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Mourning glories By Robert Avila THERE'S CLEARLY SOMETHING in the work of playwright Wallace Shawn that resonates with the crew of Last Planet Theatre. Having launched the company five years ago with a successful, not to say ballsy, four-play Shawn festival, they're back for more. Again, it marks a beginning of sorts. With the Bay Area premiere of The Designated Mourner, Shawn's eerily prescient and scathingly funny 1996 play, Last Planet raises the curtain on a new home: a capacious converted ballroom in the Tenderloin, well equipped and more than respectable, with a cavernous stage, comfortable house seats, and gritty urban vistas out the bathroom windows. And the company remains as brazen as ever, infusing Shawn's ferocious satire with a giddy exuberance all its own. If at times it all threatens to come unhinged, this sharply executed, thoroughly inebriated production still animates more than it obscures Shawn's darkly prophetic and broodingly comic work. The play's principal narrator, Jack (Matt Leshinskie), the designated mourner of the title, has taken it upon himself – after the fashion of an ancient tribal custom he once read about – to describe a particular group now extinct and, but for him, entirely forgotten. Its most significant members are his ex-wife, Judy (Heidi Wolff), and her father, Howard (Charlie Reaves), a renowned poet and essayist. Jack admits he spent years trying to blend into their circle, which represents a comfortably insular and self-satisfied slice of the cultural and intellectual elite. As if to compensate for Jack's inherent untrustworthiness as a narrator, we hear also from Judy and Howard. The three interwoven monologues occasionally give way to dialogue between characters. A former acolyte of Howard's, Jack is embittered and determinedly lowbrow. "How should I begin to tell you about this remarkable man," he asks, "who responded so sensitively to the most obscure verses and also to the cries of the miserable and the downtrodden, sometimes virtually at the same instant, without ever leaving his breakfast table?" Jack's backhanded memorial to those who, as he puts it, not only read but also understood John Donne, inevitably probes his own insecurities, fantasies, and base behavior. Meanwhile, in a dreamlike fashion that's played up considerably in artistic director John Wilkins's elaborate and expressionistic staging, Jack's private rebellion finds its counterpart in a reactionary wave of political violence as the story of a failed marriage unfolds against the backdrop of an encroaching coup d'état. Throughout, Wilkins and his sharp cast infuse the play with a rambunctious and frenetic energy, its boldly physical style set off by a colorful and versatile design scheme. The sheer elaborateness of the staging competes with the hypnotic force of the dialogue at times, and the muscular acting sacrifices some nuance (especially between Leshinskie's supersize Jack and Reaves's slick but comparatively muted Howard). But at its zany best, the production brings its own arch, stylized cadence to the play's mocking assault on highbrow pretension. The exaggerated behavior and childish antics onstage likewise serve the neurotic, infantilizing dynamic in the triangle formed by Jack and the vaguely incestuous team of Howard and Judy. Other visual extrapolations – like an image of Jack basting and seasoning Howard's corpse – reach with still more comic fury into the repressed landscape of sex and death opened up by Shawn's play. Meanwhile, by using the full depth of the stage, Wilkins accentuates the way the play's competing narratives continually frame and reframe their subjects. In the characters' private apocalypse, cultural delicacy is overtaken by the perfection of torture. "I guess the search for more refined forms of punishment never comes to an end," Judy notes. "After all, there are so many ways that life can be squeezed out of a human body." Shawn's exquisite overlaying of the most intimate experience with our collective fate – of sexually repressed middle-class idylls with class conflict and mass murder – doesn't soon let go of your consciousness. Perhaps because, like all dreams, Shawn's ambivalent nightmare expresses not only fears, or a prophetic impulse, but also a quintessential wish fulfillment – one dramatized by Jack's retreat from "civilized" life into a realm of creature comfort and childlike innocence. This theme (a specialty of Shawn's since My Dinner with Andre and Aunt Dan and Lemon) also makes him a very American playwright. Few are better than Shawn at staging sex and death on the American stage. And while the story's nonspecific setting might echo recent South American or Eastern European history, it's more than the characters' unadorned accents that make us imagine it all happening closer to home. The impossibilities registered here – from sex and marriage to any settled life in a man-made jungle masquerading as the civilized world – take on a distinctly American tone. And if it sounds like a death knell, one might ask with the designated mourner if it wasn't, after all, about time. 'The Designated Mourner' runs Thurs/14-Sat/16, 8 p.m.; Sun/17, 7 p.m., Last Planet Theatre, 351 Turk, S.F. $15-$18. (415) 440-3505, www.lastplanettheatre.com. |
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