Cold feet

By Robert von Stein Redick

MENTAL: Deborah Hall in The Calling, playing at the Portland Stage Company.

From the hilltop of late November, when I began to look ahead to the winter season, I perceived a snowy barren stretching away towards the spring horizon, with only a few hearth fires in sight. You could say I was alarmed. While I am not among those who hear a death-rattle in every shake and stutter of the Portland theater community, the absence of several traditional champions of innovation, and a largely risk-averse season by the surviving (i.e. solvent and housed) companies, made for a decidedly chilly forecast. The winter of my discontent loomed long.

Yet the vital thing to notice about such vistas is not the sparseness of those warm refuges, but the fact that someone’s bothering to tend them at all. Portland’s story is not yet one of creative cold-kill, although hypothermia could set in at any time. And as the season grew nearer, and the count of small but intriguing plays crept upward, the lack of stand-out events seemed less important. In crossing a frozen plain, I began to reflect, a series of warm huts may be of more use than one or two sprawling chalets.

January

The first month of the winter season is the most inviting of all, thanks to two companies we don’t hear enough of. First up is She-Who-Loves, an original production by Figures of Speech Theatre, a Freeport-based company dedicated almost exclusively to touring — though you may have caught their clever Nightingale at the World Puppetry Festival in Portland last year. Fresh from six months of study and performance in Japan, the troupe combines elements of Japanese Noh with puppetry and music in this adaptation of a Comanche legend. Intended for adults, She-Who-Loves describes a village withered by drought, prayers to the spirits for release, and an answer in the form of a request for burnt offerings of cherished possessions. Debates ensue, but it’s an orphan girl who discovers just what she must sacrifice.

The second original in January is actually a premiere revisited: Clay Graybeal’s The Calling, a hopeful if harrowing story about surviving mental illness, physical and emotional abuse, or even a career in social work. See the current issue’s “This Just In” for my talk with Graybeal, director Michael Rafkin, and lead actor Deborah Hall.

February

The pickings grow rapidly slimmer in February. In fact, my own picks start and end with Leaving Queens, at the Portland Stage Company. A world premiere, Queens concerns a burned-out Irish photographer just back from covering a war, and her hunt for a vanished father through the streets of early-20th Century New York. Premieres are, by very definition, unproven, but with the combined talents of playwright Kim D. Sherman (best known for Hadley’s Mistake, about Hemingway’s ill-used wife) and lead actor Alice Zienneau, we can hope that this retrospective on the immigrant experience will dish up a lot more than nostalgia.

March

The hot spot in late winter may well be Lewiston, where the Public Theatre presents Sideman, the Tony-Award winning drama about the relationship between a jazz trumpeter and his son, and the little musical world they patch together over 30 years. Since that span carries us from the golden years of the ’20s to the postwar displacement of jazz by rock as America’s quintessential sound, we’re also treated to something of a history of the music. This play would be worth it for the music alone; fortunately, it’s also a solid and compassionate family story.

I’ll also be hoping for a righteous Macbeth from the talented troublemakers at the Theater Project. It’s hardly new material, but for sheer dramatic whollop, Shakespeare’s tale of a corrupt Scottish general and his “fiend-like queen” has yet to be topped.

Elsewhere, alas, we’re stuck with reruns. When Queens closes at Portland Stage, it will be replaced by the most undeserving and overplayed safe bet this side of Deathtrap: the ridiculous Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspre (Abridged). This lumbering assortment of Cro-Magnon humor and unpoetic impulse richly deserves oblivion; instead it will make a third visit to our area inside of nine months. In all fairness, my feelings about this play are in the minority; some of the most respected sourpusses in my business have called its humor “irresistible.” But then I always wanted a chance to push the big pusses around. If you attend, keep an eye out for me: I’ll be the scandalized square who doesn’t laugh at the vomit jokes.

Not to be outdone in the already-done department, the Seacoast Repertory Theatre in Portsmouth has actually managed to create an entire winter season out of other companies’ leftovers. One of these, Yasmina Reza’s ART, is actually so funny and brilliant that a new staging (this year’s was at the Ogunquit Playhouse in July) may well be a treat; catch it March 8 through April 8. But then come Big River, in which Huck Finn sings about being Huck Finn; and everybody’s favorite, Titanic. Could there be a less daring choice than that of a recently produced musical telling the same story as the largest-grossing film of all time? Maybe the commanders at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard will treat their crews to an inspirational evening.

April

Since premieres play such a key role in lighting up my wintry plain, it seems fitting that the end of the cold weather should usher in a Maine Playwrights’ Festival at the studios of the Acorn School for the Performing Arts. Details are sketchy at this point, but the idea’s a sound and very important one, and could be one step in keeping the Arts District from becoming a place devoid of local artists.

Otherwise, all eyes will be on Wit, one of the most well-received plays of the 1990s and the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. As intelligent, funny, and compassionate as that other monosyllabic one-act, ART (which it hardly resembles), Margaret Edson’s Wit tells the story of Vivian Bearing, a brilliant and unapproachable scholar of John Donne, who at age 50 is about to be slain by ovarian cancer. The drama is not so much her death but the sparring — with God, Donne, doctors, and herself — that precedes it, and brings death into the realm of the thinkable. It is also about two lives — Bearing’s and Edson’s — spent rapturously in love with language.

Who knows? If Portland Stage carries this one off, the cerebral deficit created by Wllm Shkspre might just balance out. And then it will be spring.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.