Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
✭✭✭✩✩
by Joanna McClelland Glass, directed by Ron O.J. Parson
Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford
August 16-September 21, 2008
"Camelot Lost"
Joanna McClelland Glass’s latest play “Palmer Park”, now having its world premiere run at the Stratford Festival, is an earnest, well-intentioned piece that has more the effect of an illustrated lecture than a play. It follows the historical rise and fall of the Detroit neighbourhood of the title from the period 1968-72. Its inhabitants championed Palmer Park as a shining example of an integrated neighbourhood where blacks and whites lives peacefully side by side and where their children went happily to school together without the need of busing. Glass lived in Palmer Park at the time and it’s clear from her play, balanced though it tries to be, that the pain of losing the battle for that ideal is still real.
We learn from the ten-member cast who form a kind of individualized chorus, that the 1967 race riots in Detroit precipitated the so-called “white flight” to the suburbs of about 300,000 people. The grand houses of neighbourhoods like Palmer Park suddenly became bargains. The play begins in 1968 when a young white couple, Martin and Kate Townsend, move into Palmer Park next to the black couple Fletcher and Linda Hazelton. All the residents are upper middle class. Martin is a professor of physics. Fletcher is a pediatrician. Another is a lawyer, another owns a furniture store and third is a real-estate agent. Realizing how special their community is, they band together for two battles: first, to convince white newcomers to the city to move into Palmer Park to keep the population ratio at the “ideal” of 65% white to 35% black and second, to raise money the school board does not have to allow their children to continue attending their local school and thus to avoid busing to suburban schools. The problem is that the schools of the surrounding black neighbourhoods are overcrowded whereas Palmer Park’s is not. When the school board decides to send 130 black children to Palmer Park’s school, the fabric of the neighbourhood begins to unravel.
The first of many problems with the play is that Glass still seems to have gained little distance on the events. Glass assumes that this bit of local history automatically has universal meaning, but it does not. Much as Glass would like us to see Palmer Park as a “naturally integrated” ideal, it is also that it is primarily an anomaly that that could be sustained only by the similarity of wealth and class of its inhabitants. When one of the characters says that people outside Palmer Park think that the Palmer Parkers want their own little fiefdom, that’s pretty much exactly how it looks. In the various school board meeting Glass stages, it clear despite the idealistic rhetoric the Palmer Parkers use, that they have not fully acknowledged the realities of the city they live in. They know they are an exception and want to maintain their status as such, but what school board could realistically permit that?
To try to give the story greater resonance, director Ron O.J. Parson has video designer Mick McDonald create a near-continuous montage of still and moving images from the 1960s. We see the building boom (curiously featuring the big bank buildings in Toronto not Detroit), portraits of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, martin Luther King, Jr., race riots, advertisements, stills from television shows, etc. The trouble is that all these generic images, like the classic flower being put into a rifle muzzle, and all the popular songs of the time used for background music, merely say “This is the ‘60s” rather than anything specific about the issues of the show. The one exception and the most powerful image to appear on the screen is the overhead view of a residential street with a moving van parked in front of nearly every house. That, more than anything else, brings home the reality of “white flight” in Detroit.
There is no faulting the ensemble acting of the ten-member cast although they are all types more than fully rounded characters. Glass derives much humour from the reverse stereotyping of the Townsends and Hazeltons. Mr. Hazelton says he can't sing or dance. Instead, he reads Thomas Mann, Mrs. Hazelton makes recipes out of Julia Child, both speak French and they have a full-breed dog, while the Townsends know little of high culture, food or foreign languages and own a mutt. Both new neighbours are uptight about their first meeting and their individual post-meeting critiques of their possible blunders is one of the funnier and more natural-feeling part of the show. Dan Chameroy and Kelli Fox are as excellent as the Townsends as Nigel Shawn Williams and Yanna McIntosh, but we ultimately know very little about them except that that both couples feel intensely about their neighbourhood.
We know even less about the Rifkins, played by Brad Rudy and Severn Thompson, except that their are Jewish or about the Lamonts, played by David W. Keeley and Jane Spidell, except that Gretta Lamont has a swift temper. She also has one of the phoniest lines in the play where she compares the loss of Palmer Park to the loss of “Camelot”, as if ordinary people spoke in new anchor clichés. With the Marshall played by Kevin Hanchard and Lesley Ewen , Glass does show that all upper middle class black are not alike. Unlike the assimilationist Hazeltons, the Marshalls are inclined to boast about their knowledge of African-American culture. Hanchard also plays Alvin Wilkinson, a representative of the nearby school district filled with barely suppressed anger at the privileges the people of Palmer Park want to keep. Ewen transforms herself as much when she plays Mrs. Percy, the wise, cool head of the school board, that you would never know it was the same person.
In light of recent claims of increasing social and political balkanization in the United States with more people moving to live in neighbourhoods of like-minded people (as in “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart” by Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing, 2008), the play ought to have greater contemporary resonance. While it is good finally to see upper-middle class African-Americans portrayed on stage, here, too, although the inhabitants of Palmer Park are black and white they are like-minded and have the same economic status. Despite the obvious passion of Glass in writing the play and of the universally fine performances of the cast, “Palmer Park” comes off mostly as an historical anecdote of such particularity enacted by characters of such generality that it is very difficult to become engaged in it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Nigel Shawn Williams, Yanna McIntosh, Kelli Fox and Dan Chameroy. ©David Hou.
2008-08-26
Palmer Park