July 27, 2003
Art Overload
Whew - I'm all cultured out. I managed to squeeze in two shows in the Arts Festival on Friday. First up was a public reading by Pat McCabe (4.00pm, in the Radisson's Entertainment Centre). He announced that rather than his usual custom of reading pieces from various novels, he would just read from his next novel, Call Me the Breeze. And he did, without pause, for about an hour and a half. The lads either side of me were nodding off, not from the material, but the heat and the effort of focusing continuously for 90 minutes (of course, the pre-show pints had nothing to do with it). As for the novel, it is about a fat barman called Joey Tallon, who is working in a small border town during the Seventies, and is obsessed with a beautiful, unattainable American girl. From the excerpts, it features a good deal of dark fantasising on the part of the main character, shocking instances of violence and unrequited love - a new departure for a McCabe novel, then. Incidentally, the length of the excerpts seemed to give away a good deal of the plot, including a passage from the last chapter which suggests - to absolutely no one's surprise - that it all ends in tears.
Our attempts to get a bit of grub between shows was an unmitigated disaster - not helped by the fact that we spent the first hour of our search in Rabbitt's drinking pints. We didn't really have time for a sit-down restaurant meal, and after trying a number of bars, we went - with very heavy hearts - to O'Briens Sandwich Bar. I ordered a toasted sandwich. After quite a delay, a young wan came over to mournfully announce that she had burnt the sandwich. For F*ck sake!. So it was off to the Town Hall Theatre, sans grub, for the 8.00 pm show of Purple Heart.
The play, performed by the Steppenwolf theatre company, is set in 1972 and features Laurie Metcalf as Carla, a Vietnam War widow. She boozes - we assume - to blot out her grief, oblivious to her teenage son Thor's own pain, who struggles vainly for her attention. Her mother-in-law, Grace tries to impose some order into their lives, much to their irritation. As the first act unfolds, it becomes clear that the pain that Carla feels is the charade of grieving that she is forced to endure for a husband that beat her and that clearly didn't love her. The battle of wills between an increasingly desperate Carla, and Grace is interrupted when a stranger arrives. He is a soldier called Purdy, who has returned from Vietnam. Initially Carla ignores him, assuming that he is yet another buddy of her husband (i.e. someone that he went whoring with) and refuses to play the grieving widow routine with him. However, soon Carla and Purdy warm to each other - he too is wounded by the war, and sick of so-called convention. As the first act closes, it transpires that Purdy has no interest in reminiscing about her husband at but with her.
The first act is simply great drama. The playwright (Bruce Norris) has a great line in zinging one-liners and smart, funny, snappy dialogue, and there a couple of simply great sight gags. The direction is very much modelled on TV drama - scenes segue into each other simply through another smart piece of dialogue or physical act, just like a cut in a TV scene to focus our attention to something new. By the end of the first act, a couple of major plot points have been teed up and the audiences appetite has been duly whetted. Alas, the second act completely falls on its arse. I won't spoil it, but the earlier revelations are resolved in the most obvious manner, and the motivation is so completely at odds with what we have seen earlier as to make no sense. In truth, the play would have worked better as a one act play, since the pace of the direction, and the intelligence of the dialogue would have distracted from the plot's failings.
The acting is simply excellent. Laurie Metcalf is the most familiar of the cast, having appeared in Roseanne during it's entire run (she played Roseanne's sister, Jackie). Matt Roth plays Purdy as a laconic outsider - his deadpan exchange with Thor on the youngster's plan to plant a Vietnam-style booby trap for a girl who fancied him in school was the comic highlight of the play. Incidentally, Roth is married to Metcalf in real life. Rosemary Prinz played the mother-in-law anyone would gladly strangle to perfection - she allows Grace's own pain to filter through all of the fussing. As for the performance of Lucas Ellman (Thor), I'd like to march the entire Billy Barry school at gunpoint to the Town Hall Theatre to watch him, so they could see what a child actor is capable of doing. And to think he was only the understudy when this show played in Chicago .
One of my companions pointed out one of the cast of Neighbour's in the audience. Was it just a coincidence that the same person had been "working from home" that day. Which, to my mind, usually involves sitting in one's underpants until lunchtime, watching daytime TV and occasionally prodding a couple keys on the laptop. Who knows?
By the way, you can find a positive review of Purple Heart here(from the Chicago run), a more circumspect review here, and listen to a Rattlebag interview with Laurie Metcalf here (she sounds a bit bewildered, but that was mostly due to Tommy Tiernan sitting beside her) .
Posted by Monasette at July 27, 2003 07:54 PM | TrackBack