The Vertical Hour by David Hare

Prospect Theater Project
520 Scenic Avenue, Modesto CA

(209) 549-9341 or house@prospecttheaterproject.org

Sunday, March 6, at 2 pm

The Guardian’s Michael Billington got it right. Although discussion of the Iraq War and of Sarajevo feature in David Hare’s play The Vertical Hour (2006), the play isn’t primarily about the war in Iraq, nor about international violence, nor ultimately, about politics and war at all, although it has a great deal to say on these topics, most of it pungent. Except, that is, if you’re talking about the hidden war that is waged among  people locked in a close knit but inharmonious circle –say, a woman journalist/professor and her fiancé and the fiancé’s estranged father, on the occasion of the woman’s first meeting with the father.

Nadia Blye teaches at Yale. She’s an expert on international terror and, in her writings and her classes, an exponent of the rationalist approach to politics. Before Yale, she had served as a war correspondent but she began to feel at risk of becoming a danger junkie, and her anger at the injustices of the world was starting to warp her thinking. Now, though, all is well –in balance. She’s engaged to Philip Lucas, sunny and non-confrontational, a physical therapist, who offers her a world that is the opposite of the horror she lived amongst for so long a time. Nadia and Philip are traveling to England to meet Philip’s father, Oliver, a physician with a foggy past. Oliver is everything that Philip isn’t. He’s cynical, bitter — and seductive, very seductive. In England, Oliver sets out to get under Nadia’s skin. Soon son Philip and he are at war, with Nadia the prize.

The center of the play is two long scenes with Nadia, Philip and Oliver, set in the rolling countryside south of London. These scenes are bookended by scenes at Yale, before and after the England trip, Nadia with two of her students. Dennis (before England) is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative: whatever America does is right because America always wins; other nations should simply study us and copy as well as they can. Terri (after) is Dennis’s mirror opposite, as unreflective as he is in her analysis of international affairs but deeply critical of American policy. Dennis and Terri have their personal agendas too, which come out in the course of their meetings with their teacher, the oh so brilliant Miss Blye.

Some of the best lines in the play occur when Oliver takes Nadia on over Iraq. Oliver says he was against intervention from the start.  “From the beginning?” That’s Nadia. “Let’s just say,” Oliver replies, “I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had a fair idea what the operation would look like.”  Nadia admits that she supported the intervention at first but laments what followed after it. But she says to Oliver, “I don’t think the mess that followed invalidates the original decision.”

Hour is the best kind of play for the Prospect. It makes you think, features sharp lined and memorable characters, and delineates a real and intense personal conflict. For the right kind of theatergoer –one who relishes engagement with a play—it is memorable theater.

David Keymer, for the Prospect Theater Project

From the novel by Harper Lee.

Prospect Theater Project
at the Gallo Center for Performing Arts
May 13-21, 2011
Friday-Sunday, 8 pm

TICKETS MAY BE PURCHASED AT THE GALLO CENTER BOX OFFICE

If you don’t like this play, there’s something seriously wrong with you.  Christopher Sergel has adapted Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of Southern prejudice in the ‘30s to fit the stage. It is in many ways a Herculean endeavor, not least because so most of us have already fixed the drama in our minds as Gregory Peck, the noble White Man, fighting the near irresistible force of prejudice in the Deep South.

It really doesn’t matter whether you’ve seen the movie or read the book. It’s great theater no matter how familiar you are with it. There are some themes, some conflicts, that matter no matter how often you hear of them and this is one of them.

Early in the play, there is an exchange between Scout, Atticus’s tomboy daughter, and an elderly lady in the community, Miss Maudie.

MISS MAUDIE: Do you smell my mimosa? It’s like angel’s breath.

SCOUT:  Yessum. When Atticus [her father] gave [us] air rifles, he asked us never to shoot mockingbirds.

MISS MAUDIE: And he’s right. Mockingbirds just make music. They don’t eat up people’s gardens; don’t nest in corncribs; they don’t do one single thing but sing their hearts out. That’s why it‘s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

“Everyone in town knows what kind of folks the Ewells are,” Scout says later on, but it doesn’t matter when white Bob Ewell accuses black Tom Robinson of rape.

Atticus, fiftyish single father of two young children, is selected to defend Tom. He knows that his advocacy of Tom will put him at odds with his neighbors, but he takes the charge any way. “It’s about right and wrong,” he says. That’s one of the epiphanies of this wonderful play, that in the heart of the most prejudiced part of the old South there are people who feel that regardless of skin color, people should be judged as people, not as members of a condemned and inferior class. There are people in every community who feel that truth and justice matter.

Anyone who’s seen the movie remembers the lynch scene. A mob of liquored up white men descend on the jail house intent on lynching Tom. They are confronted by one reasonable, pacific man, who, at the critical moment, is joined by his young daughter and son. The lynch mob is shamed by the presence of the children. They leave, and Atticus’s son says to his father, “I thought Mr. Cunningham was a friend.” Atticus responds, in one of the most telling exchanges in a play filled to the brim with telling exchanges: “Still is. He just has his blind spots along with the rest of us.”

