Playwright in the Second Row

I just saw Circle Mirror Transformation at the Huntington Theatre. There are various things I could say about it, were I writing a review, but the thing that really struck me was the last couple of minutes. (Spoilers ahead.) The play takes place in an acting class, and at the end, two characters are told to roleplay meeting each other 10 years later. They start talking, downstage, and the lights gradually tighten on them, as the actors slowly shift from being the characters pretending to being the actual 10-years-later versions of the characters. It was a wonderful bit of stage sleigh-of-hand, because the transition was absolutely smooth and…well, I suppose the fact that I started noticing the technical elements that were going into the illusion means that they could have been subtler, but it was pretty darned subtle. One element that I didn’t notice until almost the end of the scene was a costume tweak. One of the characters was a high-school girl, and part of the transition that happened in the scene was that her voice and mannerisms gradually transitioned from teenagerish to adult. At the point when she was clearly all the way into the adult-version of the character — but not before — I registered the fact that her hair was styled differently than it had been throughout the rest of the show, and various small costume elements were also contributing to the more mature look. The interesting thing here is that it was the shift in her mannerisms that made me aware of the visual elements, rather than the other way around.

This description, of course, captures nothing of the actual moment on stage, which was all about the visual and the implicit. But it was a really neat effect, and the sort of tech-acting synergy we often aim at and seldom achieve

Seeing the Huntington Theatre’s fall performance of Fences got me thinking about my husband’s habitual joke about plays by “August (or Lanford) Wilson.”  I’ve had plays by both authors side by side on my bookshelf since I was a pre-teen, and have always been vaguely amused by the fact that the two Wilsons have nothing to do with each other.  But this time, I was struck by the thought that actually, they have a lot in common.

Both playwrights write mostly plays that focus on small, intimate communities, with a strong sense of location: August Wilson’s cycle of plays about the African-American community in Pittsburgh throughout various eras of history; Lanford Wilson’s small Southern-Midwestern towns in The Rimers of Eldritch, Book of Days, and the Talley plays.

The work of both Wilsons is characterized by compelling, quirky, often flawed but almost never off-putting characters.  They both have marvelous ears for voice and dialogue; they also both write excellent monologues.  They focus on the complex relationships among their characters.  I love listening to their characters talk, both for the near-poetry of the text and for the emotional and narrative content.  (Though I consider myself more of a plot person than a voice person, one of the characteristics common to the playwrights I love best is memorable, quotable, playing-with-language dialogue.  This is why I keep returning to the works of Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, and – yes – Lanford Wilson.)

For both Wilsons, the focus on voice and character and community sometimes comes at the expense of plot; even when full of dramatic events, the plot is often a secondary element.  (Lanford Wilson has a couple of plays in which as far as I can tell nothing happens, e.g. Hot L Baltimore.  August Wilson’s plays do all have some sort of dramatic event in them, often a death and/or a family conflict.  But quite a lot of Fences goes by before it becomes clear what the plot is going to be about — though I only noticed in retrospect.  And in fact the plot events (man has affair, wife kicks him out of the house, he convinces her to raise his dead mistress’s baby, meanwhile his conflict with his teenage son ultimately leads to the son running away from home) are interesting mostly only as a way to illuminate these particular characters’ lives and relationships.

I’ve seen most of August Wilson’s plays at the Huntington over the years, without thinking too much about them.  By contrast, after seeing Talley’s Folly in middle school, I’ve been a Lanford Wilson fan, have most of his plays in my collection by now, have directed one of his plays and have at least others on my plays-to-direct-before-I-die list.  Making this connection between the two playwrights has given me a new perspective on August Wilson; or rather, has clarified some patterns in my response to his plays.  (This is not to claim they’re identical by any means, but I find the similarities illuminating.) Now I want to read his plays again, this time as an adult, all at the same time, and with a director’s eye.