Ghosts Review

The original posting of this review is at this link. 

THEATER REVIEW: Cast, crew's skill illuminates tale of despair

Play engages even as it treads path of darkness

By Mark Hughes Cobb
Staff Writer

Published: Thursday, February 25, 2016 at 10:00 p.m.

The dour Norwegians of Ibsenland do like to talk. Or perhaps need to: There's an urgency to all expressions. What is small talk?

But as those severe folks blow all their subtext out into text -- there's much boiling underneath -- the current production of "Ghosts" weaves a spell from those words: As much as one can for a 19th-century play drilling to the bedrock of 19th century morality, it pulls you in, takes you out of yourself and off to Ibsenland. That's due to a keenly crafted work by director Raines Carr, offering taut guidance for an A-plus team of actors, designers and tech folks. Garrett Walsh's off-centered set, aided by a warm, sensitive lighting design by Brandon Smith, builds sturdy bones surrounding dark openings, the cleverest thought a dining room partly obscured from the main living area, visibly in shadings, shadows and certain settings of light. What happens in the dining area stays, mostly, muffled, behind gauze, in the dining area. In the living room, confrontations cut sharply. The period costumes, by Chalise Ludlow, speak to us even if we don't get the literal translation, but hint instead who's tightly wound, who's freewheeling, who is apparently bound and yet at risk of coming apart.

In following the path back then and over there, it's easy to see why "Ghosts" shocked audiences for decades after creation, with its for-the-time frank discussions of incest, adultery and syphilis, not to mention dim views of religion, and defenses of casual sex.

"Ghosts"' original Danish title, "Gengangere," also could be translated as "ones who return" or "revenants." Despite those ominous sounds, it's a horror tale only in the seeming inability of its characters to break ties anchoring them to their past actions, demented families, askew societies. There are a few interesting parallels to Tennessee Williams' "A Glass Menagerie," which just ended a run at Theatre Tuscaloosa: emotional-societal repression, absent rogue fathers, domineering mothers teetering on the verge, children doomed and damaged irreparably by things mostly beyond their control. Also like that play, "Ghosts" begins with a surface gentility, but that cooks away without the redeeming decency of a gentleman caller, the haunted guilt of Tom. Credit Carr and crew with such skill and aplomb that the journey is fascinating, engaging even as it treads the path of despair.

New UA Department of Theatre and Dance faculty member Kelly Schoger masterfully plays -- it's tempting to say underplays, but that would suggest missed opportunities, and she misses none -- the mother, Helene Alving, such that the ribbed muscularity of her will, her wit might be capable of overcoming. It's a rare performance that both pulls an audience in while seemingly never calling attention to itself; a display of quiet, steely dominance overlaying hurt.

At the aesthetically near-opposite end is master of fine arts acting student William Green, playing ne'er-do-well con artist -- with emphasis on art as much as artifice -- Jakob Engstrad. There's a sly, lively energy rippling through Green, in this performance recalling a (slimmer, younger) Alfred Molina. Green's elemental power finds what comedy and charm there is in "Ghosts," and mines it beautifully. His fellow grad actor Zach Stolz, as Helene's sensitive painter son Oswald, veers cleverly between those opposing outward appearances, outlined with subtle restraint, but shaking with the heartbreak about to burst forth.

As religious patsy Pastor Manders, Ross Birdsong quivers on the edge of toppling forward, seemingly ill-at-ease even when the conversation's going his way ... for the moment. Unnerving at first, that teetering works for the playwright's intentions, suggesting a supposedly moral outlook built on shaky soil. And Sarah Grace Valleroy, as almost-salvageable Regina Engstrad, offers the most hopeful moments, brightest glimpses of what might be, should the sun ever return.

With such superior skill sets at work, it's easy to overlook the architect. But Carr has proven, in a short time here, a deft hand at crafting compelling art out of difficult material. That this look into the past seems neither hazy memory play, nor dusty artifact, but thrillingly of the moment, deserves note.

Seduced Review

The original posting of this review is at this link. 

THEATER REVIEW: "Seduced" is a critique on American desires, dreams

By Mark Hughes Cobb
Staff Writer

Published: Saturday, September 26, 2015 at 9:00 p.m.

Although many know Sam Shepard best as a film actor — Chuck Yeager in "The Right Stuff," opposite longtime partner Jessica Lange in "Crimes of the Heart," in Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven" and more — he built his reputation primarily as a writer.

Even while carving out an eclectic career verging from counterculture to mainstream, Shepard wrote his most famous trio of plays — "True West," "Curse of the Starving Class" and "Buried Child," a Pulitzer Prize winner — in the late '70s and early '80s, about the same time he created "Seduced," playing now in the Allen Bales Theatre as part of the University of Alabama Department of Theatre and Dance's season.

Shepard's plays are challenges at best, with wild, anarchic blends of myth, dark humor, sparse language and harsh realities, but director Raines Carr has pulled together a dimensional, disturbing creation, shadowy with edges protruding. It's led by a stellar central performance from Matt Gabbard as Henry, a Howard Hughes-ish recluse gabbling, exploding and imploding in his later years.

Garrett Walsh's set, an aviator's graveyard dimpled by an OCD navel, helps Gabbard hunker at the central chaos of a crash-down life, an effect nicely assisted by shifting tones in a tawny, sometimes- harsh lighting design by Amanda Harris. It's desert and oasis, man and machine, ugly reality and dismantled fantasy.

