Adam Bock's A Small
Fire sets out to explore what remains of a person's Self when their
physical connection to the world is stripped away. But the question the
audience is left with is, why does he back off before completing his project?
In A Small Fire,
currently playing at Portland Center Stage through March 23rd, Bock clinically
removes the senses of the protagonist Jenny Bridges (played by Hollye Gilbert)
in an almost Beckettian fashion. Artistic Director Chris Coleman contextualizes
this project by quoting Joseph Campbell:
"...you can't identify with the
body, as the body is going to fade: it's temporary, it is designed to fail. But
there is another part of you that goes on, that is not attached to the body,
that can see the whole story from a distance. And if you are identifying with
that part of yourself, with your soul, then the falling away of the body is
just another chapter in your story."
Jenny is a forewoman on a construction crew. She's
foul-mouthed, in charge, and very much alive. At least until she temporarily
goes deaf, signified by a loud tone blasted from the speaker system. Her next
physical failure isn't temporary. Her sense of smell and incumbent sense of
taste disappear. Then the lights, rapidly gaining in intensity and brightness,
indicate that now her vision is gone. Her blindness brings with it decreased
individual agency. She snaps at her daughter, Emily (Peggy J. Scott), while
being dressed that she is "not a sack of potatoes." The loud tone
comes back, permanently deafening her and cutting further into her
independence. Up to this point, director Rose Riordan has told the story using
a mostly Chekhovian realism. But, subsequent to the failure of Jenny's fourth
sense, she and her lighting and sound designers (Diane Ferry Williams and Casi
Pacilio respectively) blank out the space with darkness. Jenny stands alone in
a tight spotlight and her disembodied voice delivers her despair. But then the
lights come on, and she and her husband (played by Tom Bloom) make love. She
ends the play affirming that "I'm still in here."
The conceit of the play is to strip away the protagonists'
senses one by one. The goal, as stated by Coleman in his program note, is to
find the part of the Self that exists beyond the five senses. But we never get
there. Instead of exploring death and how the cessation of bodily functions
affects a person's identity, Bock ends with a false affirmation of life. It's
an affirmation reminiscent of the Restoration script doctors who gave King Lear a happy ending, and equally
unsatisfying. In plays about death, pre-mortem denouements do the audience a
disservice. Theater ought to be a place where the community can explore issues
that effect them together, and what do we have in common more than our
mortality?
Instead of allowing us to ask a question about ourselves,
Bock calls into question his own artistic decision making. Why does he end the
play before it's over? Why does he honey us with a pleasant falsehood? One of
the benefits of American theater's obsession with Shakespeare is that it gives
American audiences a high standard to hold our playwrights to. And modern
playwrights ought to know this, and wrestle as aggressively with difficult human
questions as their primary competitor for the American stage.
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