Higher Ground, the Film

Testing the Evangelical Experience

             A movie on the shelf of our local video store caught my eye last week. The cover said something about a young woman coming of age through a journey of doubt and questioning. I thought at first it might be a religious movie, but then I noticed the R rating, which ruled out hokey piety. And I’m all about doubt and questioning. So I took a chance and rented Higher Ground.

Higher Ground director and star, Vera Farmiga

            Good thing the description on the case was sufficiently vague. If I’d known beforehand it was about Jesus freaks struggling to keep their faith and optimism in the face of life’s disfiguring blows, I would have put it back on the shelf, figuring that faith in Jesus would somehow win out in the end, none of my questions about life would be answered, and I’d be left feeling slightly irritable that I’d wasted my time watching it.

            But the actual film is nothing like that stereotype. As gentle as it is savage, as merciful as it is just, Higher Ground, recently released on dvd, is a serious, thoughtful work about the real lives of homegrown, American, Evangelical Christians.

            I’m familiar with Evangelical culture. Though raised in a Unitarian household, I also grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s in Lancaster County, PA, then a dominantly agricultural region governed by a traditional, Christian fundamentalist morality which, of course, almost no one could live up to. I learned to get along with fundamentalists because there wasn’t anyone else around to play with. My first kiss with my first girl friend was in a corn field. My closest neighborhood friend through junior high and high school was a Missouri Lutheran who believed in the Bible literally.

            Yet there was also suspicion. My Unitarian interior, fostered by my parents, always understood that, no matter how much I seemed to be accepted by my friends, teachers, and acquaintances, they all most probably and not always secretly believed I and my whole family were going to hell.

            By the time Jesus freaks appeared in the 1960s, rising out of the hippy culture and, in a sense, as an alternative to it, I was more than distrustful of Christian conservatives. They passed too many judgments, left too much out, bullied presumed sinners they didn’t even know with venomous enjoyment. Also, by then I’d had my own spiritual experiences on psychedelic drugs and didn’t want to be told what I needed to do to save my soul. No religion, cult, or sect has a corner on the longing for an eternal home where we may find happiness without fear of wrath or destruction. That’s a basic human longing.

            With complete respect, then, Higher Ground portrays that longing as it expresses itself within a congregation of ardent Evangelical believers who go about their busy lives of serving the Lord while supporting each other as extended family through one after another of life’s temptations, triumphs, and tragedies.

            At the center of the tale is Corinne, a young mother played with astonishing subtlety by Vera Farmiga, who also directs. Even in childhood Corinne seems always a little outside the circles she moves in, always a little puzzled by the behavior she sees around her.

            Yet she strives to participate. In a harrowing scene, when her infant daughter is missing in the wreckage of a freak automobile accident, she cries out in desperation for God. When the child is rescued her husband proclaims it’s God’s answer to her cry. The couple become Christian, joining an Evangelical congregation and receiving full-immersion baptism in a local creek.

            But Corinne, though she tries, never seems wholly comfortable, either in her marriage or in her church. She never enjoys sex, which she tries to avoid, and she can’t seem to fully sign on to the doctrines, either—especially regarding deference to the men. When she tries to speak out on matters of faith, she is reprimanded by the pastor’s wife, who reminds her that it is not a woman’s place to preach. When she consents to see a marriage counselor before leaving her husband, the church therapist—a self-described “prophet of God”—tells her she is possessed by Satan.

            Yet with the possible exception of the therapist, none of the many characters in the film is stereotyped. They don’t speak with one hackneyed voice, their spiritual yearning is portrayed authentically, their longing for community in communion with a divine creator and savior is universal, even if others do not thrill to the same conceptualizations. We live in bewildering times. The Evangelical life portrayed in Higher Ground is a response to these times, but not at the expense of the humanity of the characters portrayed.

            Will Corinne leave the community where her life has been centered for a dozen years or more and go out into the world on her own? It seems so, but we can’t be quite sure. The emotional tug of security in the group is a powerful force she must overcome. Anyone who has experienced the turmoil of breaking with a group identity and striking out on one’s own knows the feeling. That’s the remarkable thing about this film. It humanizes a group all too often demonized on one hand and sanctified on the other. In doing so it comments with elegant delicacy upon the helplessness we all encounter, no matter what our ideology, when we come face-to-face with existential circumstances we may never be able to understand.

