Theatrical Craftsmanship in "Three Days of Rain"

Silas Weir Mitchell brings his technically fantastic acting chops to the technically fantastic script of Three Days of Rain at Portland Center Stage.

Three Days of Rain is fairly standard kitchen-sink realism (the water in the sink even runs), to which Silas Weir Mitchell brings fairly standard acting techniques as Walker and Ned Janeway. So far so bland, but it's the proficiency of Richard Greenberg's script and Mitchell's acting that elevate PCS' production above what could have been prosaic stage-filler to something really exciting.

Three Days of Rain is written anti-chronologically: the first act is set in 1995, and the second act in 1965. Act One deals with Walker Janeway, his sister Nan (Lisa Datz) and childhood friend Pip Wexler (Sasha Roiz) just prior to and just after the reading of Ned's will. Pip's father Theo (also played by Sasha Roiz) and Ned were architectural business partners. Theo died first, and much later Ned. Neither Nan nor Walker were particularly close to Ned: he was a silent man and a distant father. Hence Walker's excitement at finding his father's journal in the apartment where Ned and Theo lived when they began their practice, which also serves as the venue for the entire play. The journal poses more questions than it answers: the evening on which their mentally unstable mother heard Walker laughing and bolted through a glass window, emerging "like a crystal being, then colorized," is entered into the journal simply as "a terrible night." The journal even begins prosaically: "three days of rain." The first act poses these questions and others, and the second act sets out to answer them by allowing us into a critical moment in the relationship between Ned and Theo and the mother Lina (also played by Datz).

Three Days of Rain's protagonists are Walker and Ned Janeway: Silas Weir Mitchell's characters. That means, taken as a whole, the play is the story of the relationship between son and father, and that it falls primarily on Mitchell's shoulders to tell that story. His acting, therefore, is the focal point of PCS's Three Days of Rain, and his presence on stage is a credit to Roiz and director Chris Coleman's bringing him into their prospective collaboration, from whence this project springs. Mitchell's technique as an actor is phenomenal. Currently, audiences have their primary exposure to him in his work as a series regular on Grimm (also co-starring Roiz), but his resume goes back years to his undergraduate and graduate work at Brown and UC San Diego, respectively. Even in minor roles, written as jokes, such as Donny Jones on My Name Is Earl, his technique steals his scenes. The only problem with Mitchell on TV is that we don't get to see enough of him. Three Days of Rain is a fantastic showcase for Mitchell's craft in that it allows us to see him use physicality, voice and methods of receiving information over the course of more than two hours to define two very different characters. Besides just showing us what a great actor Mitchell is, PCS' Three Days of Rain is a testament to the importance of craftsmanship in theater.

Greenberg's script has been performed in LORT theaters since the 90s, and with good reason: it's a technical masterpiece that plays well to Boomer subscribers comfortable with kitchen-sink realism. As such, it's a perfect vehicle for a technically brilliant actor like Silas Weir Mitchell. It's a reminder that if you're doing something well, even if you're doing something as notoriously familiar as kitchen-sink realism, you'll be doing something exciting and special.

Responding to Ulf Schmidt's "Agile Theater"

This January, dramaturg Ulf Schmidt presented a paper titled "Auf dem Weg zum agilen Theater" ("On the Way to Agile Theater") at the Jahreskonferenz der Dramaturgischen Gesellschaft in Mannheim. In it he explores ways in which contemporary theater is failing, and how it can regain social relevancy. His interest in using digital technology on stage has merit but is not new, while his assertion that we appropriate production models from other industries constitutes a categorical error.

 

He begins by drawing a bleak scenario of contemporary German theater. By his report, it' doesn't appear that much different from American theater. Still, his writing features un-cited charts and hyperbole (e.g. "das Ende des Stadttheater-Schauspiels [ist] in den nächsten zehn Jahren denkbar." - "the end of publicly funded theater could occur in the next ten years.") Bob Abelman and Cheryl Kushner's diagnosis in A Theater Criticism/Arts Journalism Reader is more trustworthy. What Schmidt dramatically refers to as "die digitale Naissance" is more prosaically defined by Abelman and Kushner as modern audiences' "access to a wide variety of entertainment options through an increasing array of personal and social media." (2) Not covered by Schmidt with any kind of thoroughness is theater's "relegation to high culture status." (4) Abelman and Kushner attribute theater's seeming elitism to the "digitale Naissance," but ongoing experiments in ticket pricing seem to tell a different story, or at least a parallel story. According to Portland Center Stage Artistic Director Chris Coleman, Signature Theater's $20 price cap has promoted a younger and more diverse audience. Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis has seen similar results by not charging for tickets. Finally, Abelman and Kushner distinguish between screen and stage by noting that the former promotes audience passivity and the later audience activity. (8)

 

Schmidt proposes two primary solutions: incorporating digital content on stage, and following a corporate production model. The first has merit, proved by the experiments of 3-Legged Dog Media + Theater Group (3LD) and their associated companies. In January's issue of American Theatre, 3LD's artistic director Kevin Cunningham noted that "Many of our more recent projects surround and immerse the audience in moving image and sound." The connection to immersive theater is notable in light of Punchdrunk's long-running Sleep No More, and Alex Timbers' use thereof in his current Broadway project, Rocky. In 3LD's specific case, immersive theater addresses the omnipresence of digital technology in our modern lives. Generally, immersive theater embraces theater's capacity for audience activity.

Schmidt's second proposal, following a corporate production model inspired by the work of Hollywood and Silicon Valley makes a categorical error: TV and technology companies create products for mass consumption. Such is the nature of broadcast supplemented by archival platforms like Netflix and Hulu, and the creation of iPads to be sold worldwide to enable access to Netflix and Hulu. Theater, by its nature, is a limited time event. As such, it suffers the same market weakness as any handmade craft: limited production leads to higher cost.

While hyperbolic and un-cited, Schmidt is correct that one of the challenges faced by modern theater (in both Germany and the United States) is the ubiquity of digital technology and entertainment platforms. His assessment that appropriating these technologies for use in the theaters offers one viable solution to this challenge is being born out by American theater companies, and has been since at least the 90s when 3LD emerged from the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. His rather involved fascination with Hollywood and Silicon Valley production models, however, misses the point. Those industries have developed their processes to match the products they create, which are mass producible. By its nature as a live, site-specific crucible of human interaction, theater needs its own production models. Schmidt might do better to look at theaters who have been addressing his digitale Naissance.

 

Affirming Life in the Face of Certain Death

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.