WOODSTOCK – Folks
along the Hudson’s west bank and distant as Gotham and New Have sighted
a weird luminosity pulsing across the northwest horizon commencing in
broad day. Rest assured, the phenomenon was not precursor the another
grid failure and blackout, it was just the Woodstock Fringe’s Festival
of Theater and Song going out in a blaze of glory.
The Adirondack-funky
theater up on Byrdcliffe has no marquee, so there were not lights to dim
when the multi-faceted (multi-credited) troupe presenting the festival
events packed their vans and department, but they leave in their wake
the electrifying impact of two final productions – Bob Manzari’s
portrait of a beached whaling captain in Lou Rodger’s “Wake of the
Essex” (not to mention Manzari’s garrulous incarnation of a
hound-loving, broke-hearted good ol’ boy in Rodger’s “Hair of the Dog”)
and a staged reading of a new play by Charles Traeger, “Ordinary
Occurrences.” Wallace Norman, the festival’s producing Artistic
Director, shaped the reading of this most extraordinary contribution to
contemporary American Theater, illuminated by a collective of actors,
mainly from the Yale School of Drama.
WEIGHTY are the credits of
the incredible hulk of an actor, Manzari, who flashes his Music Man’s
con charm in Rodger’s shaggy tale of bad and good dogs gone. We hear
of his brother Roy’s sheep-killin’ herders and his ferocious traffic
stoppin’ great Dane, Baskerville, in what carries like a bestial Arlo
Guthrie “Alice’s Restaurant” saga with accompanying guitar by Jon Rogers
until that moment Manzari’s man leaves us frozen like a deer in
headlights by the discovery of his own shock and grief at the loss of
the road-killed dog that is this man’s best friend. Ah like to cried,
but the moment sneaks up so fast, it’s more like a punch to the gut than
a think evoking sentiment. It just floors you, whomp!
Jon Rodgers, who gigs and
records with the Composer’s Chamber Theater, played a set while Manazri
aged himself about 50 years and came out the shattered hull of Captain
John Pollard to relate the tale of his whale-wrecked ship, the Essex,
and the ensuing hell he and his mates and crew entered as they sought
shore and clung to survival.
In exile from the
community of whales on Nantucket who judge him guilty of failing his men
and worse, Pollard relives the harrowing ordeal without self-exoneration
to a witness named Herman Melville whom he forbids to take notes.
Melville takes license instead, penning his epic “Moby Dick” from the
Essex captain’s saga.
We’ll re-read this great
American novel, first foisted on us in an existential literature class,
but the horror and the pity and the courage of Manzari’s Captain Pollard
will overshadow Melville’s metaphysical Ahab. This monologue, passing
timeless in an hour’s duration, carries as epic Greek tragedy.
MOVING ON to Traeger’s
“Ordinary Occurrences,” a full-length two-act play described as an
“extraordinary contribution to contemporary American theater” and
containing the “apple monologue” every young actor in the coming decade
is going to use for auditions.
We were engaged, elevated
and delighted by this double-layered drama, woven in common, frequently
comedic carnal tensions, rising to beatific epiphany and playing out in
a fantastic-absurd, totally conceivable and mot gratifying suspension.
Saints are different than
you and me because the achieve the omni-sensuality of selfless
compassion. Myriad are the ways they arrive at this state. Androgyny
is a start. The categories “gay” and “straight,” declared out of
defensiveness and fear like campanista nationalism limit spirit
development. Take Parse (actor Rob Neil gives this shambling guileless
innocent an agape grace), the adult orphan white boy photographer who
rooms duratively with Joshua, an African-American whose hard-working,
working-class family took Parse in as an adolescent.
Josh (Leroy Grant) is on
the rise in Manhattan as assistant to some major judge and is so
straight that he rarely even makes love to his girlfriend, Fran.
Tiahuana Ricks plays this school teacher with aspirations to the dance
as a no-nonsense check possessed or irrepressible exuberance. She turns
into a tap-dancing angel in her time. . .
ART OF the reason Frannie
and Josh never get to play is because Parse, coming in as a temporary
roommate years ago, is always in the apartment. They lady suspects here
beloved may prefer his roomie to her. (Did we mention the opening scene
has Josh wigging out in a police station, crying murder when there is
neither corpse nor perp in sight? The body of Traeger’s play is a
flashback leading up to this just-desserts moment I the life of a good
but rational and righteous man.).
On the particular day of
Traeger’s play, Parse is in residence and especially slow opening the
door. He has it chain-locked and is obviously up to something. Josh
notices a jumble of old clothes in the bathroom and demands explanation,
so Parse, with immense relief, confesses.
You guessed it, he’s a
cross dresser. But it’s not his gender he switches, it is his caste.
THIS sensitive, shiftless
seeker, sublimating restless heart’s hunger in a Halloween confection
pig-out, watches a luminous candy apply fall to the gutter and sees it
pounced on by a street crone. As she bends over it, absorbed in
removing debris, a truck rounds the corner and Parse leaps out to save
her. Crying gratitude, she thrusts her wallet at him. Parse, who has
no intention of being a hero, flees the scene, later discovering
religious cards and $700 in bills.
It becomes his life
obsession to find the woman and return this street person’s fortune to
her. For endless months, he haunts the city’s churches, shelters,
alleys, making himself inconspicuous with worn clothing as he searches.
He finds himself losing himself in the process and likes the person he
has become, a man he refers to as Art Holmes (as in Sherlock) way better
than the person he was. Neil’s Parse relates this tale of human
transfiguration in a mix of earnestness and whimsy that explains the
clothes to Josh but doesn’t otherwise alter his heart and mind.
NEWS comes that Josh’s dad
is up for a critical operation, and the odd couple travels down to North
Carolina for an occasion that becomes a funeral. But not before Parse
is visited by a mentor-lover from pre-Holmes days, the insidious Michael
Lowrie. (Lucas Holland is way smooth and sweet as this manipulator). He
persuades Parse to go for one more porm shoot – “You’re such an artist
with bodies” – which he reluctantly does, partly to get money for the
trip home, but mostly because he is to gentle a soul to deny anyone
anything.
The men return to
Manhattan separately for the chaos of cosmopolitan yuletide with all its
celebrations and disappointments. Parse, in a state of grief for family
losses past and present, physically exhausted, erotically confused by a
brief passionate encounter with Frannie and just a little drunk, meets
the unsolicited arrival of Michael, the insistent Satan from his pre-Art
existence, in a state of total, mindless lucidity and dispatches him.
THIS IS NOT an act of gay
panic. It carries as the dispensation of justice by the hand of an
innocent – think Robert Altman’s judicious avenger Brewster McCloud.
Parse wraps Michael’s body in Christmas wrappings, and death on this
holiday turns into a farce – there is this old Louis Vuitton steamer
trunk belonging to Parse’s uncle that Frannie’s been dying to tap on,
etc. The play concludes with a wonderful dues ex machine dvice
borrowed from commedia dell’arte or maybe “Angels in America.
If anybody anywhere has
written bout the path to sainthood and the subsequent perils of acting
from beatific enlightenment with greater succinctness and encased in
greater natural and ludicrous disguise, let us know.
MEANTIME, somebody give
this play a full run, preferably using the same cast and director.