            Higher Ground is adapted from a memoir, This Dark World, by Carolyn S. Briggs, who also collaborated on the screenplay. The character Corinne, played so expertly by Ms. Farmiga, is Ms. Briggs’ screen persona, though apparently the film diverges from the book, I suspect to crank up dramatic tension. In any case, the book was quite well received among the hip intelligentsia, as the film has also been. A more interesting question is what Evangelicals think of it.

            Personally, I admired it. I liked the music, too, much of it played live in group worship situations and other communal gatherings. It’s Christian contemporary, which can be quite as lively and heart-felt as any secular song of love and longing.

            But most of all I liked the sheer artistry of the film, a story told about people I’ve tended to avoid in a way that makes me feel their frustrations, joys, and pains as I would feel my own. In that sense the film reaches beyond its ready-made niche to speak to the wider culture, a bridge, however fragile, between Evangelicals and the rest of us, softening hardened perceptions.

            That’s the value of good art. We need more of it in our fractious world.

Lebanon, Pa—The Movie

A Diamond in the Dung

             It was hardly noticeable among the flashy new releases and kinky comedies on the shelves at my fast-paced neighborhood video store. In fact, there was just a single copy. But the title jumped out at me. Lebanon, Pa. I know Lebanon. I grew up twenty or thirty miles down the road in neighboring Lancaster.

            Why would anyone make a film about Lebanon?

            I saw from the jacket it had won a few festival awards. Named the best film made in Pennsylvania in 2010. Hardly a great distinction, but an honor all the same. What could this movie be about?

            The brief synopsis on the cover described a jilted and jaded advertising jockey in Philadelphia who returns to his birth place in Lebanon, PA, to settle his father’s estate. There he finds a teen-age distant niece who is pregnant and an attractive, unhappily married school teacher in a position to help. Inevitable interactions follow, and everyone learns lessons and is changed.

            Not something I would ordinarily rent. But the title intrigued me. I decided to check it out.

            I’m really glad I did. Lebanon, Pa, written, directed, and edited by freshman film maker Ben Hickernell, is easily the most honest and authentic portrayal I’ve ever seen of ordinary life in the suburbs and small towns spreading out from urban America. And it’s never been more topical, with Pennsylvanian Rick Santorum running for President on a Biblical platform which puts the reproductive rights of women on a chopping block.

            But the topicality is incidental to the full and fair hearing the film gives to opposing sides of the urban-rural divide in America.

Rachel Kitson as CJ

            When CJ (Rachel Kitson), a high school senior, becomes pregnant, her boy friend rejects her but later is forced by his father to step up to say he’ll marry her. The parish priest emphatically agrees, and so does Andy (Ian Merrill Peakes), her single dad—Mom died several years before—who has his hands full with her and her insolent younger brother Chase (Hunter Gallagher).

            This tense scene is just about to break out in the open when Will (Josh Hopkins) arrives in town from Philadelphia. His parents had separated long ago and he went to the city to live with his mother. He hardly knew his father. But now, as the only child and his mother still bitter, it’s up to him to go to Lebanon, clean out his father’s house, and sell it.

            CJ tells Will her secret. She’s pregnant but she wants to go to college. She’s looking into abortion.

Josh Hopkins as Will

            That puts Will in the middle between CJ and Andy, who thinks abortion is an abomination while Will has a pro-choice bumper sticker on his late-model VW Bug. Later, after a pair of town red necks beat him up, he tears it off. That comes after he’s further offended folks by getting drunk and familiar in public with Vicki (Samantha Mathis), CJ’s teacher, which in turn brings her irate husband storming to his door to claim his wife. With that, Will’s status in town as an outsider and outcast is sealed.

            This is a values film, obviously, and in watching it I feared I’d rented a pro-life movie out of Regent University. But no. Like life, this film isn’t that simple. Both sides are compassionately represented—the pro-life religious mainstream of Lebanon and the pro-choice alternative centered at the “Planned Parenting” clinic in Philadelphia. But, as in all communities in America today, not everyone in Lebanon is a pro-life religious conservative.

