An acting ensemble shines under Malibu’s starry, starry skies.
By Ed Rampell
It’s uncanny how artists find contemporary relevance in the classics. After Hurricane Katrina, L.A. Opera presented Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, that, among other things, depicts a devastating hurricane. Now, the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum is staging a play about a storm of another kind: the mortgage and foreclosure crisis.
Loss of an estate is at the heart of Anton Chekhov’s last play, The Cherry Orchard, which originally premiered in 1904 at the much-vaunted Moscow Art Theatre and was directed by the legendary Constantin Stanislavsky of “Method Acting” fame.
When it premiered, the Russian playwright’s dramedy reflected class conflicts under czarism, as displaced nobility grappled with upstart, emancipated serfs. A year after The Cherry Orchard debuted revolution swept Russia, so it can be said that Chekhov was right on the money. The Theatricum’s clever adaptation of the play by Heidi Helen Davis and Ellen Geer (who also co-stars as Lillian Randolph Cunningham, the clan’s Grande Dame) updates the action from turn-of-the-last-century Mother Russia to not today, but rather to Virginia in the 1970s.
Lillian and her brother, Gates Randolph (the dapper tippler William Dennis Hunt), are the last in a long line of landed gentry, who are unable to adapt to a rapidly changing society where their genteel world is being turned upside down. The Cunninghams are drowning in debt and deficit spending, as they have not generated new forms of income from the wealth they inherited, primarily in property. In particular, their beloved cherry orchard is being threatened with clear cutting, in order to make way for development – a subdivision, mall or, as Joni Mitchell sang, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
I recently attended the performance of another great Brecht play, Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses, and a theatergoer pointed out that despite its being set in 1930s Chicago, the Pacific Resident Theatre production did not have a single cast member of color. But there is no such “caste system” at work in this diverse ‘70s-set Davis/Geer version of Chekhov’s tragicomedy, with its integrated actors and references to the Civil Rights movement. Steve Matt plays Lawrence Poole, the grandson of one of the Cunningham’s slaves and son of one of the dynasty’s servants. Oh, how the lowly Lawrence of Suburbia has risen in the world, and the mighty have fallen, as Poole has become an economic force to be reckoned with. Chekhov, of course, is especially known for his penetrating psychological insights, and what Poole has gained in the material world has come at the cost of his soul – and soul mate (Tippi Thomas as the thwarted Velina, Lillian’s adopted daughter who has overseen the estate in her absence).
The Theatricum’s Orchard also refers to the ‘60s/’70s counterculture. In a bit of crafty casting, Willow Geer portrays hippie-ish Anna, the daughter of Lillian, who is played by Willow’s real life offstage mother. Lily-white Anna romances the perennial student, Terence Moses (Marc Ewing), an intellectual who echoes the era’s Black and Flower Power philosophies, as he rejects whitey’s Old Order, as well as Poole’s grasping commercialism.
Co-writer Davis, who has also directed productions for East West Players, deftly directs this expert acting ensemble of 16 thespians, performing in an amphitheatre beneath the stars at Topanga Canyon. As such, the open-air theatre has no proscenium arch and as the Cunninghams face dispossession a chilling moment comes after scene one. In lieu of a curtain, the lights dim and black-clad stagehands silently, swiftly remove the entire set, consisting of furniture and household furnishings, in order to literally set the next scene. While it may be unintentional, the stagehands resemble repo men, as if the Cunninghams, unable to pay their sub prime mortgage, are being foreclosed upon and rendered homeless. It is the brilliance of this production to take a 1904 Russian play and make it relevant to not only today, but to 1970s’ Virginia. Old Virginny will never seem the same again, and this Orchard is an orchid.
The Cherry Orchard will be performed through Sept. 26, at: 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Malibu.. For more information call 310/455-3723 or go to www.Theatricum.com. Picnickers welcome before and after performances.
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Will Geer and Will Shakespeare’s toga party
By Ed Rampell
I have a friend named Fred McKinnon who’s a Manhattan playwright. Above his computer, printer, etc. – his work space where the magic takes place, except when Fred is globetrotting, doing research, play hopping at London’s West End or recharging his muse at writers’ colonies from Hawaii to Massachusetts – is a postcard bearing a picture of William Shakespeare and the words: “So I haven’t written lately. Neither has Shakespeare.” Perhaps you have to be a scribe to fully appreciate this joke, but this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.
Of course, if you’d written immortal masterpieces such as Julius Caesar, you’d be excused for being a slacker of a pen pal. Unlike modern scribblers such as Fred and your humble and most obedient servant, without benefit of the Internet, word processing, drama format software, etc., the poetic genius from Stratford-upon-Avon rendered classic after classic for the ages, using only a lowly low tech quill, ink and parchment. Yet the angels sang when Shakespeare wrote, and it’s astonishing how many expressions still in use in the English language are derived from the Shakespearean canon.
