Impressions of The Twelfth Labor: A Non-review
The Twelfth Labor
By Leegrid Stevens
Produced by Tutto Theatre
Company
MacTheatre
5600 Sunshine Dr.
Austin
8/21/12
I walked through the parking
lot of the MacCallum Fine Arts Academy in central Austin in the energy-draining
August heat that curls the very leaves of the trees. Tutto Theatre Company’s US premiere of Leegrid Stevens’ The
Twelfth Labor takes place in the Lab
Theatre, a black box space across the parking lot from the still-new Mac Fine
Arts Center. Black boxes are where
anything can and does happen. On
this night the first surprising impression in this black box was the sight of
the exploding set by Ia Enstera.
The house left end of the set and the upper wall of the upstage center
house wall seem to explode upward and away like a slow-motion film of a tornado
lifting effortlessly the logs of a log cabin one log at a time. This frozen explosion is the perfect
metaphor for the family in the house below. That family not only exploded in 1949, the time of the play,
but they are still exploding, as does every family today.
I have to state immediately
that I am highly involved with this play as a producer and board member of
Tutto Theatre Company. I can make
no claim of objectivity for these impressions, and I wouldn’t want to. But the play strikes me deeply (who
would produce a play that didn’t?), and I want to tell the world about it. That’s why I’m calling this a
non-review.
The base facts of the play
are that it’s about a hardscrabble Idaho farm family in 1949. Earlier, their patriarch, Forrest
Prater (Skip Johnson), had left the family temporarily for a construction job
on Wake Island in 1941, where, although a civilian, he was captured by the
invading Japanese. He spent all of
World War II in a prison camp, and by 1949 had still not returned home.
Forrest’s developmentally
delayed daughter Cleo (Erin Treadway), however, has persistent bright,
prophetic dreams of Forrest’s safe homecoming. On the other hand, Cleo’s mother Esther (Rebecca Robinson)
has lost all hope for the future in the misery of her endless labor operating
the farm and keeping the family together.
Hopelessness in the declining fortunes of the farm is the source of all
the conflicts of the play, and all the characters take action (or simply writhe
in place) out of their sense of desperation and widely varying visions of their
personal futures.
All the character
interactions show their conflicts, but at the same time the characters hold
each other with great tenderness.
For example, the acidly gossipy Hens (portrayed by Content Love Knowles,
Chris Humphrey and Helen Allen) take Esther under their wings to get her ready
for the awards ceremony.
Throughout the play, the characters play and often give each other food,
some of it rotten, but still. One
audience member remarked that the play was a story having delicacy, and, yes, I
can see it, right through the fight scenes.
At least part of this
underlying tenderness is due to Director Gary Jaffe’s sensitive direction. His blocking of the stage action, in
particular, is full of Baroque swirlings and asymmetric movements; these
qualities give surprise to many entrances and flashes of costume color against
the earth tones of Enstera’s set.
This movement style also heightens the Hens’ transit of the play, with
their bizarre and crisp speeches, dialogues and evil cluckings.
The play is a narrative
drama, but one of non-linear storytelling, so a la mode. Acts II and III depict fantasy
landscapes and different times, all in Cleo’s dreamland and seen through Cleo’s
eyes and spoken with Cleo’s voice.
And her language is incredibly rich, with Spoonerisms, neologisms and
imaginatively distorted songs and dialogues from period movies beloved by
Cleo. This is a strange turn for
any play, but the audiences embrace it from the first instant. The cast delights in their lines; they
take them (Cleo-speak) as a rhetorical challenge, to give as clearly as
possible the dialogues with all their subtle and double and triple meanings available
for the audience’s enjoyment. The
audience need not sit there with puzzled looks, wondering—what’s okasure?
What’s snovel? What’s coreshits?
Wray Crawford and Trey Deason
are standouts in this triumph of rhetoric and exposition, accepting the added
challenge of rapid-fire patter and punning in their Abbott and Costello
routine. I would recommend this
play to all my friends on the strength of acts II and III alone. They are that good.
Another variation from
modernist drama and literature (I’m sure you’ve stopped thinking Tennessee
Williams, Steinbeck and Faulkner long ago) is The Twelfth Labor’s act of breaking the centrality of story. Where modernist stories have a main
plot with subplots, The Twelfth Labor
maintains a balance of stories, and gives equal weight to all the plot
lines. All the stories are strong
and the play keeps its central secrets until late. So one wonders what is truly the central story here. More than half the play is seen from
Cleo’s point of view, but when Esther steps on stage one is convinced that the
play is really all about Esther.
Likewise, when Forrest takes us through the prison camp, and, in his
long monologue explains why he left about a quarter of himself there, we feel
as though everything was a lead-up to his character-revealing experience. And so it goes. When Esther and Donna (Megan Minto)
finally confront each other about their lives, we believe there can be no
higher plateau in the play. Rather
than feeling confused by all this storytelling at the end of the play,
surprisingly one feels a vast, vast sense of resolution. This is only for the audience, however,
because the characters’ outcomes are varied—they are resolved or unresolved,
succeeded or failed, fulfilled or left empty, just as in life. But the feeling the audience takes away
seems to carry with it the inspiration to struggle onward, that all is
well.
I have a final odd impression
about the play and its writing.
The soldier Dee is the best nonembodied character I have witnessed in years,
perhaps since Godot (probable overstatement). Donna reads his poetic love letters (so does Cleo) and
describes his desire for marriage, desire for a son, desire for the best of
everything and motivation for education.
Esther describes his uniform buttons, deception, dark side and malicious
intent toward Donna. Between these
extremes of dark and light we can easily see the outline form of a human
character. I felt I knew him. All that remained was for an actor
wearing his Army uniform to step on stage. I enjoyed this small exercise of restraint, however, in not
creating an enacted role for Dee. This restraint gave a tiny space for the
imaginative play of the audience, and is also the best literal expression of
the absentee husband. Such thoughtfulness is one mark of brilliant playwriting.
Director Jaffe and Annamarie
Kasper as Herk together have crafted a gem of a role in the character of Herk,
mud-covered yet shining. At the
end of the play, yet again, we think that it has all come down to the story of
Herk and his relation to The Family Secret. Herk has the actual end of the play, without a spoken line
attached to it. He turns away from
the dining table and looks past and upward from the audience, seemingly looking
toward the future. The fear in his
eyes, so well gathered in his short life, is gone. To a certainty, what we see there now is hope.
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