Mockingbird is a more conventional play than many associate with the Prospect Theater Project, but it plays to strengths of the Prospect –a strong narrative line, great acting roles, and a script that forces the audience to think about serious issues.  It’s a play that will appeal to everyone.

A Delicate Balance won Edward Albee his first Pulitzer Prize in 1967. Two more Pulitzers followed, for Seascape (1975) and Three Tall Women. (1995). A prolific and talented playwright, Albee has also received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement (2005), the Gold Medal in Drama from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980), and the National Medal of Arts (1996). He was an honoree at the Kennedy Center in 1996. No doubt about it, Albee is a heavy hitter. Since the deaths of Tennessee Williams (with whom he has affinities as a crafter of plays) and Arthur Miller, he is arguably the most important American playwright living.

Balance, like most mature Albee plays, focuses on a small group of people whose emotional lives are (fatally) intertwined. It starts with talking – a husband and a wife, the wife monologuing really. She speculates about going insane, but you suspect that her discontent with her own life is peeking out from the edges. Her sister enters the room. There is more entanglement, more rough edges. The couple’s daughter Julia is slated to return soon –after another failed marriage.

The couple’s oldest and dearest friends arrive, announcing that they plan to move in. The homeowners agree. No one in the house is unaffected by the decision. Unreal as it is, this scene sets the course of the play, but then, Albee doesn’t write realistic theater. No matter how deeply his dialogue resonates with the audience, absurd things tend to happen for underdetermined reasons in Albee’s plays. It is enough that the friends are there and their presence sets the other characters on a collision path that illuminates their inner lives.

Since Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1961-2), certain themes have echoed through Albee’s plays, most notably the tenuous connection between badly matched partners and how easily it disintegrates under pressure, exposing the lack of love, compassion, even understanding between the partners.

Balance isn’t a comfortable play or a realistic one. Rather, Albee employs a kind of hyper-realism in  it, focusing not on one-to-one correspondence with mundane reality but on the turning points in the characters’ psyches and lives. There is no clear path out of the chaos of crossed intentions and motives shown in Balance, but the playgoer will leave the theater charged with energy and filled with unanswered questions.

David Keymer, for the Prospect Theater Project

An upstairs apartment in Greenwich Village. September 1990. The buzzer rings. Someone is waiting downstairs. Ruth, 55 years old, tosses down the key. Soon a young woman enters the apartment. Her name is Lisa Morrison and she’s come for a tutorial –her first– with the distinguished writer Ruth Steiner. Well, maybe Ruth isn’t all that distinguished –she hasn’t published in years– but she’s clearly the Real Thing and that’s what Lisa wants to be.

From the story Lisa had submitted in class for Ruth’s critique, Ruth thought Lisa was another student. “You don’t particularly look like your story,” she says to Lisa. “Almost without exception my students tend to look like their stories.” “So am I not a serious-looking person?” asks Lisa. “No, you’re not.” Thus starts one of the best written scenes I’ve read about what works and what doesn’t in writing. It’s the start of a complicated relationship between established writer Ruth and writer-wannabee Lisa. Over the years, Lisa moves from being Ruth’s pupil to serving as gofer and then confidante to the aging writer. Ruth unveils a long past affair with the poet Delmore Schwartz, who womanized as much as he drank (which is to say constantly). The moment was the high point in her life. Lisa has become the child Ruth never had and so she tells her everything.

But the relationship changes as all relationships do over time, especially those between mentor and pupil. Ruth advises her not to submit a short story to Grand Street but Lisa submits it anyway. It’s accepted, it’s her first published story. Lisa’s first book of short stories is both praised and savaged by the critics and the two women celebrate because at last Lisa is acknowledged as a talent to watch. Their relationship ends in acrimony. Ruth feels betrayed by Lisa. Lisa doesn’t acknowledge what she’s done with Ruth’s confidences and she doesn’t truly care. The ending is strong, filled with feeling, and it rings true.

“The unifying theme [in my plays] is loss,” said playwright Margulies in an interview for PBS. It is the sensitive depiction of loss that ultimately makes Collected Stories so effective and so moving It’s about a relationship (mentor to pupil/pupil to mentor) that many of us –no, most of us –have experienced at some point in our lives and it captures the sense of regret we felt when it ended. Collected Stories was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and Margulies won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Dinner with Friends in 2000. Uta Hagen played Ruth in the original New York production; Linda Lavin played her when the play was revived in 2010. Great roles attract great actors.

- David Keymer, for the Prospect Theater Project

Directed by Jack Souza
Starring Karen Olsen and Kathleen Ennis

Bruce wants to meet someone and so does Prudence. But their Mate Wanted ads haven’t prepared them for what they find when they meet. Bruce has a male lover, Bob, but thinks he’d like to try a woman again. Besides, he wants a child and that’s one thing Bob can’t give him. Prudence doesn‘t know what she wants but it certainly isn’t a bi-sexual whose first comment to her is that she has lovely breasts and five minutes later he’s sobbing into his handkerchief –in a restaurant, no less. They’re not a match made in heaven. Their therapists don’t help at all: Stuart seduces all his women clients and Charlotte talks to a Snoopy doll during sessions. And let’s not forget Bob. From this complicated mess, Obie-Award-winning Christopher Durang (The Marriage of Betty and Boo) has concocted a wild and wooly farce filled to overflowing with laughter.

