Palmer Park

by Joanna McClelland Glass, directed by Ron O.J. Parson

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 16-September 21, 2008

by Christopher Hoile, Principal Reviewer for Stage Door

"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       

Moby Dick

written and directed by Morris Panych

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

August 17-October 18, 2008

by Christopher Hoile, Principal Reviewer for Stage Door

"Waiting for Moby"

As a general rule, the greater the literary work the more it resists adaptation to another genre.  Purely on spec, the notion of adapting Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece “Moby Dick”, one of the greatest but most difficult of all American novels, to the stage and as mime besides would seem ridiculous.  Yet, the Stratford Festival commissioned Morris Panych, who won such acclaim for his mime adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat” to stage, to attempt to repeat his success with Melville’s epic.  Theoretically, this time he has an advantage because he and “creative associates” Wendy Gorling and Shaun Amyot have real dancers to work with in this movement piece instead on merely actors who had to learn how to move in time to music in “The Overcoat”.  Yet, the piece fails because it has not been fully enough re-imagined for the stage.

At under two hours including intermission, Panych has time to do little more than skim the surface of the plot.  The problem is that the plot itself is very simple and is not the reason why the novel is great.  Captain Ahab has had his right leg bitten off by the infamous great white whale Moby Dick and assembles a crew to carry out his personal vengeance by tracking down and killing the beast.  Melville uses this quest tale to explore themes of destructive obsession, free will versus fate, idealism versus pragmatism, human rights versus tyranny and the folly of man’s attempts to conquer nature.  Moby Dick comes to be seen as omnipresent and eternal.  In the novel the fictional story itself is interleaved with nonfiction chapters on cetology that have the double function of exploring the world that Moby Dick is part of while demonstrating the irony that all the scientific knowledge in the world cannot explain the mystic fascination of this one beast.

By focussing solely on the plot Panych’s adaptation thus can be superficial at best.  Yet even in this task he fails.  Artistic works should stand on their own, but here, if viewers happened not to know the story of the novel (which, unfortunately is increasingly the case), they would have little or no clue as to what was being depicted.  In Panych’s primitive mime language, to explain the purpose of the voyage David Ferry as Captain Ahab points to his stiff right leg (it’s not even clear that it is ivory) and then sticks his arms out straight before him separating them and then closing them together with fingers curled.  To the uninitiated this could be an imitation of a shark, a giant clam or a falling portcullis.

What Panych does depict is the friendship of Ishmael (Shaun Smyth) and cannibal Queequeg (Marcus Nance) and their joining the crew of the Pequod.  There they meet the intellectual first mate Starbuck (W. Joseph Matheson), the second mate Stubb (Matt Cassidy), the third mate Flask (Eddie Glen) and the mysterious Fedallah (Shawn Wright), who seems to have an evil influence over Ahab.  Panych makes much of Ishmael’s forsaking his own religion to worship the idol Queequeg carries with him.  But Starbuck’s Hamlet-like attempt to kill the Claudius-like Ahab comes out of nowhere since Panych has not shown Starbuck’s growing outrage at Ahab’s monomaniacal quest.  Panych spends more time on the comic rivalry between Stubb and Flask and Flask’s imitations of Ahab.  This may be “comic relief” but has nothing particular to do with the themes of the novel.

Panych’s most inventive addition to the cast are three lithe dancers--Lynda Sing, Kelly Grainger and Alison Jantzie--who are labelled as Sirens in the programme.  While thy do have this function of luring sailors away from their duties, Panych also has them represent the winds, the currents, sperm whales and Oceanids or nymphs who preside over the sea.  The play opens with a view of the drowned crew of the Pequod being tended to by the “Sirens” who move them backstage.  This is as close as Panych gets to representing nature as eternal and as indomitable as death.  These three are the only characters who consistently dance rather than simply move to the music.  On the occasions when the Sirens dance with the male dancers in the company, the effect is magical since finally as dancers the human body is used to its fullest potential.  One can’t help but wonder why Panych doesn’t give over this mime-as-theatre idea for ballet, which is its natural extension, except that he is not a choreographer.

Still, Panych does achieve several remarkable images beautifully timed to the crashing chords of Debussy’s “La Mer” and “Nocturnes”.  In one the male cast climb three ladders on movable platforms.  As the music builds the men slowly lift their long shirt tails over their heads creating the image of sails on a three-masted schooner.  In another sequence, in the novel the first successful hunt of a pod of sperm whales, the crew capture one (played by a Siren), fix it to the inside of one of the ladders and viciously hack away at it with a variety of weapons.  the men’s shirts fall from them as the Siren’s lets fall her shirt, representing the skin and blubber of the whale and walks away. 

