World Premiere of ‘The Messenger’ Boldly Probes the Complicity of Silence

 

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.

 

'My Destiny', by Holocaust survivor, Georgia Gabor

 

This is not a book review per se as nothing I can write is adequate.  Before commenting, this background information:

 

After reading (in college and later in my career republishing) The Psychology of Dictatorship by Gustav Gilbert (he was the head of my psychology department), and then as an adult reading Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance as well as the Diary of Anne Frank (and later visiting the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam with Ann), I had, until this time, avoided Holocaust literature and films. There are other reasons as well.

 

As a child I found my father’s personal photograph collection from his days as a Signal Corps photographer during WW II. Among them were scenes from a concentration camp which led to thoughts, nightmares, which I couldn’t really discuss with my father as my access to those files in our basement was forbidden.  He also never talked about the war, something he just wanted to forget. I think those photos were from a satellite camp of Buchenwald, one not far from Cologne and the Rhine River where he was active during the closing months of the War.   They ultimately disappeared; either he or my mother disposed of them.  What remained of his war years was a detailed scrap book of primary sources which I gave to the WW II Museum in New Orleans after his death in 1984.

 

Gilbert was the prison psychologist at the Nuremberg Trial and the author of the Nuremberg Diary.  But his documentation in The Psychology of Dictatorship of how Rudolf Franz Hoess, who was the Colonel in charge of Auschwitz, described with scientific precision, and with some pride how efficiently they could “dispose of” some 10,000 people per day was unforgettable and horrifying.

 

When I read Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance I had to prop tissues under my glasses to read those sections pertaining to the Ghettos that were temporary holding pens of Jews on their way to extermination camps.  The conditions of starvation and exposure simply resulted in fewer prisoners having to be transported to the death camps.  Wouk’s fictional characters made that horrid existence personal.

 

The normalization of genocide and the indescribable cruelty made me avoid such literature and now I feel, in these times in particular, guilty, and in preparation of seeing Palm Beach Dramaworks’ The Messenger, I felt compelled to read Georgia Gabor’s memoir, My Destiny. It is the work of a brilliant and passionate survivor of the Holocaust.

 

The driving force behind commissioning the play is PBD’s Producing Artistic Director Bill Hayes.  I owe him a debt of gratitude for leading me to Gabor’s story, to allow me, after all these years, to face these ugly facts and to make me and anyone who sees the play, a “messenger.” The play was written by the recently appointed Dramaworks' Resident Playwright, Jenny Connell Davis.  Silence is complicity and it is not an option, especially now in our chaotic world where hate can be found anywhere and everywhere and where there seems to be a slow slide into the unthinkable: fascism in America.

 

During WW II most Americans hardly believed that civilized German culture could possibly engage in genocide. The United States government was more aware of the extent of it, but failed to do much.  Deep antisemitism was well entrenched here as well.   And today one only has to look at the reaction on some college campuses to Israel trying to defend itself from Hamas terrorism to see it still.

 

But I am straying from the terrifying story of Georgia Gabor, her cunning ability to survive when there seemed to be no hope (as there were none for her entire family who died in concentration camps), and to witness atrocities, be subjected to unthinkable living conditions and the constant anxiety of being on the run, escaping the Nazis twice, sometimes posing as one to get by, all before she turned 16.

 

It is a high wire story, sickening in exposing man’s inhumanity to man.

 

Then there are several moments when everything seemed to be turning in her favor, such as when she and friends rejoiced hearing the Russians were pushing the Germans out of Hungary, surely they will save the Jews who managed to survive those years in bombed out buildings in unspeakable conditions.  But the Russians raped and pillaged and Gabor was on the run again.

 

She planned to go to Palestine with a Zionist group, but it was again a dangerous attempt, the likelihood she would be shot and even if she made it, she would not be able to pursue the education she wanted, and would become a laborer or farmer for the rest of her life.  Meanwhile the thought of life under communism was unthinkable to her.

 

She lived in orphanages and befriended a woman from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration who after a labyrinth of obstacles finally was able to find a place for her in a US Congress passed bill that allowed 500 carefully selected orphan children to go to the US, becoming wards of the government until they turned 21, dispersing them in state and charitable agencies for foster care.

 

Imagine how her heart leapt at this opportunity, and when she first saw the Statue of Liberty she finally felt safe.  But that would be a nice ending for “the movie.”  Real life interceded, more terrible living conditions and finally two failed marriages to abusive men, losing custody of her two children, but finding education as her way out of a hell hole of a life (she was a brilliant mathematician) and finally resolving to be a teacher so she could gain custody of her children, find and marry the childhood friend she loved in Budapest, and secure a teaching position.

 

Again, if that was only the end of the story and indeed My Destiny, published in 1981, concludes with her happy marriage. But after that she was subjected to virulent antisemitism and harassment, and her life was again miserable because she told her story.  She was fired from her teaching job, sued the school system, and would die only two years later.  This LA Times article, ‘A Long Lesson in Hate : Holocaust Survivor Sues School District Over Harassment,’ summarizes the consequences of telling the inconvenient truth.  The world premiere of the play, which opens on Dec. 8, focuses on Gabor’s story but interacting with three different generations (1967, 1993, and 2020) all with their own reactions to her and their own stories of hate and complicity.  The audience is left to connect the dots.