"Seduced" opens musically, with the elegiac title track to Randy Newman's 1972 classic, "Sail Away," which, despite the seeming incongruity, sets the course. Newman's sardonic, backhanded assaults deeply influenced Shepard: The songs are written into the script.

The thing some who only know Newman as writer of "Toy Story" hits miss is that his sweet melodies often hide satiric twists, such as in "Short People," one of the more widely misunderstood anti-discrimination hits, or in "I Love L.A.," "Rednecks," or "Birmingham," a song both tongue-in-cheek and not, which is always slightly disturbing to see Magic City folks sing along with. 

"Sail Away" seems, on the surface, to be about the dream of flying off for better shores, but is in actuality a hymn-like melody overlaying the song of slavers, urging Africans to climb aboard: "In America you'll get food to eat / Won't have to run through the jungle / And scuff up your feet / You'll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day / It's great to be an American."

"Lonely at the Top," from the same disc, states the "Seduced" theme succinctly: "I've been around the world / Had my pick of any girl / You'd think I'd be happy / But I'm not." Be careful what you dream for, Americans. Henry once flew, literally, an imaginative, adventurous aviator, engineer and inventor, winning fortunes, sleeping with numberless beautiful women, earning the admiration of all who hope to self-make their way to the top, forgetting that gravity sucks.

"Seduced" picks up as Henry's devolved to the stage of out-of-control hair and nails, wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet. Mental illness and pain — some caused by aircraft crashes — drove Hughes to madness. Henry's got the same symptoms, but Shepard's suggesting it was the dream of America, getting everything and finding you desire nothing — or nothing that's left — that did him in.

Gabbard, while 50 years too young to be thoroughly Hughes-ian, made the smart choice, with Carr, to play it less decrepit and senior, but no less pained and wracked. Gabbard's physicality, both in the shuffling and staggering, and in the way his flesh seems to revolt from all but the tenderest touches, sells the suffering, creating an empathy that might have been burned away by the harshness of his language, his severe treatment of loyal bodyguard/manservant Raul (Ross Birdsong), and dismissive turns toward two of his past lovers, Luna (Molly Penny) and Miami (Marie Videau), summoned in an effort to help heal him.

Henry is past help, and in his more lucid moments — flickering in and out like a moth circling a bulb — seems to realize it. But anyone who's flown so high isn't about to relinquish controls and auger in.

Make of their names what you will — Luna as moon, what the moth never reaches, and root of "lunacy;" Miami as one of the tribes native to America before the white man came and named it "America" — the women are types, yet nicely fleshed out by Penny as the slinky sophisticate, and Videau as the brassy broad. Each brings a relief, of sorts, comic, silly, sweet and human, to the unrelenting assault of Henry, though no possible production of "Seduced" is going to be a bellyful of laughs. 

Birdsong does exceptional work himself, as the almost-cipher Raul, tightly under control yet verging on losing it, suggesting the simmer but letting the boil arise when it will.

While it's never going to be major-league Shepard, "Seduced" is the kind of work you hope to see more of in the theater, as opposed to rehashed classics, butts-in-seats comfort food. It's great for the students, of course, something to stretch and grow from, and a treat for audiences who don't buy tickets to be patted on the back for perfect attendance. There are puzzles to ponder, about rot at the roots of America, about whether our priorities are healthy, about course corrections before crash. 

Though, honestly, what you might think will be: Geez, even Randy Newman lightened up.

Director's notes for Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

“Ibsen’s ideas were so startling that they struck the smug, complacent society of the time with force of a tidal wave, and revolutionized not only plays but the pattern of thought of men and women everywhere.” – Eva Le Gallienne

Henrik Ibsen was a man that devoted most of his life to finding his own voice. He did not start on his great cycle of prose plays, the ones he is known for, until he was 50 years old. He shocked and awed his audience and the world and became the patron saint of the independent theatre movement around the world. A Doll’s House premiered in 1879 and was an instant scandal. The gentle audience of the time was outraged that a woman would leave her husband and her children to find herself. Her duty was in the home, not in self-discovery. This play was very personal to Ibsen and it lite a fire that would become his reaction to the criticism over A Doll’s House in the form of a play about a woman who stays in the bad situation and forgoes herself for her supposed ‘duty’ called, Gengangere, or in English, Ghosts. Though he preferred the translation to be more akin to the English term “The Revenants,” meaning “the ones who return.”

The characters of this play are haunted, as we all are by elements of our past. A decision made to protect our loved ones and ourselves can sometimes come back to bite us in the end. I feel that Ibsen wanted to show the consequences of not being true to oneself and the backlash one would receive for spending a life time doing what others think is best or right for us. This is a play that is not often performed. It is important that we continue to face the issues raised in this work and challenge ourselves to look past the perceived norm and locate our true wants and needs, to be our true selves, to do what must and should be done. Unhappiness breeds descent and spirals our world out of control.

The cast and crew have worked hard to bring this play to life. We don’t want to take you to a museum of “The World’s Most Famous Plays.” We want you visit a moment in our past that is alive. These people are we. They may live in Norway in the 1880’s, but their struggles and choices are no different than our own and what they face is exactly what we face in an increasingly divisive social and political environment. This play was banned around the world for its “shocking” content in 1880. It became a beacon for theatre free from censorship and restriction. I think in 2016, it can do they same for us. Art is just a means to help us open a part of ourselves that we may not have known existed or, perhaps, help us articulate something that we have trouble comprehending. We welcome you to share this story with us and help us continue the search for what a human is and should be.