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**WWW.YOURTHEATRE.COM** "Making A Difference."
- MD Productions
- P.O. Box 1147, Conway, NH 03818, United States
- It is M&D Production's goal to awaken community-based action and understanding of social issues through cutting edge theatre, while collaborating with other interested individuals to make our community a better place to live.
2 comments:
Hello, boys.
Feel free to post my BASH review here if you want.
always good to see a theatre company pushing the envelope. Kudos.
Dear Average Theatre Goer:
Please regard this as a public service announcement.
I am urging you- strenuously- to not even consider seeing M & D Production's latest offering, BASH: LATTERDAY PLAYS. Now, before I start getting hate mail defending M & D Productions, heralding its proven track record of bringing a richly diverse palette of interesting and provocative theatre to its neck of the woods, and the capability of M & D's target audience to fully comprehend and enjoy that which it offers, I want to state for the record that I know all of this, and I'm in complete agreement. But this play is not for you.
I know what kind of theatre you're used to. And this ain't it. This play is for real theatre aficionados. Not you. With BASH, playwright Neil LaBute brings us three stories, adapted from Greek myths, setting them in contemporary America and giving each story's character a decidedly Mormon history. Each character is presented as rather pleasant, bland, and inoffensive; Mr. And Mrs. Everyman, if you will. They're typical Mormon archetypes; clean, morally upright, eschewing of vice, clear of conscience, and eager to do the right thing as supported by the tenets of their commonly held beliefs, and as taught them by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
However, in each story, something acts as a catalyst to wrench the characters therein out of their ordered, complacent, decidedly normal lives, and send them careening down a path that, in the rational light of day, they'd barely even acknowledge as possibly existing. But this is not a play that embraces the light. In BASH, Neil LaBute pulls us into the shadows, and by so doing, proves that the patented O. Henry ending of a story is definitely not dead; it is, at best, an unquiet corpse. Subsequently, in each story, the audience is subjected to an abrupt tectonic shift in the emotional landscape of the human condition. There is an upheaval, and all of a sudden, that which is prosaic and comfortingly familiar becomes chillingly alien and desolate. Further, BASH's three stories are tied together by two constants: death, and the very human need to confess one's sins, whether one was instrumental in the aforementioned death, or not.
We're not talking about the comforting death of great old age where one is carried off painlessly after a celebrated life of accomplishment, but death that flays us open and leaves us raw: the death of an infant, the calculated murder of a gay man, and the drowning of a 14-year-old boy by his own mother. We're also not talking about the staid, safe confessions murmured in low voices within the mahogany-paneled walls of a church with the guaranteed absolution that comes from repeating a set number of Hail Marys or Our Fathers; these are Mormons, after all, and they have as much use for the trappings of confession as the Catholics do for Joseph Smith's purported vision in 1823 of the angel Moroni. No: these are confessions ripped raw and bloody from the souls of the four characters who move through these stories, told as much to exorcise the pain as to rationalize the act that spawned the story. These are not venial sins: the three confessions which make up the fabric of BASH are spurred by the mortal sin of murder. Murder drives the stories as well as the characters that tell them. Murder illuminates each story and justifies it. Without the fact of murder, as well as that which sparks first its contemplation and then its execution, it, the deaths that occur within the framework of each story would be meaningless, and the play would ultimately be about nothing.
But this production of BASH avoids futility. What brings these tectonic shifts about, and the deaths that result from them, is ably brought from concept to stage by award-winning director Clayton Phillips. Phillips maintains a steady hand through all three segments of BASH, electing to allow the stories to play out in narrative form as memory pictures, keeping the blocking spare. Phillips establishes an easy conversational tone in each story, so that on the surface, it comes across as just folks, talking about what the same things we all talk about; home and family, our hopes and our fears. It's a directorial gambit which pays off, especially when the conversations take on a darker shade. The actors take stage organically, moving as the story compels them, without artifice, and as a result, the impact of the narrative is made all the more effective. These are actors moving and speaking as people move and speak in real life. It's not a re-creation, or a dramatization; it's just real. It's unnervingly effective, and compelling.
Brian Chamberlain, Rae McCarey and Heather Hamilton all bring a wide range of emotional gradients to their characters within BASH; indeed, each actor rivets us with their interpretations of that which drives their respective characters. They all speak of the same thing, and all are led to unspeakable acts in much the same manner, yet all three stories differ, colored as they are by each actor's unique interpretation of the story they tell. This cast was chosen well, and it steps up to the difficult task of assuming not only the men and women that LaBute sketches out and that director Phillips conceptualizes, but in that each actor captivates and engages with their choices. Special mention to Brian Chamberlain for taking on an additional role on very short notice in the second segment of BASH and managing to ramp his character in that story up to a convincing level.
Set within the echoey industrial confines of a failed shoe factory in Fryeburg, Maine, BASH is expertly supported by Mark DeLancey's utilitarian set, effective use of multimedia and moody light plot. Indeed, the setting only accentuates the confessional aspect of BASH; in order for one to rid oneself of one's sins, one needs a place of privacy, and what better place than a crumbling old building well past its glory days? Even with all the right things going for it, BASH shouldn't be seen. Well, not by you, the average theatre goer. It's not a musical or a Neil Simon comedy where everyone either sings through their issues or engages in wacky shenanigans until the story resolves itself. With all that you now know about this production of BASH, it would be easy to see this play and then dismiss it as Neil LaBute's raising of the middle finger to the contradictory and insular nature of the Mormon Church, and that would be your first mistake, so, please- spare yourself the embarrassment. And you certainly shouldn't stay away because BASH is a bad play, or produced badly by M & D Productions. Quite the opposite. It's a wonderful play, rich with dark emotion, well-acted, and well-conceived of by a director with some serious game.
No; you shouldn't go see BASH because, frankly, you can't take it. You're just not capable of grasping its deeper meaning. No offense. Dumb? No. I didn't say that. But BASH is just too much for you, because it goes down some shadowy paths and touches upon some parts of life that you'd sooner not think about and you don't go to the theatre for that anyway, so what's the point? To top it off, there's no happy ending, so what's the sense in you even thinking of going to see this play? Be serious, will ya? You know what you like; why upset the applecart and see something different? Nope. BASH requires that you get involved, that you get swept up in the stories it tells, and that you do some extra heavy lifting when it comes the accepting the plausibility within BASH's narrative structure. Because of Neil LaBute's compelling way of framing these stories, you cannot help but be caught up in them. And that would be bad.
You don't REALLY wanna work that hard, do you? Yeah, pretty much what I thought, too. Oh, so now you're all mad and up in arms and thinking the Big Theatre Critic is talking down to you, assuming you're too provincial or ignorant to appreciate a really good drama? And just to show me, you're going to call M & D Productions right this minute, order tickets and see this play. Not only that, by gum, you're going to get something out of it. And that'll learn me my lesson, won't it? Well, fine. Be that way. Go. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
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