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Drama Unfolds In Downtown Basement “Cell”
by Allan Appel | May 19, 2010 11:52 am
(1) Comment | Commenting has expired | E-mail the Author
Posted to: Arts, Downtown
An angry and desperate man is reading in the basement of 118 Court St.
He’s doing it in a play several times a week that the scrappy New Haven Theater Company has mounted in an unfinished lobby got up to look like a cell in which Middle Eastern terrorists are holding Western captives.
The play, which finishes its gripping run Thursday through Sunday, is Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, from 1991. It’s a group portrait based on the experiences of Europeans and Americans taken captive in Lebanon during that country’s years of civil war, 1982-1992.
“Unfortunately it’s something [still] quite relevant,” said the play’s director, Hilary Brown. But it’s not what you think.
In this three-hander, an Irish journalist, American doctor, and English professor who did not get tenure just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in Lebanon. Abducted, they become pawns in a civil war and international game.
Played with passion and fine timing by Peter Chenot (pictured top and left, Tim Reilly and Ian Sweeney), these men don’t know night from day, are never let out, are locked by long chains to the wall. They do not know if they’ll be ransomed, released, or killed.
However, these prisoners are not only not being water boarded or otherwise tortured, They are given the Koran and Bible to read, at least one square a day, with decently cooked vegetables and all the time in the world to support each other, or to tear each other apart.
That was Brown’s point of relevance. What drew her to the play was not politics but “what happens when all the chatter is stripped away” and people have only themselves and each other 24/7.
Each survives in his own way: The American Adam exercises, the Irishman Edward indulges a wicked dyspeptic wit and a gift for yarns, and the Englishman Michael tries to stay polite and civilized. Alliances shift as the men tell stories, invent and critique each other’s film scripts, pantomime sports, hear each other’s longing, discover the other’s weak points.
You remember that old line about two prisoners in jail together so long that all they need to do is say, “Joke # 11”—and they begin to laugh? Doesn’t apply here.
Whoever thought captivity could be such a romp and yet also remain horrifying? That’s the achievement of the text and the bare, low-cost, yet high-yield way in which it has been realized.
It’s a hilarious, inventive ride, steeped in riffs of verbal inventiveness that have the ring of both personal and cultural truth, as when Adam declares in a moment of deep frustration: “I hate these shorts. I want to wear America’s greatest invention: fresh, white Jockey shorts.”
You get to know these three people as if you were in the cell with them, as you indeed are.
New Haven Theater Company has led the way in town in using site-specific stages to tell stories. Click here for a story on its last year’s Glengarry Glen Ross mounted at the Wachovia Bank building at Church and Crown.
118 Court St., where this latest play takes place, was a 1985 addition to the original SNET structure built as a switching station in 1916 and completed in 1924, according to owner John Wareck. It now houses condos above and (still) unleased retail space below, where the “cell” play unfolded.
The lower basement of 118 Court, with its massive walls with peeling plaster, makes a perfect match for the McGuinness script. It’s as if the chained guys were half-imprisoned lions, half Roman gladiators fighting the lions—that is, themselves.
The wonder of the play from such a verbally bountiful Irish writer as McGuinness is also that perhaps the most moving moments among the men occur in gestures that are silent.
Three-quarters through, when Adam has been removed and presumably killed, Michael asks Edward if he had loved the American. After the answer, the literate Michael recalls how the Spartans would comb each other’s hair before they went into battle. Their enemies would jeer, but the Spartans won.
In the penultimate scene, that little verbal seed is harvested when it is now Edward’s turn, having been released, to leave Michael alone. We see him slowly dressing, putting on the shoes he has not worn in the entire play, pants, a jacket. They exchange many words, how Edward will look up Michael’s family.
Then Edward approaches and asks Michael to tie his cuffs, a job he could well do himself. It’s done so deftly and conveys so much it breaks a theater-goer’s heart.
But what brings down the house is the silence in which Edward then discovers a comb in his vest pocket, withdraws it, and grooms Michael’s hair.
The evening shows start at 8. The last show, Sunday, is at 2 p.m. Assistant Director is Hallie Martenson; stage manager Jim Clark; and lighting designed by T. Paul Lowry.
(Editorial disclosure: The New Haven Theater Company has co-produced staged readings of a play by the reporter.)
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posted by: N'Zinga Shani on May 19, 2010 2:25pm
Thank you to Allan Appel and the NHI for sharing this beautifully written informative piece. In the midst of political squabbles and economic challenges New Haven offers up this theatrical gem. This is but one of the beauties and benefits of a truly dynamic, multicultural and multifaceted city.
Community theatre is often rich in food for reflection; this play—as described here—seems to be a veritable mental and emotional feast. Thank you for sharing it with us.