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Three people in a room that exits into a bedroom, a kitchen, a garden and a driveway. The place is surrounded by water, as far as the eye can see. One person, a man, is dressed in a robe that fits him well but isn’t familiar. Another person, a woman, wears a robe that also fits her but makes no sense in terms of its style. The third person, also a woman, jogs, is impolite and impatient and keeps walking out on the other two when they ask questions or deny knowledge of a certain fact. Are these people somewhere real? Or is it a place they have created in their minds? Or is it...perhaps, Hell?
Playwright Lee Blessing has taken a premise, sixty years old at least, from the play "No Exit" by Jean-Paul Sartre and expanded its horizons while constricting its relationships. Instead of three strangers locked together for eternity in a small room, Blessing has given his people windows on a world of eternal dampness. Instead of a Valet to answer questions he has left his trio of people to answer their own questions. More of a mystery play than an existential drama, Blessing’s excellent piece of work, now on stage in Vermont at the Bennington Center under the producing hands of the Oldcastle Theatre Company, gives its audiences something to carry home with them. This is a play that leaves more questions unanswered than it originally poses.
Director Eric Peterson has the good fortune to have a cast of magicians of mood. Each of them seems capable of surprise at a moment’s notice. All three of them circle and connect and circle again as though, and the script would have it so, they had never met before. They do it with such truth and conviction that the mysterious elements of the play are continually heightened.
Bill Tatum plays Moss (mis-identified on the program as Ross). As he delves and digs into the story of his life and who he is, this man without a memory other than of his mother hating hard-boiled eggs, ihe is consistently one thing: a judge. There is, in his playing of the role, a sense of being more a pre-judger of things and when the second woman, named Wren, offers him a variety of explanations about his condition and its causes, he seemingly selects his options and his reactions. Tatum’s honest playing of this part, both the confusions and the confrontations, goes a long way to making the show a chilling sort of experience. He gives every version of reality its own clarity. It’s a masterful performance of a role that never gets to the specifics, but only to the generalities.
Paula Mann as Avis, the first woman, is remarkable. She has confusion written across her face. She becomes pretty in an instant and haggardly in a second. Her variations on a theme are played beautifully and sometimes with a startling tone that seems impossible and as frustrating as Wren’s reaction to Avis’s confusion. She has a voice of silver that plays well against the anger she expresses at Moss and at herself. She also manages to express fear without any hint of the usual over-played physical and vocal hints of that emotion. There is a naturalness to her version. Her Avis is as chilling as Tatum’s Moss.
Carey Van Driest has the unenviable role of Wren. We are told over and over who she is, but we never fully believe it. As caretaker of the other two in this water-bordered miniature universe they inhabit Wren is the keeper of secrets, the manufacturer of versions of their lives. She confronts the other two with possibilities that may or may not be real. Van Driest is tough. She is coy. She is flirtatious and affectionate. She is stern and she is manipulative. She handles all of these variations without batting an eyelash and her character is different in every scene. Unlike Avis and Moss who are invariably themselves, though neither one knows who he or she really is, Wren is a new character from scene to scene. Van Driest brings her own version of honesty to each interpretation of her character.
In "No Exit" Sartre reveals his premise late in the play when the man says to his two female companions in the room they share "You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the burning-marl. Old wives’ tales. There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!" At about the same point in Blessing’s play Wren informs each of her charges that the other has died only to leave them alone with one another, in the flesh, to act out yet another variation of their memory-less relationship. It is the same story in action as in Sartre’s words. Nothing they’ve been told or learned in the past, even the recent past, the day before, is necessarily true or real. Certainly Wren’s statement in the moment prior to this confrontation has a basis in fact. What they are left with, all three of them, is the current Hell in which they exist.
Peterson makes the most of these moments. He has given a tentative aspect to all things physical in the play. He has distracted us for about eighty minutes at this point in the play with ways and means of making things real. At this point he removes hesitation and leaves us with less than we thought we had. There is one lie too many in the play and one truth to few. Like the characters of Moss and Avis who wake up each day in bed with one another, but without knowledge of who they are or where they are, Peterson has physically taken us back to the beginning of the play and the alternate worlds of the mind in which Blessing’s characters exist.
In the early moments of the Sartre play the man says of the place in which he believes himself to be, "Shall I tell you what it feels like? A man’s drowning, choking, sinking by inches, till only his eyes are just above water. And what does he see?...A collector’s piece. As in a nightmare. That’s their idea...isn’t it?" In the Blessing work that nightmare is redefined as happiness, but even that concept comes with a question.
Ken Mooney has designed a beautiful set, perfect costumes and effective lighting for this production.
With three excellent actors and a director’s vision of the piece which illuminates once and for all the vagueness in life, "A Body of Water" emerges as the best work of the season at Oldcastle Theatre. Hopefully audiences will find the ninety minute, one act/five scene play as fascinating and enthralling as I did. This is theater for those who think.
◊09/23/2007◊
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