Article
Reviews
of Radio Golf and Pera Palas in Plays International, Autumn
2005
Robert
Cohen
in Los Angeles
Twenty-plus years in the making, August Wilson’s mammoth
dramatic creation – ten plays that treat African American
life in every decade of the twentieth century – comes
to its thrilling conclusion with Radio Golf, a moving
and often brilliant portrayal of the oxymoronic – and
often simply moronic – notion of “redevelopment”
as it steers between the fiercely conflicting interests of real
estate, politics, and social culture. For how do you redevelop
property without demolishing the community that calls it home?
Particularly a community that was prevented from fully developing
in the first place?
Radio
Golf, performed this Fall at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper
Forum (in a second step towards what will presumably be its
final version for its expected New York opening), has no quick
solutions. But it certainly vivifies the issues. Set in the
1990s, and thus neatly concluding Wilson’s decalogy and
the African American century it describes at the same time,
the play posits a potent dialectic. On the right is developer
Roosevelt Hicks who, with the aid of government funding, plans
to build a twelve-story apartment complex in Pittsburgh’s
scruffy Hill District – which happens to be Wilson’s
own childhood home and the site of many of his plays. Against
Hicks stands an aged and tattered Hill dweller, Elder Joseph
Barlow (“Old Joe”), who claims to be the owner of
an abandoned house now standing in the path of the developers’
waiting bulldozers. And in the middle of the debate is Hicks’s
old friend, Harmond Wilks, a local realtor now running for city
mayor. Harmond is idealistic enough to open his campaign office
in the decrepit Hill District rather than the tonier Shadyside
suburb, and to hang a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. prominently
on his construction office wall, but he’s also ambitious
enough to have taken on Hicks as a business partner, and golf
partner as well. But the increasingly heated arguments between
Roosevelt and Old Joe end up tearing Wilks in half, and pretty
much tearing us in half in the bargain.
This
would make for strong drama even if race played no part in it
– and Hey, did I mention that all the play’s characters
are black? But in the context of the entire cycle, the epic
story of American slavery’s aftermath becomes the tragic-heroic
subtext of Wilson’s neo-Odyssey. For such is our great
and grave national mythos: America, whose official name includes
the word “United” and whose national pledge pronounces
us “one nation, indivisible,” is in fact still desperately
trying to bridge cultural, intellectual, political and psychological
chasms vaster than our totemic Grand Canyon. We are an eminently
divisible nation, still trying to Yank ourselves out of our
new Civil Wars - between black and white, red and white (a subject
not ignored by Wilson in Golf, by the way), and, now
more than ever, between red (right) and blue (left). Who develops?
And who gets redeveloped? And why?
“It’s
not about being white or black,” says would-be Mayor Wilks,
“it’s about being American.” Well the rainbow
revolution may be coming, but it sure hasn’t arrived –
not in Wilson’s mind, nor, as we watch his play, in ours.
Wilson’s
genius is not in his dialectics, however, but in his lustrous
dialogue: speeches that virtually glow in the dark and create
a seamless rapport between logic and sensuality, kinship and
camaraderie, aspiration and hard fact. Let me quote at length
Roosevelt’s first long speech - nostalgic, revelatory
and carnally ambitious - to Harmond:
“I just want these kids to know what it feels like to
hit a golf ball. I hit my first golf ball I asked myself where
have I been? How’d I miss this? I couldn’t believe
it. I felt free. Truly free. For the first time. I watched
the ball soar down the driving range. I didn’t think
it could go so high. It just got higher and higher. I felt
something lift off of me. Some weight I was carrying around
and didn’t know it. I felt like the world was open to
me. I never did feel exactly like that any more. I must have
hit a hundred golf balls trying to get that feeling. But that
first time was worth everything. I felt like I had my dick
in my hand and was waving it around like a club. ‘I’m
a man! Anybody want some of this come and get it!’ That
was the best feeling of my life.”