Ian Merrill Peakes as Andy

            Will CJ defy the consensus opinion—get an abortion and follow her plan to go to college in Philly? Or will she submit to the pressure from her father, her boy friend’s family, her pastor, and her peers to stay in Lebanon and raise a family? I could only hope but I could not predict what she would do until the end. To say any more would be to say too much. But the truth of the film’s characterizations and events reminded me a whole lot of my own teenage years in Lancaster in the 1950s. Things haven’t changed that much in southeastern Pennsylvania with its pig-headed, paranoid, Pennsylvania Dutch brand of Christian fundamentalism. Lebanon, Pa captures that traditional, settled ambiance—forever caught in a moral struggle between church and bar, Saturday night and Sunday morning—with the keen and faithful eye of a country music ballad.

            In the end, after all sides are fairly and truthfully represented and just about everyone we’ve met in town becomes involved, CJ must make her own decision. I found the result satisfying. But loose ends are left dangling, as they would be in life. There is no resolution to the abortion debate, but there is resolution for CJ and, perhaps, even for Will. Samantha has some things to work out. Andy certainly does. And brother Chase has grown up a little himself.

            The performances of all the actors are engrossing, but particular credit must go to Kitson as CJ, Peakes as Andy, and Hopkins as Will for the fullness of their portrayals. That would have been impossible without a nuanced, well-crafted script, which handles hot-button issues, particularly abortion, fearlessly and fairly with the jury simply dismissed—no side of the issue either justified or vindicated. Life goes on, happier for some than for others for the time being but same-old same-old for most.

            Critics seem to have given Lebanon, Pa mixed reviews—some disparaging it, others praising it highly. I’m with the latter. It’s a rare kind of movie—low-key, not very innovative, but truthful and heartfelt to the core, and that alone makes up for a lot. Its main fault is a spastic flow of continuity from shot to shot within scenes—the only reminder that this is the work of a youthful, relatively inexperienced, but very promising film maker.

            Rent it, if you can, and see for yourselves. I predict you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Mr. Marmalade: Neither Sweet Nor Tangy

 

            I wish I could blame it on second night. I’ve done enough theater to know that second night often has lead in its pants after the climax of opening the night before. So, as a member of the audience on second night, maybe I’m wrong to say that I don’t think Mr. Marmalade is a winner.

            Mr. Marmalade is the play (by Noah Haidle) that opened at the Generic Theater in Norfolk, VA, on Feb. 10. In the interests of full disclosure, I was cast to be in that play but decided to work on another project.

            I looked forward, though, to see what director Donna Dickerson and my almost-cast mates would do with it.

            But I’m not sure anyone could do much of anything with it. The script is not very clear. Or rather, it’s clear through muddy water.

            We know that Lucy, a four-year-old girl played by adult actor Celia Burnett, is isolated in her own imagination and in many ways victim of it. We catch on that her new little friend Larry, played by Andre Fedyszn, is her fragile connection to the outside world, and we see a thin ray of hope that she and Larry can be okay, somehow. Or not.

            But those are serious themes. So we have to wonder why Lucy’s mother—Sookie, played by Rene Finkenkeller—is a caricature, serving, perhaps some kind of broad satire. Similarly, the horny guy she brings home from the office one night (Brian Cebrian), Lucy’s uber-teen baby sitter Emily (Missy Hayes Mohr), her sleazy boy friend (Brian Cebrian again), and even Mr. Marmalade’s fey personal assistant Bradley (played by Dean J. Schaan)—they’re all caricatures, serving, perhaps, some kind of broad satire. But this undercuts any seriousness we might feel for Lucy’s situation. Or are we watching an R-rated cartoon?

            As a result, there is about Mr. Marmalade a kind of strange flatness where tragedy and comedy, realism and farce, almost cancel each other out while the deeper meaning of the play is more a thought than a feeling.

            The marvel to me is that this play has a production history going back to 2004, including a New York City run. A number of regional theaters have undertaken it.

            The Generic cast does its best, shifting with the currents as they swim their way from camp to sentimentality to boorish hostility to an imaginary Parisian cafe with live musicians playing “La Vie en Rose” as Lucy dances romantically with Mr. Marmalade (Christopher Kypros), the middle-aged, reformed alcohol-and-drug-addicted workaholic.

            It’s a lovely scene. But, as with most of the rest of the play, we just don’t know what to think. And that doesn’t move us very much.

