugard, plus an equally powerful presentation of Edward Albee's undervalued 'The Lady From Dubuque'), the organization seems to have hit a wall.

This year started promisingly with a sublime mounting of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, but since then, we’ve seen little to celebrate.  Sam Shepard's Heartless, and the two plays by Henry David Hwang—Golden Child and The Dance and the Railroad—have received tepid productions, and the third, Kung Fu, won’t be ready for viewing until next season, when the company will be abandoning altogether its core mission of spotlighting a single playwright.  (I haven't seen Old Hats, so I cannot comment on it.)

And now we have on view a frustratingly tedious production of Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, a challenging play in the best of circumstances.  Here, unfortunately, the circumstances include uninspired directing, generally mediocre performances, and an insipid set. 

Wilson, who is far better represented by the engaging production of Talley’s Folly at Roundabout’s Laura Pels Theatre, wrote The Mound Builders a decade earlier than the better-known romantic comedy—though it is not an early work, which might have explained the clumsy crafting of the plot and the often leaden dialog.

This is a story that unfolds slowly, ostensibly held together by a narrator recalling his experience as an archeologist at a pre-Columbian excavation site that is about to be flooded out by a man-made lake aimed at turning the area into a resort destination.   The play combines esoteric archeological context with the various dramas that unfold among the members of the visiting team, and a growing conflict with the owner of the property on which the site is located. 

For about the first thirty minutes, we are exposed to all of the characters:  the narrator Professor August Howe; his wife Cynthia; their daughter Kirsten; Dan and Jean Loggins (he’s an archeologist; she’s an ob-gyn); Howe’s alcoholic novelist sister Delia; and Chad Jasker, the high-strung and unstable owner of the ramshackle house in which they are all staying during the dig. 

As directed by Jo Bonney, the cast members rush their lines and pretty much shout their way through the lengthy and difficult-to-follow exposition—as if rushing and shouting will serve to get us through the boring stuff.  It is difficult to figure out who is who, and even at intermission theatergoers around me were debating which characters were siblings and which were married to one another.  For my part, I took notes and drew arrows on the program in order to help me keep the relationships straight. 

All of this is unfortunate.  While The Mound Builders is unlikely ever to be viewed as a Wilson treasure, there are some interesting elements, including an air of growing danger that pervades the second act, and occasional pockets of smart dialog.  I was particular taken with a story told by an intoxicated Dan (well-performed by Zachary Booth), as well as some of the wisecracks and intellectual musings by Delia (Danielle Skraastad), such as the notion of eyes being projectors of images rather than receivers of them.  Unfortunately, there are not enough of these high spots, and, frankly, most of the cast is not at the top of their game here.

Wilson has been compared with Tennessee Williams, though I don’t see much of the latter’s poetry in Wilson.  The playwrights I am most reminded of are Sam Shepard and Harold Pinter, both of whose work can only come to life with the right director and the right set of actors who can capture the tension and rhythms in their work. 

So, even though The Mound Builders is problematic, I would be interested in seeing what a more visionary director and a top-notch cast could do with it.  Think  “Indiana Jones meets Sartre.” Now there's an image for your eyes to project!

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A Joyous Revival of 'Talley's Folly' to Warm the Heart on a Cold Winter's Day

What a lovely Valentine’s Day gift the Roundabout Theatre Company has given us with its tender and emotionally rewarding revival of Lanford Wilson’s 1979 gem-of-the-heart, Talley’s Folly, now in previews at the Laura Pels under the delicately balanced direction of Michael Wilson.

It’s not hard to see why Matt Friedman, played here by Danny Burstein with a complicated mix of chutzpah and underlying schlubiness, has set his cap for Sally Talley.  As richly brought to life by a marvelous Sarah Paulson,  Sally is his equal in every way, the only woman in his 42 years who has captured his heart, despite the minor inconvenience of having shown no hint of interest in doing so.  

Matt and Sally are an unlikely pair.  Neither eHarmony nor JDate would think to bring them together, and it is a tribute to the playwright’s skills that, even though we know this story must have its happy ending (Matt assures of this in a prologue addressed directly to the audience), we remain unsure until the very end.  For though Matt—as narrator—draws us into the story as if embarking on a fairy tale, he and Sally are as real as two humans ever to emerge from a playwright’s imagination.

The tale unfolds on the evening of July 4, 1944 and takes place in a boathouse on the Talley family property in Lebanon, Missouri.  The boathouse is the literal “folly,” of the title, a folly being a fanciful structure meant to suggest a romantic old ruin, lovingly created for this production by set designer Jeff Cowie. 

Matt has come from St. Louis to convince Sally, with whom he had a brief romantic fling the previous year, to run off with him.  The distance from St. Louis to Lebanon is under 200 miles as the crow flies, but these two places are truly world’s apart.  Matt lives in a city where he can fit in comfortably as a Jewish immigrant accountant with socialist sympathies.  In Lebanon, though, he stands out like a sore thumb, a “traitor and an infidel,” as he puts it.