You have to imagine this as it thunders, in ever-rising cadences,
from an impeccably groomed 200-pound-plus black man in grey
suit, white shirt, and blue-plaid tie, in order to hear the
combination of elation, pride, and ejaculatory abandon that
is the magnitude of Wilson’s linguistic achievement. It’s
a poetry that transports what at first glance seem urban planning
problems to evolutionary status. Golf-loving Roosevelt –
fitly named after two U.S. presidents – is roaring inexorably
into (“playing through” a golfer would say) the
Hill’s future. But he’s also quashing the Hill’s
past. To a workman hoping to save the Elder’s house, Roosevelt’s
sarcasm is merciless:
“It’s not my fault if your daddy’s in jail,
your mama’s on drugs, your little sister’s pregnant
and the kids don’t have any food cause the welfare cut
off the money. Roosevelt Hicks ain’t holding nobody
back. Roosevelt Hicks got a job because Roosevelt Hicks wanted
one. You niggers kill me blaming somebody else for your troubles.
Get up off your ass… quit stealing… quit using
drugs… go to school… get a job… pay your
taxes. Oh I see you can’t do that cause Roosevelt Hicks
is holding you back.”
But the workman’s brazen reply rises fully to Roosevelt’s
challenge:
“Yeah you holding me back. You make things hard for
me. You go around kissing the white man’s ass then when
they see me they think they see you coming. Go on downtown
and kiss some more ass cause you ain’t wanted around
here.”
No American playwright today joins issues as cogently and powerfully
as Wilson does. And the weight of his unprecedented decalogy
bears down upon those issues with immense force. The house to
be sacrificed belonged to the fabled Aunt Ester – an iconic
character mentioned in earlier plays (and appearing in Gem
of the Ocean) who, dying at the age of 366, carried with
her the entire sad and joyous history of Black America. And
Old Joe Barlow claims to have “journeyed to a city of
bones sunken in the Atlantic Ocean,” this being Gem’s
devastating image of the slave ships that foundered on their
doomed voyages to America. The accreted impact, coming at the
end of this extraordinary cycle, is overwhelming, and Wilson’s
Radio Golf (excerpts here are from the working L.A.
script, not a final one) could very well become a true masterwork.
It has a way to go yet. The role of Wilks, the would-be mayor
in the middle of all this, lacks emotionally convincing and
dramatically meaningful transitions; his shifts of position
are surprisingly abrupt – and not clearly generated by
events or arguments or even a psychology that we can readily
determine, diminishing their significance as anything other
than dramaturgical tropes to move the plot along. And the small
role of Wilks’ wife adds absolutely nothing to the play;
it should – in my opinion – be either expanded or
dropped. “I still love you, Harmond,” she says,
as her husband switches his political position, but Golf simply
hasn’t put this romance into play, and the revelation
– which in another play might be a climax - is simply
wasted.
Golf is directed, by Kenny Leon, with a breeziness
we don’t usually see in Wilson productions (certainly
not in Leon’s more subtle and nuanced staging of Gem
of the Ocean last year); indeed, the comic pacing and theatrical
brio would not be out of place in a Neil Simon comedy. But it
works just fine; the gravity of the play’s subject needs
no grim underlining, and the wry humor, far from distancing
us from the play’s solemnities, urges us to work towards
solutions rather than wallow in irony or defeatism. James A.
Wilson as Hicks, and Anthony Chisolm as Old Joe, both Wilson
veterans, are stunning in their escalating face-offs, as is
John Earl Jelks, another Wilson vet, as Sterling, the workman.
Rocky Carroll seemed, well, a bit rocky from time to time, but
he certainly delivers the goods when he is sufficiently clear
what they are. None of these reservations, though, detract an
iota from the splendors of Wilson’s new, and very fresh,
accomplishment. I very much look forward to seeing it again
in New York.
Istanbul, aka Constantinople, was the most important city in
the world for roughly a thousand years – from about the
fourth to the fourteenth centuries - yet most history texts
slide quickly over this amazing fact. Pera Palas, enjoying
its West Coast premiere at Theatre@Boston Court in Pasadena,
doesn’t begin its coverage of Istanbul’s history
until the first years after World War I, but the magnitude of
the city’s importance and the span and splendor of its
cultural heritage weigh heavily on the play’s every moment.