            See for yourself. Mr. Marmalade runs Thurs.-Sun. through March 4 at the Generic Theater, Downunder at Chrysler Hall in downtown Norfolk. For reservations, call 757-441-2160.

Authentic to the Core

Martin Luther King Day at The Venue

Martin Luther King Day was charged, though not overwhelming, last night at The Venue's open mic. There was also a lot of friendliness in the crowd as the usual line-up of diverse talent, some of it outstanding, some so interesting you couldn’t stop watching, took to the stage for their five (or ten) minutes of fame.

            Then the last person on the sign-up list came up. She was an elderly black woman who couldn’t walk very well, had to be helped onto the stage. She wore long, full skirts, a colorful jacket, some kind of full-headed scarf or cap, and great big black clunky orthopedic shoes. She intended to read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, she said.

            I’d already seen school children in DC read the speech earlier on the PBS NewsHour, so I recognized many of the phrases all over again. But this scene was somehow more striking. This woman had been there in 1963, here in Norfolk when they closed down the schools rather than integrate. Now she’s a grandmother, probably a great-grandmother, standing on the stage behind the microphone, holding her book, and reading the speech that seems to have become like the Star-Spangled Banner for a lot of people, not just black folks. She didn’t read that well, either, but that just added to the scene. Here, I thought, is a representative of those southern Negroes King keeps referring to in his speeches (except it’s a woman, not a man) and who he represented in his deeds and, in fact, really did, like Moses, lead to a promised land. For many, his dream has come true. And if equality and prosperity have not yet fully arrived in Mississippi, here in Norfolk blacks and whites are coming together in places like The Venue, sharing their perspectives, their visions, and their time. Talk about the power of a dream!

            I’ve experienced few moments so magnetic as those I spent listening to that black great-grandmother reading King’s speech with clarion passion, stumbling over words, losing her place, but forging on to the great crescendo, “Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m  free at last!”

            So much life and experience reverberated beneath that simple scene. It was authentic to the core. I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else on Martin Luther King Day. It was a perfect moment, when past, present, and a hopeful future became one together, and time itself seemed to stand still.

New from The Virginia Playwrights’ Forum

A Kind of Conscience Is Interesting Theater

            A company of nine actors and two directors have obviously put heart and soul into bringing the work of six new, ten-minute plays to the stage of Norfolk’s Venue at 35th for a two-weekend run which began Nov. 5. The result is an evening of interesting, if not always flawless, theater.

            All the plays but one are the work of local playwrights of the Virginia Playwrights Forum. The lone exception is by a student in the MA program in playwrighting at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, connected here through her teacher, whose own short play is also in the line-up.

            The plays have been gathered under the title A Kind of Conscience, suggesting some link in each to a moral dilemma that may not quite fit the norm of what we understand as “conscience.” But what that “kind of conscience” is may not be easy to spot in all the skits.

            And perhaps the word “skits” is not quite appropriate to describe this ten-minute-play form. Surely there is a particular kind of craft to it, which, judging by the examples currently on display at The Venue, seems to demand a dramatic situation focused upon a single, pointed moral or philosophical idea. It helps if the presentation also entertains an audience.

            A Kind of Conscience opens with a learned—perhaps a better word is “erudite”—contribution, Patti Wray’s “Shylock: The Jew that Shakespeare Drew.” It’s a clever idea. Shylock, played with aplomb by Cliff Hoffman, brings a lawsuit against his creator, William Shakespeare, for racial profiling and defamation of character. Hearing the case are three judges personifying Ancient Theater, Elizabethan Theater, and, in an amusing touch, Modern Theater, who is trying to catch up by reading The Merchant of Venice for her first time as the trial unfolds.

            That’s one of a few good laughs in the piece, which, however, comes to a questionably simple verdict that seems hastily developed. But what strikes me most is Wray’s documented data on the depth of prejudice against Jews found in the literature of Shakespeare’s England, where, as her Shylock points out, the elite systemically vilified and ghettoized his people—unless, of course, they needed to borrow money.

            Cheryl Sharp’s personification of Modern Theater catches attention. E. Mike Ziegler and Dale Watson as theaters Ancient and Elizabethan, having less to work with from the script, come across more stereotypically.