What Panych signally fails to depict is Moby Dick itself.  I had expected that the three Sirens would form a single unit or that the three ladders would be used or that the entire cast but Ahab would form the whale to represent Ahab against the world.  But no, when the climactic moment comes all Ahab does his thrust his harpoon at the centre of the compass on the floor of Ken MacDonald’s set.  There’s no becoming entangled in his harpoon line, being dragged down with the beast--nothing.  After the thrust he merely becomes the floating corpse we saw at the beginning.  After all the build up and the success of depicting the sailing ship, this is distinctly disappointing.  Perhaps Moby Dick, who comes to seem a godlike being cannot be represented, but if so why agreed to adapt such a story to so physical a medium as the stage in the first place? 

Unlike “The Overcoat”, where the selections from Shostakovich’s music were crammed with incident, here there seems to be rather too much filler for such a short piece.  There is too much mimed rope hauling, peering through telescopes into the voms and stumbling to and fro on the yawing deck to mark time in Debussy’s music until a coming event can match the coming musical climax.  Meeting with other ships and gazing at maps may be exciting in the novel but become tedious on stage.    

The cast acts as one throughout as they must.  Smyth face registering he transition from innocence to experience is an ideal Ishmael.  Nance make Queequeg an intriguing character not a simple cliché of a “noble savage”.  Ferry attacks his role with passion but those who imagine Captain Ahab as lean and gaunt and eaten up from within by his obsession will be disappointed.  Wright’s demeanour is so distinct in the four roles he plays you won’t know Father Mapple, Fedallah, Peleg and the Captain of the Jungfrau are played by the same actor until you read the programme.  Given the minimal set lighting designer Alan Brodie is principally responsible for giving the piece its brooding atmosphere of immanent danger.

Panych’s Moby Dick is a misfire.  Debussy’s music itself is consistently more nuanced and exciting than anything we see on stage.  If François Girard had not already done in the Canadian Opera Company’s 2005 production of Wagner’s "Siegfried", a monster made up of a pyramid of actors suspended from each other would have made a good Moby.  Yet, even if that problem could be solved, only the full physicality of dance, not mere mime, can match the sensuousness of Debussy’s music.        

       

©Christopher Hoile       

Caesar and Cleopatra

by George Bernard Shaw, directed by Des McAnuff

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

August 17-November 9, 2008

by Christopher Hoile, Principal Reviewer for Stage Door

"Caesar in Las Vegas"

The Stratford Festival’s first-ever production of Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” is a good new/bad news situation.  The good new is that Christopher Plummer, who plays Julius Caesar, gives a magnificent performance full of dry wit and capable of switching from comedy to deadly seriousness and back with the merest change of voice.  The bad news is that this performance is trapped in a relentlessly superficial production by Des McAnuff with all the subtlety of a typical sword-and-sandals epic from the 1950s.  The designers have pulled out so many ancient Egyptians clichés that the action seems to take place in a theme hotel in Las Vegas rather than in Egypt of circa 46BC.  

As one enters the Festival Theatre one can’t help but note what appears to be a statue of an Egyptian god in gold and ebony, arms held out from its sides.  Only the unobservant will thinks this is actually a statue not an actor.  When the lights go down, the “statue” descends in the trap elevator and folds its arms.  This pointless gimmick for an easy laugh epitomizes McAnuff’s approach to the whole play.  Anyone who has seen the “Caesar” before in a good production--most likely at the Shaw Festival in 2002 or in 1983, both directed by Christopher Newton--will know that the play is not really “Monty Python’s Life of Caesar” as McAnuff portrays it.  Shaw uses humour to keep us at an ironic distance from the action, not so we ignore it but so we view it rationally not emotionally.  The humour significantly lessens as the play reaches it end even though McAnuff tries to keep pushing it.  Shaw expects his audience to know the future history of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, if not from history then at least from Shakespeare’s plays about each figure.  We should know from the start that what fate holds in store for them is not comic.  The play ends with Caesar having taught the girlish Cleopatra how to be a great ruler and with him setting sail for Rome, but a good production will not view this as simple happy ending as McAnuff does but rather conjure up the bittersweet quality of triumphs that will not last. 

Fortunately for the production, Christopher Plummer seems to have insulated himself from McAnuff’s superficial approach.  The aged Caesar seems a role he was born to play.  It suits him much better than did Lear in 2002 because it does not require the devastating baring of emotion he seemed reluctant to portray.  It is also a better vehicle that was “Barrymore” in 1996 since that role afforded him no majesty.  Here Plummer is both the witty commentator on himself and others and ruler whose majesty seems innate.  He brings out the gravitas in Caesar’s great address to the Sphinx that begins the play then suddenly shifts to bantering with the kittenish Cleopatra as an indulgent grandfather would with the whims of his granddaughter.  His command of phrase and change of tone is certainly greater than McAnuff’s.  If only McAnuff were less obsessed with keeping the tone “light”, Plummer’s delivery of some of Shaw’s great insights would have greater time to register.  Caesar sees that vengeance must be eschewed in politics because it leads to a cycle without end: “And so, to the end of history,

murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.”