Set, eponymously, in Istanbul’s most famous (and truly
palatial) hotel, the play spreads its focus over three discrete
time periods: the postwar dissolution of the Ottoman empire
and rise of its modern Turkish republic under Mustafa Kamal
(Atatürk) in the early 1920s, the country’s first
years as a US ally and NATO member at the start of the Cold
War in the early 1950s, and the re-emergence of Islamic fundamentalism
in the early 1990s. Each era has its own cast (some characters
being older versions of their earlier selves) and each period
co-exists on stage with the other two, as characters from different
eras play out their scenes simultaneously, often onstage and
crying out at the same time.
While this may sound like a clever dramaturgical puzzle (where
are you, Mssrs. Stoppard and Ayckbourne?), it’s not, really:
the author, Turkish expatriate Sinan Ünel, has skillfully
created this work as a dramatic collage of Istanbul/Constantinople’s
own conflation (talk about “indivisible!”), as a
city which quite literally bridges Asia and Europe, and figuratively
- as the former capital of both the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires
and the terminus of the Orient Express – bridges East
and West, Christendom and Islam, classical and medieval, ancient
and modern. And looking beyond these geographical, political
and theological realms, we also see the deeper social axles
that connect (or disconnect) old and new, male and female, sacred
and secular.
The play is more panorama than plot: ten actors play Pera’s
twenty-five roles of roughly the same size; with characters
ranging from an actual English journalist (one Evelyn Crawley)
to lively fictional ones: a wealthy Pasha, an English diplomat,
a harem odalisque, a Turkish expat and his American boyfriend,
an American schoolteacher and her younger sister, plus various
friends, relatives and servants of all the above. Yet all of
them have distinct identities and back-stories and, even when
they’re speaking at the same, we have a pretty good idea
of the moment-to-moment goings-on between them and the transcending
arcs of their – and their various countries’ - lives.
This is all quite impressive, as is the excellent ensemble cast,
all of whose members are drawn from the estimable Antaeus Company
of Los Angeles, which co-produced with the Boston Court team.
Indeed, Aenteus has provided the Boston Court with two casts,
each entirely distinct, performing on alternate evenings, and
has blatantly bent casting genders as well (a bearded male plays
an elderly harem lady), thus clearly prioritizing the play’s
structural and thematic issues over the urge to create of individually
“definitive” performances.
Of the many interwoven relationships in Pera Palas,
the most gripping is the infatuation and marriage of idealistic
young Turk Orhan and an American girl, Anne, who visits Orhan’s
Istanbul home in 1952; when, forty years later, Orhan’s
and Anne’s resulting Turkish-American son returns for
a visit, the son confronts his older and now-alcoholic father
who curses both the American license and Arabic fundamentalism
that he sees destroying off his country’s gains. Sparks
fly aplenty in a final scene where both generations share the
stage: young Orhan and his young wife battle in the 20s and
old Orhan and his gay son have it out in the 90s, with nary
a hair’s breadth between them. A few of the issues (and,
regrettably, several of the climaxes) are lost in the resulting
cacophony, but the point of unending cultural crises thunders
home. While revisions that could score both the points and
the dramatic thrills would be appreciated, the overall impact,
particularly as acted here, is powerful, and its pertinence
is vast.
Acting was indeed stunning throughout, particularly, in the
performance I saw, by Broadway veteran Harry Groaner as the
older Orhan, Ramón de Ocampo as the younger one, Mikael
Salazar as an old Pasha and Rebecca Mozo as his 15-year-old
daughter. The multi-era design (Ottoman ogival patterns punctuated
with McDonald’s arches) was by Tom Buderwitz scenic, Adam
H. Greene lighting, Ivy Y. Chou costumes and Leon Rothenberg
sound, and it was outstanding in every respect. A fascinating
and thoughtful evening, with confidently assured direction by
Michael Michetti.
—Robert
Cohen