            Next up on the program is “Memorial Day” by Denise Dillard, a witty writer who works in layers of feelings, often contradictory, which subtly or secretly gnaw at her characters, as in last summer’s Jack and Jillian, previously reviewed in this column.

            In the present piece, on a contemporary Memorial Day a bored teen-aged daughter arrives with her mother to lay flowers on the grave of her grandfather, killed in World War II. Unexpectedly, her great-grand mother—her mother’s grandmother—shows up with flowers, too. Only they’re not really for the man the younger women think they’re for. Long-kept secrets spill out,

            Amelia Dobbs as the teenage daughter and Angela Best as her mother make a believable pair of family members—each consistently straining at the tether of the other—while Bobbi Hite keeps everyone guessing until the end, when the meaning of it all is made clear in a single concluding line reminiscent of that old Rolling Stones song, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

            Closing the evening’s first act is John FX  Delaney’s chilling—at times over-chilling—”Showers,” a play of Nazi evil in which a German Jew, once decorated for heroism for his country in World War I, is sent to the showers—that is, to the gas chamber—by a cold-hearted World War II commandant who is impervious to appeal.

            Joel King is The Commandant, as despicable a Nazi as anyone has ever seen, yet at times I thought I detected a comical hint of Arnold Schwarzenegger in his bombastic delivery. Perhaps that’s not inappropriate.

            Mike Ziegler is on top of his game as the persecuted innocent, Prisoner 1736, who is led out of The Commandant’s office unaware of the multiple atrocities about to be visited upon him and his family. Jonathan Hite as Schmidt, the Nazi guard, is steadfastly anonymous, a feat worth noting in any actor.

            Following an intermission, Act II begins promisingly with Shari Graber’s “The Big Success,” initially a witty satire at the expense of phonies in the world of art patrons and critics. But it ends in poignancy, a portrait of a starving artist trapped in a Vincent-van-Gogh vise of impoverished anonymity.

            Jonathan Hite is Marty, the starving artist attending the gallery opening of his latest paintings. Amelia Dobbs is Claudine, who runs the gallery. The opening is proclaimed a rousing success. A wealthy, pretentiously artsy couple, played by E. Dale Watson and Angela Best, speak for all the unseen gallery patrons in their extravagant praise for the new work, given the nod as well by art critic Vincent Montague. (Hampton Roads audiences will undoubtedly get the lampoonery).

            However, there are no sales, and, though Claudine encourages Marty to “bask in the glow” of his big success, it slowly emerges that without a sale Marty is...well, best to leave that detail for paying audiences and say only that the piece uses satire effectively before, in a questionable shift of mood, it twists the knife. For their part, Hite and Dobbs glide along well together in their shaky partnership as promoter and client.

            Providing the gallery setting are a number of easels displaying paintings worthy of attention, the work of local artist Woody McBlair. Hopefully his career is going better than Marty’s!

            “The Trunk,” by Wilkes University playwrighting student L. Elizabeth Powers, is a morality tale set in the hinterland between the death and the final destination of a man who is trying to “take it with him.” The “it” in question is a large trunk full of memorabilia from what he perceives as his failed life.

            Cliff Hoffman is the Man in this case, met on “Platform One” by Jonathan Hite as the Ticket Agent, who informs him he can only take carry-on baggage with him on the train. But since it seems he cannot let the trunk go, he must take it to “Platform Two” to catch another train for a different destination.

            The allegory soon becomes apparent, as the Man, well played by Cliff Hoffman, is essentially guided by Hite’s calming therapeutic approach to reconcile with himself and make the better choice, as all would agree who can relate to an either-or nature in an afterlife. Also appearing poignantly in flashbacks is Angela Best as the Man’s Wife.

            Jean H. Klein’s “Curtain Call” closes the evening with a woozy fantasy of the theater in which the line between life and art is all but erased.

Here, an actor, having just been diagnosed with cancer, can no longer distinguish between himself and Terry, his character, who is a terminal cancer patient. The actress playing Olga, Terry’s wife, tries to help her colleague find perspective and sort out his identity crisis. Meanwhile, the actor playing Mike, the man Olga marries in Act II after Terry dies, is growing increasingly impatient with  waiting in the wings for his part to begin.

