Yasmina Reza

February 8 – March 3, 2013

A study in the tension between civilized surface and savage instinct, this wickedly funny play was the winner of the 2009 Tony award. A playground altercation between eleven-year-old boys brings together two sets of Brooklyn parents for a meeting to resolve the matter. At first, diplomatic niceties are observed, but as the meeting progresses, and the rum flows, tensions emerge and the gloves come off, leaving the couples with more than just their liberal principles in tatters.

Mark Dooley, David Messamer, and Angi Ciccarelli in PTP’s critically acclaimed Three Days of Rain

Three Days of Rain
by Richard Greenberg 

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.