Sally, on the other hand, has grown up in a well-situated conservative Protestant family.  She carries a heavy burden of expectations that would make it unlikely that she would get together with someone like Matt, who, in addition to the obvious, is also 11 years her senior, and whose very presence has led Sally’s brother to chase him from the house with a shotgun.    

The audience’s joy of watching these two play off one another is in seeing the gradual peeling away of surface expectations.  Life has left both of them very wary and attuned to how best to navigate their way through the world with a careful projection of an image.  Matt hides behind his humor and charm; Sally hides behind her sense of dignity and professionalism (she is well regarded for her work as a nurse’s aide).   

It is Sally who eggs Matt into revealing his painful family history, which he does in his inevitable story-telling fashion. But the story he tells--one that is quite touching—unexpectedly triggers a strong negative response in Sally.  She doesn’t buy a word of it and believes she is being manipulated, something she will not countenance. 

In due time, we come to understand her reaction, and by the end, Matt and Sally have come to understand one another, and their love is solidified.  But as much as we appreciate our happy ending, Mr. Wilson’s great skill as a playwright is in painting complete portraits of Matt and Sally—and even of the members of their respective families whom we have come to know without having ever met them.

Issues of war, bigotry, unionism, and the constricted role of women are all addressed over the course of a seamless evening.  So, yes, this is a wonderfully romantic story, but there is not a moment of schlock or falseness in it. Talley's Folly is a love story for grown-ups and a Valentine to cherish.

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'Lemon Sky,' Early Lanford Wilson Play, Gets A Mixed Production

 A Sour Reunion:  Keith Nobbs and Kevin Kilner

Playwright Lanford Wilson, who recently passed away after a most distinguished career, was considered by many to be the theatrical heir of Tennessee Williams. 

I can’t say that I fully buy into that premise. 

Wilson did have a Williams-like way of creating vulnerable characters who are filled with emotional longing. But when it comes to capturing the poetic beauty of the English language—as Williams was able to do in his masterworks from the 1940s, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire—other names come to mind ahead of Mr. Wilson's.

  

One is Robert Anderson, whose play about father-son warfare, I Never Sang For My Father, was given a splendid production last year by the Keen Company, under the direction of Jonathan Silverman, who wisely allowed Anderson's marvelously-crafted words to take center stage.  It didn't hurt that the production featured multi-layered performances by veteran actors Keir Dullea and Marsha Mason. 

The Keen Company identifies its mission as one of producing “sincere plays” that are “generous in spirit and provoke identification.”  With I Never Sang For My Father, that mission was fully and most satisfactorily realized. 

Now the company and director Silverman are back with another “sincere play,” an early work by Lanford Wilson called Lemon Sky.   Unfortunately, the results are not quite so sublime, despite some standout performances, most notably from Keith Nobbs who carries the lion’s share of the play on his shoulders as Wilson’s stand-in, Alan, and Kellie Overbey as Ronnie, Alan’s stepmother.

The play presents us with Alan’s recollections of a summer-long reunion with the father who abandoned him and his mother when Alan was only five years old.  Dad had fled from the family home in Nebraska to Southern California, where he now lives with Ronnie, their two sons, and two teenage foster girls.  Still, no hard feelings, until what begins as a relatively pleasant attempt to reconnect gradually grows disturbing and ugly as secrets and lies reveal themselves.

Lemon Sky is a difficult play to bring to fruition on the stage.  For one thing, it constantly breaks the fourth wall as characters stop what they are doing in order to address the audience.  It also jumps back and forth across time between the late 1950s, when most of the action takes place, and 1970, where Alan serves as narrator of his memories of that earlier period in his life.

To hark back to the Tennessee Williams model, Lemon Sky is a “memory play.”   

When I previously wrote about last year's Roundabout Theatre production of The Glass Menagerie, I argued that what we were presented with represented Williams' memories only as these were carefully filtered through many drafts and rewrites.  We were allowed to see only what Williams wanted us to see, and not what he truly remembered.  

In a sense, Lemon Sky is more realistically memory-like; it depicts both the playwright’s recollections of a particular time in his life and the messy act of trying to recall and sort through past events.  Wilson gives us memory as it actually occurs, in a non-linear fashion with many asides and tangents.  

That’s all well and good, but it might have helped if some effort had been made to separate the time periods.   It took me a long while to figure out we were  leapfrogging across time, since nothing about the staging or lighting hinted at what was going on, and 17-year-old Alan and 30-year-old Alan looked and acted exactly the same.  

The difficulties with the storytelling are not helped by the set that is clumsily spread out across the stage of the Clurman Theatre  and a mixed bag of acting, with an unfortunate weak link in Kevin Kilner as Alan’s father, Doug, who should give us the creeps but who seems, at most, annoying. 

The most interesting character is the cheery, chirpy Ronnie (well played by Ms. Overbey), who seems to be a stereotypical Southern California ditz until we begin to see the consequences of the poor yet entrapping bargain she made for herself when she ran off with Doug. 

This production of Lemon Sky is worth the visit only if you are a Lanford Wilson fan and want to catch one of his early efforts.  I can’t fault the sincerity, but I wonder if perhaps the Keen Company and its director might do better with something more straightforward.   Another Robert Anderson play, perhaps?

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