            For it seems Terry’s meltdown is happening before an audience which has come to see the play, and as his loss of reality infects the others the play falls apart,  an ultimate theatrical bomb.

            Cheryl Sharp as Olga, Joel King as Terry, and E. Dale Watson as Mike carry on like troupers, but somehow the piece’s promising psycho-social punch doesn’t quite land. Are these actors really in a live play or are they bickering with each other downstairs in the Green Room? We’re supposed to believe the former, but too often it seems to be the latter.

            Kathleen L. McBlair and Aliki Marie Pantas divide directorial duties, with Pantas in charge of “Memorial Day” and “The Trunk” while McBlair handles the remaining four. Together they have mounted an evening worthy of their obviously considerable effort. Pantas’ sound design deserves special mention.

            The ten-minute play is something of a novelty, but with so many playwrights at work here in Hampton Roads an evening of shorts is an ideal way to display their varied talents all in one evening. There are two more performances, Friday and Saturday, Nov. 12 and 13, at 8 p.m. at The Venue, 631 35^th St., Norfolk. Tickets are $12. Call 757-469-0337 for reservations.

“Nothing Is More Real Than Nothing”

Beckett Plays Well at The Venue

Samuel Beckett’s classic, Waiting for Godot—a long play about nothing—opened at The Venue on 35th in Norfolk Friday night (Oct. 14), as an earnest cast tackled the difficult script with enough gusto to make it work. If, that is, you don’t mind sitting through two-and-a-half hours about nothing.

Then again, is it really about nothing? It says it is—several times, cleverly and often eloquently. But if Beckett really means that, you must conclude that, to him, nothing is something worth talking about. And talking, and talking. Beckett was Irish, guaranteeing a certain amount of blarney well fermented in a no-nonsense Roman Catholic education.

He was also a disciple-friend of his countryman, novelist James Joyce. They met in 1928 in Paris, the cultural capital of the west between the world wars, and hung out together off and on with other writers and artists until Joyce’s death in 1941. Their experience, shaped by a Catholic education followed by the First World War, the excesses of the jazz age, and the Great Depression, gave rise to a kind of nihilism based in the perception that life is essentially meaningless—so much so as to be absurd.

And if nothing else Waiting for Godot, first produced in Paris in 1953, is absurd.

Two homeless tramps, Estragon and Vladimir, occupy an undefined space with a bench and a spindly tree, waiting for Godot to come. Instead, after a time, a pompous capitalist, Pozzo, shows up, dragging his slave, Lucky, behind him on a rope. Foolishness reigns, conversations go nowhere, clichés fly like spit balls, all manner of human pretensions are mocked, slapstick pratfalls abound. There’s even a fart joke in Act II.

But, of course, it’s all quite serious. This is modern life, a Chaplinesque comi-tragedy of a humanity whose meaningless lives are but a blip in the eternity of an indifferent universe. We are born in a graveyard and the best we can do is find a way to entertain ourselves until we disappear. If, like Estragon and Vladimir, we have each other, it’s an addiction more than a free choice. As the two hobos say more than once, they’re happiest when they’re not together.

It’s good to live in a city where we can see this theatrical museum piece performed in a miniature theater that must be reminiscent of its first production. Director Denise Dillard has done a sophisticated job of mounting it. Viewing it is so much like looking into a time gone by that we can almost imagine the French Gestapo patrolling 35th Street outside. And there is much that applies to our situation today in the U.S.—the poverty and abuse rampant in a decaying, unequal society, the sense of chaos and madness lurking in every silence.

But it’s hard to avoid saying that it’s all a bit tedious. Some people seem to enjoy that. I never particularly have.

Dillard offsets the tedium a bit with periodic pauses in the onstage action while readers sitting to the right and left of the stage provide biographical and historical information. An actor portraying Beckett himself occasionally appears to add the author’s take on life and art. Some of what he says essentially explains the play, as in “Nothing is more real than nothing.” These interludes are helpful in filling out the play’s context.

The program notes inform us that this is a “workshop/documentary style production,” with one of the readers, Anna Sosa, also serving as prompter. Her services were frequently required by all the actors, which, it must be said, slowed things down when they’d already become tedious.

