Hospitality suite How Portsmouth helped host Peace BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	The Peace of Portsmouth Written and performed by Greg Gathers and Marguerite Mathews. Produced by Pontine Theatre at the West End Studio Theatre, in Portsmouth, through May 8. Call (603) 436-6660.
	Backstage This July, the Two Lights Theatre Ensemble will mount one of Shakespeare’s more rarely staged revenge tragedies, Titus Andronicus, in which just about every actor is guaranteed an interestingly gruesome stage death. If you’re hankering to be eaten in a pie, auditions are: Friday April 29 in 403 Bailey Hall at USM’s Gorham campus, from 6 to 9 p.m.; and Sunday May 1 in Luther Bonney Auditorium at USM’s Portland campus, from 6 to 9 p.m. African-American actors and actors over 40 are especially encouraged to audition, and all are asked to prepare a Shakespearean monologue of two minutes or less. Call director Michael Toth at (207) 415-5278 with questions.

In August of 1905, Theodore Roosevelt gave our fair neighbor Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a brief thrill of fame. The time had come for diplomacy in the bloody Russo-Japanese War, and mediator Teddy chose Portsmouth as the setting for negotiations between Japanese and Russian envoys, who were charged with making a mutually agreeable peace. Portsmouth, naturally, was ecstatic. Not only would their local economy get a shot in the arm, but the little city of 10,000 would appear before the world as a grand and cosmopolitan locale, a destination for important worldly dealings. The story of Portsmouth’s month in the international sun is the basis of The Peace of Portsmouth, a smart and elegant piece of historical theater created and performed by Pontine Theatre Co-Artistic Directors Marguerite Mathews and Greg Gathers, at the West End Studio Theatre in Portsmouth.

Scripted entirely from primary documents of the era (mostly Portsmouth Herald columns), The Peace of Portsmouth presents a patchwork of the Portsmouth citizenry’s experience of the peacemaking. The real focus of this work is less the political play-by-play of the proceedings than Portsmouth’s fascinating palette of self-congratulatory local color, as the locals harbor a new sense of international importance and try to out-host each other with parties and excursions for the visitors. We hear breathless descriptions of the envoys’ conference room at the Navy Yard (green velvet draperies, mahogany furniture made especially for the event), human-interest patter about the 30 year-old Japanese tea that Mrs. Helen Knight served to the foreign guests, and an account of the two kids who entertained with bicycle tricks and impersonations. The result is a richly textured and quite witty little documentary study of turn-of-the-century Portsmouth manners, social history, and material culture.

That might sound a little dry, or at least a little academic. But Mathews and Gathers have conceived a surprisingly engaging multi-media production, mounted with turn-of-the-century photographs and staging techniques. Their show opens to a period piano tune (like all the music in the play, digitally mastered from the original wax cylinder recordings) with the two actors poised in impeccable vintage dress on either side of a framed screen. Slowly and wordlessly, they turn a crank to display a succession of striking old photographs of the Asian battlefields, enlarged and printed on a long roll of linen. These are the images by which Americans of the day would have known the horrors of the Russo-Japanese War, and this presentation of them reminds us of the power such images held in a pre-TV world.

From there, Mathews and Gathers traffic in a bevy of accents and props, the most enthralling of which are balsa wood cutouts of people, boats, and automobiles. Culled from old photos of international figures, city officials, and all stripes of locals, they make for particularly delightful stagecraft. In the play’s most impressive bit of staging, Mathews and Gathers use the cutouts like puppets to recreate the parade that welcomes the flotilla to the city: moving steamers, schooners, diplomats, and fancy cars past a tableau of New Hampshire men waving caps, ladies dressed in their finest, and kids dressed in pointy Nipponese hats. Even when Mathews and Gathers move on to other props (a fine portfolio of photographs, presented page by page; blow-ups of front pages of the Portsmouth Herald) the cutout Portsmouth citizenry remains positioned on shelves here and there around the stage, a constant and wide-eyed presence throughout the show.

The characteristics we see in that citizenry — provincialism and curiosity, self-importance and generosity, petty regionalist boosterism, and a desire to be part of the improvement of the larger world — are at once endearing and cause for the amused rolling of eyes. The locals are offended when the Japanese don’t pay enough attention to their minstrel show performers, weather what’s become a resilient rivalry with Kittery across the river, exult that no foreigners have yet beaten any locals at shuffleboard, and harbor bright, bourgeois hopes for World Peace.

We see here micro inklings of American traits that came to stay and swell — a less-than-nuanced understanding of other cultures, a rather muscular cultural nationalism, a beacon-of-hope goodwill toward that world that is as sentimental as it is, often, selective and simplistic. We also see the energy and creativity of a people, their love of spectacle and games, a robust generosity of spirit. The Portsmouth Peace is a richly conceived and gracefully executed look back at the manners of a younger America. Like pictures of your family from long ago, it is distantly familiar, amusing, and a little bit eerie. And even with a century’s worth of hindsight, it’s hard to look without affection.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com