 

 

Kenneth Lonergan’s ‘Lobby Hero’ Exposes Uncomfortable Truths in Palm Beach Dramaworks' Production

 

Although written more than twenty years ago, Lobby Hero is a highly relevant play for our post truth world.  It was Sir Walter Scott who penned "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!" which is at the heart of this ensemble character-driven plot, leading to disturbing moral and ethical dilemmas.  Each character's actions and choices affect one another's lives.

 

The palette may be small, but Kenneth Lonergan creates major layers of meaning: class issues, racism, sexism, police cronyism, and workplace harassment, leavened by very humorous moments.  These themes clearly emerge in this thoughtful and entertaining production.

 

The stunning set was envisioned by Dramaworks’ award-winning Scenic Designer, Victor Becker, who died earlier this year and to whom the play is dedicated.  This realistic lobby in a Manhattan high rise apartment building is more than a space merely to be passed through.  It is a stoic observer, a fifth character, enabling the lives of the players to be challenged and changed before us.

Tim Altmeyer, Elisabeth Yancey, Britt Michael Gordon, Jovon Jacobs

 

Lonergan builds the play around a pair of parallel relationships, the action unfolding over four successive nights.  The first pair is Jeff, a uniformed nighttime security guard for the building and his captain William and the second is Bill, a uniformed policeman and Dawn, his rookie partner. 

 

Jeff is the antihero in the lobby, “an Everyman,” who views his situation in the world for what it is, having to live with his brother because of debt, hoping for a break, although not knowing what to do in life. Sometimes he feels that he was born to fail; a discernible Dreiserian undercurrent permeates all the characters.

Elisabeth Yancey and Britt Michael Gordon

 

Britt Michael Gordon plays Jeff with an affability which has you pulling for him, in spite of his unguarded casualness in dealing with others. Amusingly, but sometimes disastrously, he just says his private thoughts out loud, even blurting out the truth about others, leading to “the tangled web” of the characters’ enmeshment.  His demeanor makes him feel “safe” for the other characters to talk to, even confess to, and to lecture to as well. 

 

Gordon portrays him with a quirky innocence, belying some poor past choices and the estrangement from his late father of whom he is always reminded as being a “real hero” during the Korean War.  He uses humor as a defense mechanism, particularly to cope with personal insecurities in dealing with others.

 

His boss, William, a black man, is played with an ironclad moral implacability by Jovon Jacobs.  He espouses “living by the book,” especially for the edification of Jeff, but William is on the horns of a dilemma as he later confesses to Jeff -- his brother was arrested for a monstrous crime, one he’s almost certainly guilty of, but he is relying on William to provide an alibi. 

 

William now must weigh that against his equal certitude that his brother will not receive a fair trial particularly as the public defender is overburdened with other cases.  Will he do the right thing, or will he provide an alibi knowing the system, one that is blind to black men without resources, will fail to provide true justice?  Jacobs plays this moral seesaw to the hilt, the impossible choices, drawing Jeff into the details.

Tim Altmeyer and Jovon Jacobs

 

The second pair is headed by Bill, Tim Altmeyer delivering an exaggerated performance as a macho, intimidating cop, imbued by his own self-importance.  However, he certainly nails him as the most unlikable person in the play, who even Jeff in all his innocence calls a “scum bag.”

 

While carrying on an affair with a woman in the same building where Jeff and William are security guards (bristling at being called “doormen” by their police counterparts), Bill also is engineering a fling with his rookie partner Dawn, played by Elisabeth Yancey, her PBD debut who balances bravado, and later, betrayal.  She sees Bill as a love interest until Jeff innocently stirs the pot by blurting out the purpose of Bill’s visits to the building.  Yancey convincingly plays the gullible and then jilted rookie and delivers a lot of pathos in her role.

 

Jeff’s loose tongue provides for many laughs as well.  Gordon’s performance rises to a climatic high point when he is charged by Dawn to share William’s confidence.  He successfully renders this as an existential crisis of finally being able to do something meaningful in his life.  The denouncement hints at some future for Dawn and Jeff, an understanding of doing the right thing, a hopeful upbeat.

 

Director J. Barry Lewis extracts first-rate performances from his very skilled actors, including some fast sounding “New Yawkr tawk .”  Maybe it’s a little over the top along with the mannerisms of Altmeyer and Yancey in their police roles, but those in the audience who grew up in NYC (including myself) will identify.

 

Lewis magnifies some uncomfortable confrontations, such as William’s fury at Jeff for revealing confidences and especially when Bill mincingly and aggressively confronts Jeff for involving himself in Bill’s business, on the precipice of physical violence.  He has paced the play so the humor can land, elevating some laugh out loud moments, so necessary given the play’s themes.

 

The PBD technical staff supports the efforts with Roger Arnold’s sound designs, jazz interludes between scenes as well as the siren sounds of the city, the barking of a dog, the ding of the arriving elevator.  The lighting design is by Kirk Bookman perfectly capturing that glaring light of a lobby in the middle of the night, and PBD’s resident costume designer, Brian O’Keefe devises immaculate uniforms, badges and caps for the four characters, purposely disheveled at times, and street clothes for Dawn in the last scene.

 

Palm Beach Dramaworks production of Lobby Hero successfully deals with its large enigmatic moral dilemmas, with heart, humor and acumen.  

 

All photographs of the actors are by Tim Stepien