However, despite tedium, despite nothingness, despite inconsequential dialogue and virtually no plot, the actors make it entertaining enough to win our affection for their hopeless plight. Henry D’Alonzo and Mike Zeigler as Vladimir and Estragon have a winning chemistry together. Bill Armstrong’s exalted pomposity as Pozzo fulfills the character’s absurd ego-mania, and Andrei Fedyszyn’s portrayal of Lucky, with its schizoid personality shift from abject, faceless slave to babbling intellectual and back again, almost steals the show.

In a minor role, Matt Cole is affecting as the boy-messenger sent in at the end of each of the two acts to report to the tramps that Godot won’t be coming today but will come tomorrow. Cole also doubles as Beckett in the narrative breaks, while Tiffany Armstrong is the second off-stage reader.

Credit must certainly go to Anna Sosa for the authenticity of her costumes and to Aliki Pantas for her careful and precise lighting design.

And who is Godot?

Obviously, Godot is God, or at least the god the author was promised by the Church, and those poor souls who wait for him wait in vain.

If Beckett is to your taste—or even if he isn’t—you can see him well replicated in this faithful Venue production which runs through Oct 23—Friday and Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $12—students and seniors $10. For reservations or more information, call 757-469-0337.

Ambition Opens 2011-12 Season at the Generic

Enron Exposes the Criminal Roots of Irrational Exuberance

Norfolk’s Generic Theater opened its 31st season Friday night (Sept. 9) with the Virginia debut of British playwright Lucy Prebble's Enron, a seriously ambitious project for a company of avocational actors and technicians who are not likely to make even gas money for their obvious hard work and dedication. Let’s hope, at least, they get an excess of love and appreciation from packed houses for bringing this important show to the stage way-down-under in Chrysler Hall.

Do you remember Enron? I barely did, after the mind-numbing procession of corporate malfeasance that followed, continuing, of course, to this day. Yet remembering the Enron scandal is instructional, for with hindsight it becomes apparent that the energy company’s collapse was a canary in a coal mine. It signaled the presence of the subtle poison of self-undoing which unregulated free market capitalism had injected into our social contract, especially when practiced by certain highly torqued alpha males whose natural habitat is Texas.

Not that Texas has a monopoly on toxic alpha males in this land of the free. Wherever brains and massive ego outweigh common sense and old-fashioned decency, you will find the Jeff Skillings and Andy Fastows of this world busy dreaming, scheming, and making deals—smart guys who vastly underestimate their capacity for human error or, in obsolete parlance, Biblical sin.

“Sin,” in fact, may be the appropriate word for it, since Enron, though disguised as a contemporary docu-drama (if ten to fifteen years ago can be called contemporary), is really a traditional tale of three men in positions every bit as powerful as any classic monarch (Ken Lay) and his most trusted lords (Skilling and Fastow), whose vaulting ambition brings them down and, with them, many thousands of ordinary folks tied to their fortunes. You remember the news stories. What those guys pulled off was too clever for common understanding. It took place in an orgy of self-indulgence and narcissism, the epitome of Baby-Boomer excess, where somehow veneration for a pantheon of psychedelic saints morphed into a giddy chase after ever-more clever ways of appearing uber-rich when, in fact, there was no money in the bank, let alone illumination in the mind.

Matt Friedman, whose sharp direction was behind last season’s satisfying Darwin in Malibu at the Generic, takes up the formidable chore of bringing Enron to fulfillment as a large-cast musical with high-tech edge. Video projections surround the audience on three sides at regular intervals, with a main screen high on an upstage wall. Voice-overs and a library of music cues and sound bytes provide a cinematic overlay to the live action. Sophisticated lighting, enhanced with all manner of colored novelty blinkers and pulsers, add energy and excitement to much of the action. A cast of 24, many playing multiple roles, including singing and dancing, must have required countless hours of rehearsal. Don’t even ask how Matt Friedman spent his summer.

Of course, it’s the story that carries the play, and it’s the characters who weave the story. In Enron, Playwright Prebble manages to create a fairly riveting narrative of a complex, even arcane, web of financial maneuvers and manipulations that I, for one, strain in vain to comprehend. But I can understand what it’s adding up to because the characters, in their arcs from a rising “irrational exuberance” to descent into ruin and disgrace, are clear.

