PBD has always been known as a home for serious classic works, but Producing Artistic Director William Hayes has been moving the theatre towards innovative new plays with the logic that if regional theatres don’t produce such works, who will? The Messenger was incubated in its Dramaworkshop. Hayes has said he believes this is the “most important play ever produced at PBD and at the most appropriate time.”
Indeed, what transpires in the intermission-less 90 minutes bears out that statement, from the opening moment when a monolithic section of the wall opens bathed in bright light with ominous, deep musical tones (perhaps a hat tip to Kubrick’s 2001?) as the characters emerge representing the past, present, and possibilities of the future.
Although this is not a holocaust play per se, it finds its gravitas from the life of Georgia Gabor, a holocaust survivor, who immigrated to the US and later taught math in the San Marino Unified School District for two decades. The persecution she suffered in her adopted community was a terrible addendum to her life, as well as its implications for society. The Messenger pulls us into the central overarching issue, man’s inhumanity to man. It is a play about persecution and how history seems destined to repeat itself. It is about the consequences of being silent, especially in this social-network polluted world where those who “scream” loudest are generally those who perpetuate ethnic and racial persecution.
While it is a four-character play, Gabor’s story, played by PBD veteran Margery Lowe, is the only one based on a real person, with much of her dialogue coming from Gabor’s memoir My Destiny.
Jenny Connell Davis, PBD new Resident Playwright imaginatively creates the other three characters from facts of different eras and designates years as their names to clarify where they place in the panoptic vision of the play. All are women. It is remarkable that she has been able to create characters that grow more and more real, ones the audience empathizes with, in a play which is essentially surreal and symbolic.
They are 1969, a curator at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California; 1993, the mother of one of Gabor’s students; and 2020, a high school student and former volunteer at The Huntington. Off stage character, Miley, a friend of 2020’s, shares this story as well.
Their episodic stories materialize out of time sequence and are kaleidoscopically woven into the fabric of Gabor’s experience. The actors pour their hearts into these stories, making poignant connections between then and now.
Angela Gulner, Gracie Winchester, Margery Lowe, Annie
Fang; Photo by Alicia Donelan
The success of this world premiere is in large part due to Margery Lowe’s experience in appearing in new plays, especially at PBD. It takes a special sensibility playing the lead where no one has gone before, to make the character interpretation one’s own. Lowe has a special advantage playing Georgia Gabor as both are diminutive in stature but lions in spirit. Lowe also had the advantage of being able to study Gabor when she was interviewed in 1984 by The 1939 Society.
Lowe perfectly captures
her character, and triumphs with Gabor’s words from her memoir although her
Hungarian accent takes some acclimation to clearly understand. Nevertheless, Lowe has reincarnated Georgia
Gabor with her flirtatious mannerisms, her dynamic personality and stalwart
resolve to tell her painful story over and over.
But it is what she experienced afterwards – again becoming a victim of anti Semitism in the wealthy community of San Marino CA. -- where Lowe’s performance provides a strong catalyst in moving the arc of the story. The other characters’ develop into real people under her watchful eye, the ripple effects washing over the audience.
Bill Hayes directs The Messenger. His vision and his labor of love underscore his belief in the play and are borne out by this production. His talented assistant director, Jessica Chen, whose background is in dance brings her eye for fluidity to the stage.
Gracie Winchester plays 1969, capturing youth’s wide eyed wonder of working in the august Huntington Library, where possibly becoming a curator comes into conflict with her discovery that the Library harbors a dark secret, the original copy of the Nuremberg Laws, which was designed to deprive Jews of basic rights, signed by Hitler himself. How did they come to the Huntington and why were they filed away, never displayed, forgotten? 1969 has to make a choice to reveal the facts, but perhaps at the expense of a cherished career. Winchester makes you feel her character’s dilemma as well as her outrage, and sad capitulation, the playwright connecting the dots with 1969 appearing as a regretful old lady with a parasol in 2020’s era at “the Hunt.”