As for Nikki M. James who plays Cleopatra, she seems to have taken to heart the universal complaints concerning the virtual inaudibility of her “Juliet” this season.  Now one can hear every word, but this is because she shouts every word.  She is a talented actor and could be excellent in this role, but unless she learns to project her voice properly she will ruin it.  Yelling allows little room for nuance and as the play progresses nuance in her speeches becomes increasing important to let us see how she learns to play the game of politics and equivocation.  

There are some excellent supporting performances, most notably Peter Donaldson as Rufio, Caesar’s main confidant and the epitome of a no-nonsense Roman soldier.  Timothy D. Stickney is also a fine Pothinus, Ptolemy’s guardian and chief promoter of his cause, who at first appears untrustworthy but in fact is a canny politician.  Two other important role, however, are ruined by McAnuff’s direction.  Shaw clearly included the anachronistic Britannus to be an object of fun and to connect his audience with the subject matter, but Steven Sutcliffe’s fruity delivery is surely not what Shaw had in mind.  One has only to think how Norman Browning played the role in 2002 to realize that Britannus is comic because of his feyness but because of a dourness that reflects his dismal native climate.  Worse is McAnuff’s view of Ftatateeta, Cleopatra’s chief nurse.  She, too, is usually spoken of in jest because of her odd name and appearance, but unlike Britannus is she definitely not a comic character herself.  McAnuff has Diane D’Aquila raise her hands and hiss like a cat whenever her name is mentioned.  This only turns into a comic caricature, not the evil embodiment of the politics of revenge that Caesar is trying to ween Cleopatra from.

In smaller roles David Collins as Theodotus, Roy Lewis as Achillas and John Vickery as Lucius Septimus all do solid work.  McAnuff has Paul Dunn play Ptolemy too much as a silly boy and not enough as the puppet of politicians, and Gordon S. Miller never fully conveys as Patrick R. Brown did for the Shaw that Apollodorus, another deliberately anachronistic character, is a reference to Oscar Wilde.        

        

The best of Robert Brill’s sets is the very first when just the stone paws and suspended separate head of the Sphinx are enough to suggest the whole.  Otherwise, he complies with McAnuff’s bizarre obsession with the central elevator trap and designs sets that often hamper movement and focus.  In Act VI the centre is occupied with a pool where Michelle Monteith and Sophia Walker as Iras and Charmion are bathing nude.  Needless to say, the gratuitous display of flesh (this is supposed to be “Cleopatra’s boudoir” not a spa) distracts us from whatever is said.  Earlier in Act III, Brill has steps leading to a quay as Shaw specifies, but then, just where the pool will be, he creates a pit and through this, illogically enough, the famous carpet is unloaded not from the quayside.  Are to think Apollodorus’ boat is underneath the stone barrier by the river?  Later, when Caesar and others jump into the water to escape, they jump off the quayside steps and ignore the central hole.  When the carpet containing Cleopatra is unrolled in the most famous scene in the play, the set allows nowhere to do it but in front of the hole onto the front steps of the stage where few people will be able to see.  Later McAnuff has Brill’s two massive columns moved one in front of the other blocking the house right side of the audience from seeing the house left side.  Again on the front steps of the stage where few people can see he has Rufio murder Ftatateeta.  All this reveals that McAnuff in only his third production on the Festival Stage is still thinking in terms of a proscenium theatre not the thrust stage he is working with.

As for Paul Tazewell’s costumes they are almost ridiculously extravagant and with their overuse of gold lamé move the design from re-creating a period to vulgar display.  Nikki M. James literally has a new costume every time she appears, even when it makes no sense.  In Act III Cleopatra rushes off stage with Apollodorus’ carpet in one costume, but when she is unrolled before Caesar she is in different costume and headdress.  When haste was of the essence when did she have time to change?  Light designer Robert Thomson seems best at conjuring up night scenes and engineers the wonderful effect of a cascading fadeout from the perimeter moving to the centre for the play’s conclusion.

Fans of Christopher Plummer need not hesitate.  This is one of the finest performances he has given at Stratford in years.  It suits him so well one wonders whether he should not essay some of Shaw’s other commanding gentlemen like Undershaft in “Major Barbara” or Captain Shotover in “Heartbreak House”.  Fans of Shaw, however, will balk at a production that emphasizes glitz over interpretation and comedy at all costs over the melancholy sense of the end of an era that tempers it.  Christopher Newton’s 2002 production that moved the setting up to just before World War I brilliantly captured all of the play’s varied nuances and its underlying seriousness of purpose.  Significantly, while McAnuff does away with Shaw’s Prologue spoken by the god Ra in keeping with his view of the play as a kind of historical comedy, Newton adapted the Prologue to emphasize from the start the Shaw’s vision of the vanity of empire.  As Ra points out to Shaw’s complacent members of the British Empire, “The dust heaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust”.  If only McAnuff’s production had such insight it might be worthy of Plummer’s performance.                      

       

©Christopher Hoile