'Trestle' fine entry in Wallace series

Review by Hedy Weiss | Chicago Sun Times

'We are like potatoes left in a box," says one of the two high school-age characters in "The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek," Naomi Wallace's hauntingly twisted Depression-era drama now being presented by Eclipse Theatre.

Yes, the smart, sensitive Dalton (Matt Farabee), who is almost 16, and Pace (Marissa Cowsill), the troubled, brainy wild girl two years his senior, are living in a time (1936) and place (a small, American industrial town), full of shattered dreams. But while Dalton, whose unemployed father has become something of a hermit, and whose mother ekes out a living at a factory job, still harbors some hope of going to college, Pace, clearly bursting with potential, is already on the brink of nihilism.

In fact, obsessed with the great locomotives that periodically zoom over the trestle bridge in their town, Pace is hellbent on racing the steely monster, and even more determined to make Dalton attempt the perilously dangerous feat alongside her. And over the course of several weeks, she uses every psychological and sexual ploy in her arsenal, relentlessly taunting and teasing Dalton, who is vulnerable but certainly no pushover, to the edge. The outcome, of course, is tragic.

Along the way, we meet Dalton's father, Dray (Kevin Scott), who has plummeted into depression, and mother, Gin (the quietly compelling Cindy Marker), a genuine survivor Ñ devastated by her husband's retreat and painfully aware of both Pace's yearning for life, and her power over her son. In addition, there is Chas (Sean Bolger), the man long estranged from his own son (and from himself), who tries to look after Dalton after it's all too late.

Director Jonathan Berry, who staged a knockout Steep Theatre production of the pitch black "Festen" this spring, and who will make his Off Broadway debut this fall, is a master of shedding light on darkness. And while he and his superbly chosen actors can't entirely camouflage Wallace's frequently self-conscious, heavily poetic dialogue, this production Ñ the second of three plays in Eclipse's all-Wallace season Ñ goes a long way in dispelling the feeling that the characters are mouthpieces for the playwright's political views. He goes deep into the emotions that drive these people.

Farabee, whippet-thin and very boyish-looking, gives a tremendously raw, affecting, wholly riveting performance. Cowsill expertly captures the volatility and rage of Pace's racing mind. And the pair's tense, unhealthy chemistry is caught ideally.

Joe Schermoly's tremendously muscular, rusted steel girder set (with fine lighting by Lee Keenan and sound by Josh Jorvath) is perfection in this play about desperate times.

NOTE: Eclipse's Wallace season, which began with a sharp revival of "One Flea Spare" (to be staged by the Comedie Francaise, making Wallace the first non-French female dramatist to have her work done there), will wind up with the Chicago premiere of "The Fever Chart: Four Visions of the Middle East" (Sept. 15-Oct. 30).

Link: www.suntimes.com/entertainment/weiss/6702644-452/trestle-fine-entry-in-wallace-series.html

Chicago Theater Beat

Review by Lawrence Bommer

Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek is sheer atmosphere. It makes no argumentsÐit just uses stark poetry and burning imagery to present an action portrait of dead-end despair. The subject: Depression-era survivors, drifters in stasis. It's 1936 and an unnamed small town has lost hope along with jobs. The WPA can't make up for the forced redundancy of thousands of hard luck folks. There's talk of strike against the local glass factory, where the women workers have ended up with permanently blue hands from chemical contamination. Even the local creek has run dry.

Meanwhile, bored and useless, two teenagers with no future beyond a suffocating present meet up at a railroad trestle. Pace is a tomboy with a fascination with trains (at least they have purpose and power). She's already triggered a tragedy trying to outrun one. (A local boy hesitated on the tracks and was killed.) Now she wants Dalton, a quiet and impressionable local lad, to join her in the kind of adventure that makes her feel aliveÐrisk-taking as self-definition. Can they win a race against a thousand-ton locomotive?

Their love/hate affair creates its own complicated confusion. Dalton carries his own cursesÑparents who, hardly able to fend for themselves, make him feel like a burden, and a protective shyness that turns his feelings for Pace into a kind of self-mutilation. Toying with him as she has with trains, Pace (the irony of her name!) has dangerously underestimated both.