Angela Gulner makes her PBD debut as 1993, and gives a bravura performance of someone thinking she is doing the right thing as the antagonist, organizing a partition objecting to Gabor’s teaching. As a parent we all know how we will go to extremes to guard one’s child. But did she cross a line when she is the one that takes action to stop Gabor for inviting children to hear her survivorship stories after school (not a requirement)? Gulner protests (“her history is not OUR history”). She’s a math teacher! She has no right to teach what should be left to historians! Yet her moving performance elicits sympathy as well as being reminded of current events in our schools right now.
Annie Fang, also making her PBD debut as 2020, deals with some of the emotional highlights of the play, particularly her relationship with the off stage Miley, who is a math genius, is certainly destined for a top school (the community’s raison d’être), and yet is more interested in art. They are Asian Americans and during Covid were called “Chinks” while volunteering at the Huntington by the same kind of people who might hurl Jewish invectives at Gabor.
The incident blows up in social media, today’s ubiquitous Petri dish for scapegoating and persecution and 2020 tries to distance herself from the widely circulated video of Miley confronting her tormentor. Ultimately Miley suffers the ultimate consequence of silence. As we can only see and feel Miley through 2020, Fang’s performance is particularly noteworthy.
It is an ingeniously written play by Jenny Connell Davis and director William Hayes manages the actors on the stage as they tell their overlapping stories, moving from shadows to light. Portions reminded me of a Sondheim duet where counterpoint is featured.
As an abstract play, where characters may be moving from point A to B, more along a surrealistic path, Resident Lighting Designer, Kirk Bookman has challenging transitions, essential ones to keep the audience engaged. Much of the time shadows are as important as lights up, as all characters are on stage throughout even if not engaged in their own particular part.
Bookman works in concert with Video Designer Adam J. Thompson. Parts of the play are filled with projected videos, some falling on the actors themselves but mostly on the white walls, in particular videos of artistic compositions by Miley, and very moving to see them being created in real time. Other projected images are disturbing though, such as the bombed out Ghettos which Gabor “lived in,” and symbols of hate that both Gabor and 2020 had to endure. Overall, the video and the lighting of the show are even more integral than the typical play and kudos to Mr. Thompson and Mr. Bookman.
Sound design by Roger Arnold is portending, even startling at times (gunshots), boot steps of the Hungarian Nazi sympathetic Arrow Cross Party, all in keeping with the dystopian theme of what Gabor endured, during the war.
Against a white-washed stage Costume Designer Brian O’Keefe’s choices were endless (except white!) and here he creates costumes not only appropriate for the different eras of the characters, clearly distinguishing each, while still sharing certain earth tone palettes. O’Keefe is a stickler for the details. They are award winning visions, and I loved 1993’s wide legged pants and sunglasses pushed up in her blond hair. It tells a lot about the sought after community where helicopter parents landed with their kids.
O’Keefe brilliantly designed the swirling dress with the ubiquitous stretchy belt cinching in Ms. Lowe’s tiny waist which not only showed off her diminutive figure to perfection but allowed the actress to swish about in her more flirtatious moments. The dirt-red sweater thrown about her shoulders added the final perfect touch.
The execution of the complex staging of this play warrants kudos to PBD’s Stage Manager, Kent James Collins. Opening night went as smoothly as if the play had been in previews for weeks (vs. the reality of two days).
The Messenger is not only a world premiere, it is also the first production in a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere series and regional theatres in Texas and Minneapolis are already committed to producing it. Fittingly Mrs. Roberta Golub, Georgia Gabor’s daughter, is the executive producer of The Messenger.
At the end, Fang, who plays 2020, has the temerity to begin to “step outside the box” (full lighting for this dramatic effect). Can the future learn from the past? Isn’t it incumbent on all to become activists, to become messengers of The Messenger? That is the ultimate question of this imaginative new play.
