I don’t fish. To be frank, I don’t approve of fishing, especially “sport” fishing, since, like hunting, it’s not a sport in the accepted sense, that is, a contest between two equal adversaries playing by the same rules. I don’t understand the outsize thrill folks seem to get from outwitting a fish. I do understand, though, that for many people fishing has a semi-mystical, almost religious allure. That devotional relationship with the experience flows through The River.
Jez Butterworth’s brief, mesmerizing 2012 play is this season’s closer at Harbor Stage Company, Cape Cod’s most adventurous and original summer theater. It takes place in a rustic fishing cabin where a Man (no character names here) brings a Woman, his new lover, for a weekend of fishing and bonding. 
The Woman, a self-confessed newbie angler, disappears during a moonless midnight outing to the nearby trout stream, then nonchalantly shows up with a fresh-caught fish in her creel. Except it’s not her, but another Woman.
Or is it? To us, she’s clearly someone else, but the Man doesn’t seem to notice. From here on, the play is a puzzle, an escalating series of eerie ambiguities that tease us with questions of time, perspective and memory.
Fishing isn’t just an activity in The River; it is, of course, a metaphor. The script includes a poem by Ted Hughes about night fishing (fittingly, from his collection River) which reverses the usual predator/prey relationship. And fragments of a song weave through the scenes, offering a contextual through-line much as the William Blake hymn “Jerusalem” punctuates Butterworth’s epic play of that name. Here, it’s a setting of W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” about a man (or river god?) who has spent a lifetime of searching, after he once hooked “a little silver trout” that suddenly turned into “a glimmering girl” who called to him and then vanished.
If you require a clear-cut solution to your mysteries, you might be frustrated by the playwright’s refusal to provide one. But I found far more satisfaction in musing on the multiple possibilities presented by this engrossing exploration of, as the theater’s promo puts it, “the addictive qualities of love” – and not incidentally, of fishing. If you’re anywhere near Wellfleet this month – or even not so near – go. The River runs through September 3rd.
Harbor Stage is the closest thing you’ll find these days to a traditional repertory company. It’s formed around a core quartet of multitalented theater artists, all of them supple, magnetic actors, and I’ve loved watching them move in and out of varied roles on- and offstage over the past few seasons. The River featured Robert Kropf, Brenda Withers and Stacy Fischer, each of them riveting, and was directed by Jonathan Fielding. This season’s previous show, The Kritik, was written and directed by Withers and starred Fischer and Fielding, with an uncredited key cameo by Kropf.
Most Harbor Stage shows are small-scale, small-cast affairs. The Kritik was a step up, with an 11-member, majority-Equity cast that stretched the limits of their intimate dockside venue in Wellfleet and, probably, their budget.
It’s set in a tavern in the remote village of Abliveta in 19th-century Russia (thus the spelling of the title). And it’s set in Russia – rather than, say, Blaine, Missouri, where Waiting for Guffman takes place – because it’s a comedic homage to Anton Chekhov: petty nobility and proletarians in a provincial backwater, far from the bright lights of Moscow, pecking at each other while either bemoaning the end of an era or eagerly awaiting the new one.
In this case, the town’s upper crust are the local politicians, press, and theater people. Straddling the latter two categories is Volya, a Vanya-esque figure. He’s the drama critic for the town’s newspaper, who’s getting fed up with writing hypocritically glowing reviews of the community theater’s terrible shows and its vainglorious playwright/director/diva.
The plot turns on his decision to finally write a candid review, which leads to farcical confrontations and confusions, riding on a riotous insider’s look at the allure of the stage, art vs. commerce, enthusiastic amateurs, arrogant pros, and of course, critics. Sitting there in my press seat, I could feel the playwright teasing me and my colleagues as the characters sparred over aesthetics, finances, ethics, and the theater’s love/hate relationship with the press, including the problematic practice of complimentary tickets.
I was sorry to miss the season opener, Miss Julie, since I’m up for seeing anything this company does. Luckily, Strindberg’s fervid study of class, sex and power is having a limited reprise at Boston’s Modern Theatre at Suffolk University, September 15–25. The repertory hats switch again, as Kropf directs a cast of Fielding, Fischer and Withers.
The River photos by Edward Boches
The Kritik by Sara C. Walsh
Miss Julie by Anton Anderson
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