Directed by Heike Hambley (Bach at Leipzig, Copenhagen)
November 20 — December 13, 2009
(Thur-Sat 8 pm; Sun 2 pm)
Tickets $15

A young woman sits in her window, dreaming of her fiancée, a Bulgarian noble who is off to war. A middle-aged man, Captain Bluntschli, who is a soldier in the opposing Serbian army, climbs in her window. He seeks shelter after a devastating Serbian defeat. As they talk, his lack of idealism affronts her. Her fiancée, Sergius, led the cavalry charge against the Serbian machine guns and won. Sergius’s behavior confirms her picture of the true hero, and Bluntschli definitely doesn’t match up to it. He’s a mercenary. He joined the Serbian army pure and simple because the Serbians got to his village before the Bulgarians, and he sees Sergius’s actions, however successful they were, as nothing but folly. Sergius survived solely because of a mistake on the part of his army’s quartermaster. Bluntschli’s gunners were sent the wrong caliber of ammunition and so they couldn’t decimate the Bulgarian cavalry when they attacked against all the perceived wisdom of military engagement. His prosaic view of war, of everything! -he carries bon bons in his cartridge belt because chocolates are more soothing than bullets in the heat of battle—irritates her but she hides him anyway. The next day he leaves but she finds she can’t forget him. Then Sergius returns. His demonstrative heroism is wearing, and is he really all that he pretends to be?

George Bernard Shaw was one of the greatest and most influential playwrights of the twentieth century, a master at combining social commentary and biting wit. Arms and the Man had been one of his most beloved plays since it opened in London in 1894. It has been a favorite of theatergoers ever since with actors from Ralph Richardson to Kevin Kline and John Malkovich playing the “chocolate soldier” Bluntschli, Olivier, Brando (in his final stage appearance, in 1953) and Raul Julia playing Sergius and Glenne Headly and Helena Bonham Carter the tempestuous and overly romantic young Bulgarian, Raina. Arms is one of two plays by Shaw to be made into a musical –a Viennese operetta, The Chocolate Soldier in 1908. (The other was Pygmalion (1913), the basis for My Fair Lady (1953). Shaw subtitled Arms and the Man “A Pleasant Play,” and a pleasant play it is. The dialogue is light but Shaw lards it with witty observations on a variety of topics: class relations, social pretension, the folly of romanticism, the brutal reality of war. Veteran director Heike Hambley (Copenhagen, The Physicists, Bach at Leipzig) has assembled a first-rate cast to bring this theater classic to life once more. If you don’t laugh at Arms and the Man, ask your doctor to check your pulse: you may already be dead.

Prospect Theater Project
520 Scenic Drive, Modesto
For tickets, call 549-9341

Eugene O’Neill’s

A Moon for the Misbegotten

Directed by David Barbaree
(The Constant Wife, Road to Mecca, The Beauty Queen of Leenane)

It’s 1923, rural Connecticut, the Hogan farm. Phil Hogan is as Irish as they come in all respects, including his disregard for the strict truth and his monumental drinking. His daughter Josie lives with him. Outsized in body, she’s reputed to be equally outsized in her taste for men. Rumor has it she’s had it on with most of the men in her neighborhood. But her one real love is the landlord, James Tyrone, who is the only man around who regularly drinks Phil into the ground.  Tyrone is just waiting around on his inheritance: when it comes through, he’ll leave town but only after selling the farm to Phil at a good price. But Tyrone’s a drunk: he doesn’t always remember what he’s said and he’s just been offered five times as much for the farm as the Hogans can pay. Phil tells Josie that Tyrone has agreed to sell the farm away from them. Angry and hurt, she sets out to entice Tyrone into her bed: once he’s bedded her, she knows he’ll feel obliged to marry her. Out of this sordid scheming, O’Neill fashions a tale of romance that breathes poetry from its very pores –it’s funny too! Josie and Tyrone both have something to lose. Josie may be tough as nails outside but she’s vulnerable and hurt inside. Tyrone numbs himself with alcohol to hide a terrible self-loathing. At last, their love is too fragile: their vulnerabilities doom their one last chance for redemption. Moon has been a magnet for actors since its opening on Broadway more than fifty years ago. To name a few, Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards, Jr., Kevin Spacey, have all tried their hands at the roles of the doomed lovers. Now it’s the turn of the talented cast at the Prospect.

Fridays-Sundays, September 18-October 11, and Thursday, October 8
Thursday, Fridays, and Saturdays @ 8 pm; Sundays @ 2 pm
Tickets $15
Reserve tickets by calling 549-9341 or emailing house@prospecttheaterproject.org