LOS
ANGELES TIMES
June
9, 2004
THEATER
REVIEW
A poli-sci thesis that's adapted for the stage
David Edgar's two-play cycle about a fiction California
governor's race just may be too smart: It feels more like research than drama.
By Rob Kendt
Does
conscience have any currency in contemporary American politics? The signs may
not look encouraging in an election year that will again break fund-raising
records.
But
a surprisingly affirmative answer comes from an unlikely source: English
playwright David Edgar, whose "Continental Divide," a two-play cycle
about a fictional California governor's race, had its Southern California
premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse last weekend, just as encomiums to that
unshakeable West Coast politican Ronald Reagan hit newsstands.
In
the first play, "Mothers Against," a Goldwater-y Republican candidate
with liberal views on drugs and free speech battles his party's "fright
wing" to assert an appealingly Jeffersonian vision of unfettered liberty.
In
the second, "Daughters of the Revolution," a former 1960s radical
traces his newly recovered FBI file back into his revolutionary past, in the
process recovering a vestige of his idealism--even to the point of betraying
former activist colleagues, now craven New Democrats willing to sell out any
ideal to get elected.
As
hopeful as such profiles in courage may be, Edgar flatters us with his vision
of Americans taking the nuances of political discourse so deadly seriously. Or
perhaps it just seems that way because his two plays, which premiered last year
at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and have since played at Berkeley Repertory
Theatre and in London, betray their playwright's meticulous research and
boundless empathy, even of the strictly hypothetical variety, for all points of
view.
The
result is more than five hours of nonstop talk--not an automatic liability if
the talk is brilliant, the dramatic stakes unbearably high, the modulations of
tone dexterous. Edgar has done a series of rewrites since last year's Oregon
premiere that have burned off some fat and turned up the dramatic heat a few
degrees. But "Continental Divide" still retains the chilly academic
air of a political science thesis.
We
can't call it a failure of imagination, certainly, that Edgar's ambitious
narrative debuted the same year our fair state became a real-life political
theater of the absurd. What playwright, after all, could have invented last
fall's recall circus, in which a Republican cyborg terminated a Democrat robot
over a field crowded with porn stars and assorted others?
Given
that freak show, the relatively principled, if cynical, governor's race Edgar
conjures, like the fictional Bartlet presidency of "The West Wing,"
looks more like the politics we wish we had, compromises and all, than an
indictment of the dumbed-down fund-raising casino our politics have largely
become.
Not
that Edgar doesn't score some well-observed points against the corrosive
conformity of contemporary campaign gamesmanship.
In
"Mothers Against," the stronger of the two plays, the campaign team
for Republican candidate Sheldon Vine (Bill Geisslinger) gathers at a family
home among old-growth redwoods (in William Bloodgood's dusky, suggestive set)
to prepare for a televised debate.
The
battle lines are quickly drawn between the candidate's own tolerant
laissez-faire conservatism and the nanny-state moralism of the born-again
Republican Party, whose views Vine sneeringly dismisses as "bumper-sticker
politics, 'values voters,' Mothers Against Everything."
A
Latina pollster (Vilma Silva) cites research showing that voters admire Vine's
integrity, even say they agree with him--baffling, since they also say they
don't know what he stands for.
"How
can they not know what I think?" Vine wonders. Without missing a beat, his
campaign manager (Michael Elich) deadpans, "Because this has been an
exceptionally well run campaign."
There's
one issue, though, that Vine's advisers want him on the record endorsing: a
dubious ballot measure, Prop. 92, which mandates an anti-terrorist loyalty oath
for state employees and registering voters. It's a tough sell to their
sharp-witted candidate, not just because it makes his libertarian blood boil
but because it would criminalize the eco-activist affiliations of his
dreadlocked daughter (Christine Williams), who may know something incriminating
about a fatal environmentalist incursion on state property.
Leaving
aside that neither this fictional loyalty oath nor the
"eco-terrorist" incident prove particularly plausible as a
make-or-break electoral controversy, there's a curiously sanitized,
house-of-cards quality to all this supposedly Machiavellian plotting. Tempers
flare in neat little flickers amid brittle repartee, impromptu stump speeches
and mild gallows humor, but consistently stop short of genuine passion or
despair.
We
soon begin to appreciate the relative economy and focus of "Mothers
Against" once we're cast adrift with Michael Bern (Terry Layman), the
ex-revolutionary whose journey into his countercultural past drives
"Daughters of the Revolution," Edgar's more problematic second play.
A
community college dean about to accept a post with a state education
commission, Michael panics when his well-meaning partner Abby (Michelle Duffy)
gives him his FBI file as a gag gift for his 55th birthday. Aside from whether
its revelations might endanger his new job--a concern that fades
quickly--Michael's search for the snitch who helped the Feds fatten his file
turns into a vision quest of sorts: to find out why the "movement"
betrayed itself.
This
leads him to a tree-sitting "village" for a ludicrously
straight-faced tableau of New Age harmony, and to an ex-Black Panther, Kwesi
(Derrick Lee Weeden), now an Oakland community activist, who gets some of the
play's more stirring speeches about keeping the faith.
Other
ex-radicals on Michael's must-see list prove less inspiring. Both Vine's
Democratic opponent, Rebecca McKeene (Lynnda Ferguson), and her campaign
advisor (Lorri Holt) are unrepentant about "selling out" their former
ideals to get elected.
This
is Edgar in his element: a milieu in which every character talks like a policy
wonk, a campaign strategist, or an amateur historian of leftist politics.
Unfortunately, this is not drama but impressively exhaustive research
transposed to the stage, spiced with in-jokes and peppered with snarky asides.
References
to recognizable human relationships, meanwhile, are conspicuous by their near
total absence. Michael alludes in passing to a family apparently torn apart by
his activism, or at least by its aftermath; another character chuckles, not
especially ruefully, that she's barely gotten to know her own daughter because
she's been "underground." Ah, the things we do for revolution.
Director
Tony Taccone gives "Mothers Against" a buzzy Howard Hawks tempo, but
no amount of speed can lighten the pedagogical load of "Daughters."
Some of the cast have deepened the texture of their characters: As the Vines,
Geisslinger and the steely, tightly coiffed Robynn Rodriguez make a
particularly convincing power couple. And as twin brothers on opposite sides of
the political spectrum, Weeden plays a riveting theme and variation on coolly
sublimated rage.
Edgar's
would-be epic doesn't have the emotional sweep of "Angels in America"
or the narrative confidence of "The Kentucky Cycle," nor either
quality of Edgar's own sprawling "Nicholas Nickleby" adaptation. With
"Continental Divide," this thoughtful Brit wanted to send a valentine
to the better angels of our American nature--to both our frontier individualism
and our utopian striving. We would have preferred some ripping good plays.
"Continental Divide," La Jolla Playhouse, Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of the University of California San Diego (UCSD). In alternating repertory, Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. & 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 1. $28-52. (858) 550-1010. Running time: "Mothers Against," 2 hours, 50 minutes. "Daughters of the Revolution," 2 hours, 50 minutes.