Ken Lay, the founder of Enron, likes to see himself as the benevolent patriarch of the corporation. As played by Chris Kypros, he comes across as an old-fashioned Chamber-of-Commerce type who believes business is America’s religion. He easily becomes enabler to the get-rich-quick schemes proposed by Skilling, played by Kent Collins, who himself is brought to a higher level of corruption by a numbers man, Andy Fastow, played by Ethan Marten.

Marten’s Fastow—bordering on psychopathic—is a work of art, a stand-out performance. His accounting bargain with the devil, symbolized by three dancing reptilian figures he plays with like a lion trainer, is the show’s most pointed, poison-tipped dagger. Collin’s Skilling, on the other hand, is much less blind to the danger he’s in and so more vulnerable. His undoing is his ego-mania, his arrogant conviction that he’s smarter than anyone else. Collins is convincing as the confident Skilling but less emotionally certain of the ruined Skilling, who was ultimately convicted of nineteen counts of conspiracy and fraud and sentenced to 24 years in prison, a mighty fall for a proud elitist. Fastow, by cooperating with prosecutors, got off with two counts and six years, though he was the brains behind the creative accounting that led to a debt of $30 billion and, in 2002, bankruptcy of a company once considered the leading light of American business genius.

As for Lay, he was charged with six criminal offenses but died before trial of a reported heart failure tainted by the suspicion he may have deliberately fallen on his own sword.

Completing the principal characters is Claudia Roe, played alluringly by Generic President Jeannette Rainey. Lay passes her over in favor of Skilling as company CEO, which turns a casual sexual relationship between her and Skilling into a smoldering distrust. Skilling eventually forces her out of the company, which saves her from prosecution later when the big guys fall. In the final analysis, it would not be too far wrong to say Roe is the play’s only winner, for her special project—a real-world power plant in India—is the only success that still stands when the giant house of cards built by the others finally falls. She’s also the only one of the bunch who’s honest, though her ambition is considerable as well. Rainey conveys these complexities with assurance.

Surrounding the principles are countless bits of competent performances by actors too numerous to name, the largely anonymous employees, investment analysts, traders, journalists, and family members of the principals—a vast chorus of citizens who appear and disappear in one fast-paced scene after another. Without them, the play would lose its sweeping scope, recreating a national rather than an individual tragedy.

Yet that sweeping scope brings with it enormous technical considerations, not the least of which is a scene change every few minutes. It’s nearly a three-hour play, so that’s a lot of scene changes. As the play wraps up, running crew members pushing flats and furniture about in the dark compete for focus with short scenes of denouement unfolding in various locations in the light. Meanwhile, opening night nerves and glitches were at times obvious throughout but will no doubt smooth over as the play’s run continues.

No mere theater review can do justice to the enormous investment of local time and talent that has gone into this production. But with video newscast performances by WTKR Channel 3 news anchor Barbara Ciara and WHRV/WHRO talk-show host Cathy Lewis splashed on the theater walls, you can begin to understand the scope of community involvement and support. Meanwhile, network video archives of some of our favorite political celebrities of the era—Enron cronies Bill Clinton, Alan Greenspan, and both George Bushes, to name the most prominent—remind us that Enron was a national scandal, not merely another case of corporate bad apples caught red-handed. We may not have known much about Enron at the time, but most of us voted for at least one of those enabling politicians, making us complicit.

Why retell this story now? The answer should be obvious to anyone who’s paying attention. The problem was never fixed. And at the 10th anniversary of 9-11, it’s impossible not to notice the synchronicity of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers with the collapse of Enron. Remembering that it was Osama bin Laden’s stated objective to bleed America until it is bankrupt, we can speculate that he needn’t have bothered. We’re obviously capable of bankrupting ourselves. Much of what we see in the flawed characters of Lay, Skilling, and Fastow is reflected in our own national hubris. There is a price to be paid for projecting ourselves as the best and smartest in the world, which is how we like to see ourselves. (Few outside our borders agree.) The Generic’s respectably professional, entertaining production is a must-see for any American seeking perspective on our current state of multiple national emergencies.

Enron continues at the Generic Thursday through Sunday until Oct. 2. All performances are at 8 except for Sunday matinees at 2:30. Tickets are $15 general admission, $12 for seniors, military, and students, and $10 for groups of ten or more. For information and reservations, call 757-441-2160 or, on the web, go to generictheater.org.