These are Romeo and Juliet without the romance, just the rebellion, and it's not enough. (It's without the sex too: Pace teaches Dalton how to touch and kiss her in mysterious ways that manage to defy touch but seem twice as intimate.)

Wallace tells this town tragedy from all sides. We see how hard times have ground down Dalton's ineffectual parents. We meet the dead boy's father, a jail guard who describes how the prisoners have morphed into animals to deal with captivity. Marissa Cowsill, Matt Farrabee - Eclipse TheatreTold in fragments in psychological rather than chronological order, the action unspools like a folk song, where the stanzas are as different as the singers. No more brittle than the characters, a plate and a glass break: The metaphor matters.

As she proved in the recently produced "One Flea Spare" and "Slaughter City," Wallace has a gift for turning sympathy for life's underdogs into testaments of survival. In Jonathan Berry's staging, the second offering in Eclipse's season-long exploration of Wallace plays, hope and hardship hold equal sway. Wounded but hungry for life, Matt Farabee's Dalton is protective and private where Marissa Cowsill's Pace is ready for anything and afraid of nothing. As his parents, Cindy Marker and Kevin Scott resemble premature ghosts haunted by happier times. Sean Bolger is another father who wants a second chance after having beaten his last son so much that the boy started hitting himself out of habit.

The tragedy on this trestle seems small when set against the national nightmare of 1936. But, presented just a few feet away from us, it takes on a terrible inevitabilityÐlost lives in hard times.

Link: chicagotheaterbeat.com/2011/07/26/review-the-trestle-of-pope-creek-lick-eclipse-theatre/

NewCity Stage

Hard times don't just mean no money; they mean the hardscrabble headspace that a bad economy brings. Naomi Wallace examines the long-ranging effects of an empty wallet in the Eclipse Theatre's latest, the second of three productions devoted to Wallace's work.

Pace (Marissa Cowsill) and Dalton (Matt Farabee) languish in a Depression-era small town; they take solace at the town's train trestle, plotting a hazardous race against the train. Meanwhile, Dalton's parents Gin (Cindy Marker) and Dray (Kevin Scott) struggle with their dying marriage.

Wallace's poetry resonates but the narrative trips over the construction. That's alright; the performers pull the audience through. Cowsill's Pace is so abruptly honest and intelligent you question her sanity; Farabee's absolutely believable as the "good boy" overwhelmed by Pace's single-mindedness. Marker and Scott impress as a loving couple reviving their relationship. Director Jonathan Berry's staging and pacing keeps a hard-luck tale vibrant and alive. (Lisa Buscani)

Link: newcitystage.com/2011/07/25/review-the-trestle-at-pope-lick-creekeclipse-theatre-company/

One Flea Spare gets strong revival at Eclipse

Review by Hedy Weiss | Chicago Sun Times

The Great Plague that devastated England in 1665 and is said to have killed about 20 percent of London's population, failed to bring out the better instincts in people. In fact, it only exacerbated the class struggle (the poor died in far greater numbers than the upper class). And when it came to that other struggle - the one between the sexes - well, the plague didn't do much to alter the dynamics of that relationship either, with matters of sex and death proceeding more or less in the usual way, though perhaps with a bit more cruelty and desperation.

These are just a few of the conclusions to be drawn from "One Flea Spare," Naomi Wallace's odd and intriguing 1995 play now receiving a strong revival by Eclipse Theatre - the first of three works in this company's season devoted to the work of this Kentucky-born, fiercely leftist playwright who spent many years living and working in England. Wallace does not paint a terribly pretty picture of humanity. But her heated, poetic language (at times self-consciously so), and her strong characters keep you watching and listening. So do the actors in director Anish Jethmalani's vivid production.

"One Flea Spare" (which takes its title from a John Donne poem, as well as from the tiny creature that spreads the plague from the rodents who carry it), is set in one room of an elegant townhouse (designer Kevin Hagen gets it just right) owned by a shipping magnate, Snelgrave (a volatile Brian Parry), and his wife, Darcy (Susan Monts Bologna in an immensely brave and passionate portrayal).

The windows of the place are boarded up, and before the couple can embark on their planned escape to the countryside they are "invaded" by two strangers on the run as well - Bunce (a fascinating performance by the easily charismatic J.P. Pierson), a handsome, worldly, and very hungry young merchant seaman, and Morse (Elizabeth Stenholt), an exceedingly precocious 12-year-old runaway who might be the daughter of a recently deceased wealthy family, or perhaps a servant for that family. (Stenholt, a freshman at Maine West High School, gives an astonishingly accomplished performance here and has "star" written all over her.)