For example, consider Julius Caesar, which the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum premiered June 6 in its amphitheatre under Malibu’s starry, starry skies. It’s common knowledge that the phrase “et tu, Brutus?", which has come to epitomize backstabbing (literally!), originated in Shakespeare’s high drama about the lowdown Roman Empire. But did you know that the term for someone speaking gibberish also wittily began in Caesar, when Casca (Alan Blumenfeld) quipped: “but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.” Caesar’s right hand man, Marc Antony (Aaron Hendry), not Mahatma Gandhi, proclaimed: “Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war.” Even that popular populist 1960s exclamation in the affirmative by Black Panthers arguably emanated from this play when, during his funeral oration, Antony cried: “To stir men's blood: I only speak right on.”
But while so many of Shakespeare’s wondrous words are still perennials, it is the syntheses of swordplay and wordplay, rhyme and theme, that makes Julius Caesar as rabblerousing and timely today as it was when it opened at the Globe Theatre in 1599. As the hotheaded Antony wisely observes: “The evil that men do lives after them.” Indeed, 510 years later the plot about plotters conspiring to assassinate the head of the ancient world’s superpower remains resonant. Like the Rome of antiquity, with more than 700 military bases scattered around the world the United States of America has become an empire beset by internal inequities and endless enemies and wars abroad. Using the pretext of 9/11, just as Caesar had 2,044 years before him, George W. Bush grabbed unprecedented power, diminishing the role and rule of a representative republican form of governance as he assumed greater omnipotence. Like Caesar awaiting to be crowned absolute dictator of imperial Rome by the senate, Bush’s imperial presidency, unitary executive, warrant-less surveillance, extraordinary rendition, prolonged detention without charges, torture, etc., were the tyranny of a latter day “decider” and would-be emperor.
Julius Caesar opens with the Roman throng feting their conquering hero, who displays blithe hubris and arrogantly disdains portents of disaster. Similarly, that prating prancing preening prick of a president enjoyed widespread approval ratings when the uniform-clad wannabe warrior prematurely proclaimed “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck for a preemptive war we’re still, alas, mired in six years on.
From their 21st century vantage point, audiences may congratulate themselves that unlike Cassius’ cabal, we are too cultivated to settle political disputes at dagger point. On the other hand, our too, too loyal “opposition” caved, with many Democrats voting for the PATRIOT Act, to authorize the invasion of Iraq under false pretences, and supported too many Bush measures. To make matters worse, Bush was reelected and although ultimately repudiated by the electorate, now that he’s out of power our spineless senators decline to charge him with war crimes, etc. Meanwhile, his Antony, Dick Cheney, continues to sow discord with impunity. As Cassius (Melora Marshall) said: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world, Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about…”
But time will tell who were truly more refined: the Americans, who cowered in the face of despotism, or the Romans who, as Shakespeare’s most famous fictional character, Hamlet, said, “[took] arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end[ed] them," literally turning their oppressor into a bloodstained quivering mass of orange Julius (played by Carl Palmer). In another half a millennium, history shall pass judgment on who were more civilized.
Caesar’s political overtones befit the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, which was founded after the leftwing cowboy actor (1950’s Broken Arrow and Winchester ’73) refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. Instead of fading away into obscurity, Geer turned his land in Topanga Canyon near Malibu into an outdoor theatre, where he also grew every plant Shakespeare wrote about. Geer went on to co-star in the 1954 classic made by blacklisted talents about striking Chicano miners, Salt of the Earth, and in the beloved 1970s CBS-TV series, The Waltons, playing Grandpa Walton.
Probably the highest compliment I can pay the Theatricum’s production of Julius Caesar is that it’s worthy of the bard. It is, to use Brutus’ (Mike Peebler) words, “a savage spectacle,” with a cast of dozens. Considering that I recently saw the one woman show, Kick, starring DeLanna Studi and the two-actor drama A Number co-starring John Heard, a cast of 40 is of near epic proportion onstage. Ellen Geer deftly directs the mass scenes, which are somewhat reminiscent of Salt of the Earth. The mise-en-scene of the battle sequences, as sword drawn Roman centurions romp over the bard’s boards, are excitingly well-choreographed, making excellent use of the open air Topanga setting. The slow motion assassination of Caesar is harrowingly cinematic.
In the best gender bending acting since Cate Blanchett played Bob Dylan in 2007’s I’m Not There, the production’s most outstanding performance is delivered by Melora Marshall as Cassius. She plays him as an overwrought conspirator, a fanatical devotee of the cause whose own ambition and zeal compels Cassius to take up arms against the man who would be king.
Julius Caesar will be performing through Sept. 26. For more information: call 310/455-3723 or see: www.Theatricum.com.
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