The acting is excellent, and it has to be. Andy Paris’s direction has the actors moving and talking continuously, each scene transitioning seamlessly into another with precision and timing normally seen only in well-rehearsed performances of Oscar Wilde or Philip Freneau. Since the characters interact with a narrator, though, and never call one another by name, it’s almost impossible to keep up with who’s who on stage. The actors create, with wonderful skill, a set of characters, each clearly delineated, each believable, each a powerful evocation.
The interesting theatrical effect is this: ordinarily not knowing who the characters are on-stage would be a confusing mess. But what Tisdale and Paris are presenting is a collage of grief, from rough intensity to barely controlled and back again, through fourteen people who are experiencing that grief right in front of you. It’s not a narrative play, it’s an expressive one, a collection of anecdotes wired together and electrified by pain.
Within moments you can identify each character by their pain. Each actor is terrific at finding the body language and the tones of voice for the varieties of pain each character feels as the year of the play goes by.
Dana Hart is searingly contained in two entirely different ways as two very different men, Tim Rock and Steve Harper. Hart uses his impressive gifts to show their pain expressed by repression. It’s a splendid performance.
Anne McEvoy, as Carole Hoffman and Janet Harper, has equally diverse roles, and shows the strengths of each woman distinctly, and with enormous sympathy. There’s nothing flashy about McEvoy’s acting; rather there is a high-powered excellence that makes it easy to instantly sympathize with each character’s feelings.
Bob Goddard plays Chuck Hoffman and Police Chief ‘Goob’ Garver, and differentiates his characters easily. Goddard’s performance is nuanced and vivid at the same time. His account of the trip accompanying some of the bodies home is a high point: there is not a false note in his portrayal of the strong emotions of a man not used to revealing his emotions at all.
Casey Spindler and Justin Tatum, the brothers to three of the men who died, make it easy to see who they are playing in scenes where they reveal their characters’ memories of their brothers.
Sarah Marcus is the widow of one of the young men, and, if I have this right, the sister of another. Her grief is played out mostly as a widow, though, and her wrenching emotional journey to try to move on in order to have children and build a new house and life is rocky.
Jill Levin plays Edie Devarmin and Adrianna Rock, but what you remember most is Edie’s anger and pain, and her determination to find out exactly what did happen in what, as little by little things are revealed, appears to have been not only a personal disaster for these families, but a military catastrophe of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and incompetence on the part of the command structure that got these young men killed.
Finally, Chuck Tisdale, the playwright’s brother, moves around the stage as the audience’s surrogate, prompting the characters into revelations without imposing any expectations. It’s a tough role to stand in for people who are right there behind you, but both the Tisdales, Michael’s judgment in minimizing the narrator’s role, and Chuck’s in playing it, are adroit.
I couldn’t wish this any better performed, but I could certainly wish it were shorter. Where to cut? Well, Michael Tisdale has already edited forty eight families down to four, which may be the hardest part. Now it’s a matter of getting these four families to say what has to be said in two hours instead of three.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Marcus Bales marcusATdesignerglass.com
(:divend:)