The arrival of these two homeless people result in all four of them being quarantined for a month, with Kabe (a terrifically wily Zach Bloomfield), the zestily sadistic security guard who patrols the streets, taking full advantage of the situation.

Trapped, and with a sense of mortality looming at every turn, all notions of civilized behavior become a mockery here as these characters engage in storytelling, and, more crucially, in games of sex and power that alternate between the playful and teasing, and the potentially fatal. A pair of fine shoes, handed back and forth between Snelgrave and Bunce, captures the artificiality of the social divide. So does a searing sexual exchange between Darcy and Bunce, as well as a far more cynical bit of bartering between Morse and Kabe that involves toe-sucking.

Wallace's play unquestionably captures a pervasive sense of sickness. But it is more a matter of moral rot than the plague that is her subject here. And it is people, not fleas, that carry those sorts of germs.

Link: http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/stage/4816885-417/one-flea-spare-gets-strong-revival-at-eclipse.html

Review from Newcity Stage

If you didn't already know that playwright Naomi Wallace is from Kentucky, you might assume the writer of this play set in seventeenth-century London during the plague is a natural-born Englishwoman. Not that it matters too much; well-researched historical dramas about experiences far-removed from a writer's own are hardly a new thing. Yet beyond the gory details of highly stratified English life, maintained even during the plague, there's a sense that the nobles, beggars and thieves in "One Flea Spare" could exist in any time or place, for that matter, here and now.

Independently of each other, Bunce, a sailor, and Morse, a young girl, seek shelter from the plague in the home of the Snelgraves, just days before they had expected to be able to reopen their doors. Only Kabe, a guard, declares they'll have to stay shut in another twenty-eight days. Now all four are stuck with each other.

Eclipse's revival of the play uses the Greenhouse's studio space remarkably well, encouraging feelings of claustrophobia. Brian Parry and Susan Monts-Bologna are terrific as the Snelgraves, a bitter couple whose marriage went sour too early. J.P. Pierson's Bunce has a sensitivity and romantic streak you wouldn't expect of a sailor, and Elizabeth Stenholt owns the stage as street-smart Morse. Zach Bloomfield as Kabe, a shameless profiteer, compels laughter via discomfort. Anish Jethmalani's direction is, as the Donne poem goes, "cruel and sudden." (Neal Ryan Shaw)

Link:http://newcitystage.com/2011/04/11/review-one-flea-spareeclipse-theatre-company/

Eclipse's feverish revival of Naomi Wallace's Black Plague drama features an impressive performance by Susan Monts-Bologna

Review by Zac Thompson | Timeout Chicago

Wallace sets her 1995 drama in London in 1665, smack dab in the middle of the Great Plague, an epidemic that killed more than 75,000 people out of an estimated population of 460,000. In the play, it feels like the end of the world. And, as any disaster movie will tell you, the end of the world is murder on the class system. During the 28-day quarantine Wallace depicts, it all but collapses.

The site of the forced confinement is the London home of the wealthy Snelgraves, William and Darcy, who have been stuck in a loveless marriage ever since a fire disfigured Darcy decades ago. They're joined for the quarantine by two commoners-a sailor and a serving girl wearing clothes stolen from her dead employers-who have separately snuck into the house thinking it was abandoned. The prevailing order of things, with William lording over the others with noblesse oblige, doesn't hold sway for long, because for once the masters and the menials are in the same boat. Consequently, power relationships and sexual arrangements turn all topsy-turvy. Chaos looms.

Though Wallace's indulgence in poetic language can sap the play of forward motion, Jethmalani's staging feels appropriately feverish and in flux. Each cast member contributes a satisfactory performance, but Monts-Bologna, as Darcy, walks away with the whole thing. Tasked with playing a character driven primarily by sexual longing, Monts-Bologna avoids turning Darcy into a horny old broad, conveying instead a desperate, lifelong ache to connect to another human being. She's mesmerizing.

Link: http://timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/theater/14700769/one-flea-spare-at-eclipse-theatre-company-theater-review