Attention must be paid as
one enters the Palm Beach Dramaworks theatre.
A stark white angular platform is set atop the stage with one sharp
corner pointing directly towards the audience.
The entire set is bathed in white, a tabula rasa on which will be
written the message of The Messenger. PBD’s new Resident Stage Designer, Anne
Mundell, has populated a corner with books and files, randomly placed and chaotically
spilling onto the floor. It is edgy,
perplexing, inviting.
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.
