This summer at Shakespeare & Company, a season of edgy contemporary works has unfolded in the company's Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre. It's an intimate, rough-hewn space in S&Co's new, $10 million Production and Performing Arts Center, a former athletics facility which also houses rehearsal studios, technical offices and a hangar-like scene shop.
Three of the Bernstein's nine summer shows are one-woman plays, presented under the umbrella "The Diva Series," which ran briefly in early summer and return next month (more on that below). Three more are grouped in a "Life Laid Bare" series, and two of these are still playing. Both are searing three-character dramas in which pain and humor uneasily intertwine, one grappling with the undercurrent of racism in the lives of three white people, the other digging into intimate questions of love and betrayal, with an all-black cast.
The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, by John Patrick Shanley, is about heritage, passion, and the way sex can both complete and imprison us. The title implies what I take to be the playwright's theme, a twist on Socrates' famous injunction: The unexamined life has not yet begun.
Donna's ex-boyfriend, Tommy, is unraveling. He's living in squalor, talking to his fridge and dating Donna's teenage sister. Donna is almost homicidally furious, but she is also helplessly drawn to him. She's estranged from her father, a successful artist who stopped painting and started drinking when his wife died. But she senses he holds the key to her dilemma, and asks him to confront the young man and either shape him up or beat him up.
The characters as written are not specifically African-American, and casting black actors isn't an attempt to "universalize" the material or interpret it in a new light. But under the sure-handed direction of Tod Randolph, the three performers give the play a specific feel and tone that works perfectly, even though it's not what the Irish-American Shanley originally had in mind.
As Donna's father, John Douglas Thompson has all the rage and despair that he displays as Othello in S&Co's mainstage theatre, to which he adds a self-mocking humor. Bowman Wright is poignantly at sea as Tommy, a young man who is stubbornly "present-tense," incapable of understanding his past to get a grip on his future. Both men are excellent, but the player I couldn't take my eyes off is Miriam Hyman, an actress of thrilling presence and sensibility whose performance as Donna is mercurial and heartrending.
J.T. Rogers' White People are three Americans of disparate backgrounds: a New York college professor, a former high-school beauty queen in North Carolina and a self-made businessman in St. Louis. In separate but intertwining monologues, each one reveals thorny interactions with people of color. As the U.S. inexorably becomes a majority "non-white" society, they feel overpowered and disoriented. Each represents a particular aspect of the ingrained racism that afflicts "post-racial" America, and the playwright occasionally betrays a didactic impulse, but they are distinct personalities with absorbing, ultimately wrenching stories.
They occupy separate raised cubes on the Bernstein stage—in Kiki Smith's striking set design, everything is glaring white and incomplete. Michael Hammond, seated at a half-desk strewn with blank papers, is both chilling and funny as the arrogant, ultra-rational executive who has worked his way up by playing the game and "wearing the uniform," and now deplores the black employees who don't follow his example.
Dana Harrison is affecting as the Carolina housewife who is both baffled and ticked off that a black girl from her high school class is now a bank manger, a Latino is her husband's foreman, and an Indian immigrant is her epileptic son's doctor. On opening night, Jason Asprey seemed as if he was still feeling his way into the role of the teacher whose prize student in a class of dullards is a gum-snapping black girl who talks ghetto but thinks brilliantly.
In her program note, director Anna Brownsted urges the audience "to become fully aware of this moment." She's talking about the momentary shared experience that is live theater, but she may also be asking us to make sure we pay close attention to our own responses to these characters' experiences in the web of our nation's cruelest and most intractable dilemma.
Three Divas
All of the "Diva" plays, which return for a three-night stand in September, focus on strong-minded women who made brave choices about the directions of their lives. Two are true-life stories, one a charming fantasy.
In Golda's Balcony, by William Gibson, Annette Miller portrays Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel during the so-called Yom Kippur War of October 1973, when Israel fought off a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria. She's in her office, barking orders over the phone, pleading with the Nixon administration for help, and taking time out to fill us in on her biography and that of her country. It's a one-sided version of history, of course, since it's Golda's version. Miller has done several one-woman plays at Shakespeare & Company, and I found this her most convincing performance by far—gritty, heartfelt and complete.
The title of The Actors Rehearse the Story of Charlotte Salomon is an indication of its multiple viewpoints: a theatrical biography of a Jewish artist who perished in Auschwitz, based on her own chaotic autobiographical play, rehearsed in a Jerusalem bomb shelter in the 1980s over the objections of one of its thinly disguised characters. The piece, written and performed by Penelope Kreitzer (who persuasively inhabits some half-dozen roles), intriguingly delineates the persistent tension between art and life.
The third "diva" in the trilogy is Shirley Valentine, a vehicle for the company's founder, Tina Packer. I haven't seen this performance, but Packer's natural ebullience and indomitable spirit are perfectly suited to Willy Russell's tale of a Liverpool housewife who chucks her stagnant domesticated existence and finds fulfillment on a Greek island.
White People and The Dreamer Examines His Pillow: in repertory through Sept. 6. The Diva Series: Sept. 11-13. At Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, (413) 637-3353, www.shakespeare.org.
