 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
              
|
On Stage: 'When He Was Gone' History Center play overcomes its didactic intent Thursday, October 22, 1998 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
Against expectation, in spite of threateningly earnest intentions, something theatrical and gripping can still blossom.
'When He Was Gone'
When: Sat.-Sun. 1 and 3 p.m.
Tickets: Free with center admission; 412-464-6000.
Take "When He Was Gone," a brief living tableau and essay in comparative history by Lynne Conner, resident playwright-historian at the History Center.
You see the problem. As a play, "When He Was Gone" staggers under the burden of its didactic intent. We suspect, quite rightly, that we are being taught something - something wholesome and healthy, no doubt, but still, no one enjoys being lectured to.
And Lynne Conner's canny little play never entirely sheds that burden. Her portrait of two grieving widows, one bereft in 1862 by the Battle of Antietam, the other in 1972 by the Vietnam War, is all too obviously calculating in its contrasts and parallels (including that catchy near-anagram) and its determination to Make History Vivid - which is, of course, the corporate goal of Stages in History, the History Center's resident theater group that Conner runs.
That's the point. The product may be all well and good, but it's still a product designed toward a certain end. How can it have the free-floating discovery that gives theater its inner life?
To start, Conner's script does show some clever exposition. Anna (Bryn Jameson in 1862 mourning) and Irene (Chrystal Bates in 1972 casual denial) are posed in funereal grief - photographs on the wall of a museum. It helps that we are indeed in a museum, watching. A smug docent (Conner herself) gives a little lecture on the two - intelligent but glib, in gentle parody of just such a didactic event we assume we are there to see.
The docent leaves and the two women come to life to tell us that she got it wrong. Clever, but obvious. But then they begin to talk. And as the play relaxes its educational mission, it puts us in touch with a shared humanity.
The actors have a lot to do with it. Bates could speak 10 percent louder and Jameson could act 10 percent less, but both present living portraits who interest and move us.
In such a brief script, Conner can't expect to solve the time-travel-conundrum - which differences to acknowledge, how to relate existence frozen by the act of photography to "real" on-going lives? That is, Anna never wonders about the later life of herself and her four children, and Irene never comments on her "real" self, presumably still alive in 1998.
But no matter: Don't ask, don't tell.
The few differences that are acknowledged are well chosen. Meeting the African-American Irene, Anna assumes the sacrifices and ideals of the Civil War did have historical value, and the play notes lightly the irony of the long frustration of those ideals and the painful parallels to Vietnam.
Come to think of it, it's a pretty full 35 minutes. Take the grandparents and the kids.
|
||||||||||||||||||||
