Eugene weekly., January 25, 2007, Page 48, Image 48

BY CHUCK ADAMS
Religious fervor drowns out the truth in Book of Days
JOHN BAUGUESS
Middle America
On The Verge Of A
Nervous Breakdown
Humor and pathos mix well at the VLT
T
he Very Little Theater’s production
of Book of Days starts with the
entire cast onstage rattling off short
descriptions and anecdotes about Dublin,
Missouri (pronounced Miz-ZUR-Uh),
where the action takes place. We learn the
town is far from any metropolitan area (the
closest city is Springfield, population
151,580), but a tide of strip mall commer-
cialism and urban progressiveness has been
lapping at its shores for some time now, eat-
ing at its morals from the inside-out so that
even the town’s reverend has a spit-shined
glow but is rotten at his core. Part The
Laramie Project, part Dogville, Lanford
Wilson’s Days offers a panoramic portrait
of Middle America struggling with theolog-
ical complacency on the one hand and a
common sense worldview on the other. The
result is a fine blend of laugh-out-loud
humor and deep-seated tragedy.
It’s no coincidence the townsfolk are
called Dubliners, a nod to their fleshed-out
Joycian undertones. The play may give
Ruth Hoch (Shawne Crow) and James
Bates (Mike Hawkins) the most narrative
juice, but every character has his or her
desires. There’s Len (Tom Wilson), Ruth’s
husband, who wants the cheese plant he
works for to start making slow-aged gour-
met cheese rather than selling off curds to
Kraft. Walt Bates (Alan Aldrich), the
cheese plant owner and town patriarch, is
drawn to Len’s plan, if only out of a desire
to re-create the Provolone cheese (and
romance) he tasted on his honeymoon in
Italy 30 years ago. There’s Lou Ann Bates
(Mary DeLorenzo), obsessed with making
her husband, James, confess his overt adul-
tery before the church, while the Reverend
Bobby Groves (a pitch-perfect, plastic-
smiling Kevin Crowe) tells her to be a
“good wife” and let the matter drop.
Then there’s Boyd Middleton (LCC the-
ater student Kory Weimer), a slick Los
Angeles bohemian who will guest-direct
the community theater’s production of
George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, and
who casts Ruth in the lead. Like it or not,
Middleton becomes the symbol of the
immoral intrusion on Dublin’s soil — or
soul — that begins with a seemingly harm-
less play about a woman’s crusade against
church dogma and ends with Sheriff
Conroy Atkins (Barry G. Carroll) threaten-
ing Middleton, asking the director to leave
the town in peace. “For crying out loud,”
reasons Middleton, “it’s George Bernard
Shaw! Nobody is offended by Shaw!”
Nobody in urban America, he means.
It’s unfortunate that Walt, one of the
more lively characters, is killed off barely a
third into the play, thus leaving a hole in
the cast — but to much effect. We long for
the return of Walt, perhaps as a phantom à
la Hamlet. But death, Wilson assures us, is
final, making murder the most heinous
offense. It’s maddening, then, when
Dubliners play down the death to preserve
their fragile existence. This is where Ruth,
who chooses to keep focusing on the
details that don’t add up, is given her Joan
of Arc moment. Sensing her historical
precedent, she duly gets burned.
Wilson frequently employs asides,
flashbacks, reruns, jump cuts and other
metanarratives to give the play a breath of
cinematic air, allowing it to give nuggets of
information in a nonlinear, disjointed fash-
ion that — thanks to fine choreography
from director Richard Scheeland and a
superb lighting design by Amanda
Ferguson — transitions smoothly from one
cut to the next. In perhaps the play’s largest
step outside of itself, one scene has Elaine
Slatore (playing Sharon Bates) refusing to
reenact a flashback scene where she let
loose a flurry of curses and accusations
after learning of her husband’s hunting
accident, insisting she “never said it like
that,” so Leslie Murray (playing Ginger)
steps in and gloriously plays the scene for
her. Wilson is saying we must remove our-
selves into the artificial world of theater (or
any type of fiction) in order to tell the Truth
with a capital T, a grand gesture towards the
arts with powerful commentary on our cur-
rent state of the union.
Book of Days is a play about staying
loyal to reality, to details, to truth — even if
it brings about the much-dreaded C-word:
change. While the message is not ground-
breaking nor scathing (Wilson wrote it in
late 1999), the VLT’s production comes at a
timely historical crossroads at what many
predict will be our country’s darkest period.
Will we side with reality or convenience?
Will we continue to get truth from CNN
and Truth from Comedy Central? When we
say a change of course is needed, do we
mean it, or are we just saying it?
ew
THE WOMAN IN BLACK
Opens Fri., Jan. 26 at Cottage
Theatre in Cottage Grove. You
know those urban legends where
a dead woman haunts a house
and maybe a town and then
leaves her hook on the car door
of the lovers making out at the
Point? Well, OK, this play isn’t
exactly like that. But it does have
tales within tales and mystery
and, well, a ghosty, haunty, appar-
ently terrifying chica wearing,
well, black. Head down to Cottage
Grove to check out the produc-
tion. Show dates are Jan. 26-28
and Feb. 2-4 & 9-10. Call 942-8001
for tickets.
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