Theater Review - Parent trap
Essential Theatre plays explore familial ties
Our parents gave us life. Does that give them the right to take it away? And when they die, where does that leave us?
Two of the three shows in “Power Plays,” the 2005 Essential Theatre festival, engage ideas of parental responsibility and mortality. Sam Shepard’s drawn-out but thoughtful The Late Henry Moss considers the dark consequences of absentee fatherhood, while Lee Blessing’s complex Going to St. Ives uses motherhood as fulcrum for political, racial and moral debates.
The Late Henry Moss evokes the notion of the sins of the father visited on the sons, which isn’t just a recurring theme for the playwright, but sometimes seems like his only one. Shepard fills his dramas with grown children wrestling with the legacies of bad dads. In Henry, bullying, violent Earl (Patrick Wood) reveres his deceased father (Daniel Burnley), while his slow, soft-spoken younger brother, Ray (Nick Rhoton), brings up memories that Earl would rather bury.
Initially, Earl and Ray sit a strange vigil over their father’s body, and the actors make a darkly funny Laurel-and-Hardy team as they argue over their paltry inheritance. But as Ray learns more about their father’s final hours, the younger brother becomes the more cruel and dominant one, as if uncovering family secrets unleashes savage feelings.
Flashbacks reveal the strange obsession that marked Henry’s last days. A reclusive drunk, he carouses carelessly until a mysterious “Indian woman” (an effectively earthy Suehyla El-Attar) pronounces him dead — even though he’s still walking and talking. Henry questions whether he’s truly “alive” up until his actual death.
The audience must endure repetitive scenes of brutal punishment and psychological abuse, but Henry builds to a powerful metaphor. Shepard suggests that a man who turns on his family is little better than a ghost, and for his sons, an absentee father differs little from a dead one.
Motherhood provides common ground for the two highly diverse women of Going to St. Ives. Renowned British eye surgeon Dr. Cora Gage (Shawna Tucker) prepares to perform a glaucoma operation on May K’Kame (Yvonne Singh), the mother of an African dictator reminiscent of Idi Amin. Act One takes place in Cora’s English drawing room, and over tea the doctor requests a favor: Cora wants May to intercede on behalf of four doctors imprisoned and condemned by May’s son. May agrees, on the condition that Cora serve as accomplice to an assassination.
With her intimidating combination of regal bearing and incisive intellect, May sets off St. Ives’ intriguing tensions of patient vs. doctor, royalty vs. civilian, black “native” vs. white “colonial.” In the second act, the women meet in an African garden six months later, but though they’re now on a first-name basis, they still prove virtually alien to each other. Motherhood brings them to mutual understanding, despite Cora’s reluctance to discuss her deceased son. Cora argues that life must be nurtured at all costs, but May’s love for her child cannot outweigh the guilt she feels for having brought a genocidal tyrant into the world.
Singh turns May into a vivid, original theatrical presence, more proud of her lifetime of suffering than her royal trappings. Even Singh’s expansive gestures suggest a woman reared outside of Western culture and values. Alas, she’s not equally matched. Tucker tries to keep up with Cora’s ever-changing moods, but seldom goes beneath the surface. The actress never does justice to Cora’s English emotional reserve, nor does she convey the ego of a world-famous doctor, so she ultimately simplifies a complex personality.
At times the playwright’s words sound more like stage dialogue than credible human conversation, and the conflicts seem a little too suited to a juicy debate in a college ethics class. Nevertheless, Going to St. Ives proves rich with perspectives seldom addressed in American plays. Though St. Ives focuses on broad global concerns compared to Henry’s narrow psychological roots, both hinge on parents who have, quite literally, raised a little hell.