Seen on: Friday, 2/23/24.
Plot and Background
Deep Flight Productions present a pair of monologue one acts by Lanford Wilson for one week only at The Flea. Both plays concern a character answering questions from an unseen person. In A Poster of The Cosmos, Tom curls over a takeout coffee in a precinct interrogation room after the death of his lover; in The Moonshot Tape, Diane grants an interview to a student in her hometown while staying in a rundown motel near her mother's nursing home.What I Knew Beforehand
I had read both plays, years ago, in the collection of 21 one acts by Lanford Wilson, but I didn't remember most of the content. But I know and love the work and voice of Lanford Wilson, and I was very excited to get to see some of his work performed.Thoughts:
At the end of Cosmos, Tom asks if the police are happy now that he's finished telling the terrible story of his lover's death from AIDS, and his attempt to cope with that moment. At the end of Moonshot, Diane offers her interviewer a drink, to help digest her story of sexual abuse and revenge. But the question they're really asking is "Do you regret asking me to tell you the truth?" Because the thing about knowing the truth is, you can never unknow it. This horrible thing that has been living inside Tom, inside Diane, has spread to live inside their interrogators, has spread to live inside us.
Tom, costumed in his baker's whites, twitches under the police officers' questions, bitterly repeating their comment that he "don't look like the kinna guy'd do somethin' like dat." Though we don't yet know what it is he's done, we can see the smears of red blood on the shoulder of his undershirt. As it becomes clear that it is 1987 and his lover has just died from the plague decimating the gay community, those smears of red become increasingly potent, especially with Zack Gage's unobtrusive but effective lighting design dimming around Tom, isolated him in the pool of light created by the hanging bulb above him. The interrogation room, as designed by Bethanie Wampol Watson, is a narrow sliver of space, with nowhere to hide and nowhere to go: dingy yellow plaster walls alternating with cement brick walls, a table, a coffee cup, a one-way dark window.
Diane, pacing the confines of her similarly dingy motel room (another excellent and potent design choice by Wampol Watson, cleverly constructed to change easily from one space to the other for the evening; and credit is due to the excellent stage crew who effect that change quickly), exhibits both a matching restlessness and a disdain for the questions she's being asked. She focuses instead on the contents of her drink glass, and the insidious unpacking of the history of her abusive stepfather.
There's a sense, in both scripts, of the characters losing control of their own narrative: neither should be admitting to the things they are, especially not with a tape recorder running. That loss of control, however, doesn't quite manifest in the performances the way it should, in part because they're both a bit pause-y. As playwright Wilson notably advised both his students and those performing his work, you need to "take the air out" (credit to Reesa Graham for this note). These plays work if one feels that somewhere along the way someone cut the brake line, and that Tom and Diane couldn't stop themselves even if they wanted to. Like vomiting to rid your body of food poisoning, these characters need to get their stories out. But I think neither performance has yet fully grappled with the gravity of what their characters are admitting: the desperation, the despair, the viciousness. Some of it's there. The grief is there. But that lack of horizon line, particularly in Tom's story--it's 1987, and things are only getting worse, not better--is missing when it should be front and center.
Still, I will always be grateful for the opportunity to see Lanford Wilson's plays performed onstage, to hear his words, to witness his stories continue to be told.
***
Running: Now playing at The Siggy at the Flea (Deep Flight Productions) - Opening: February 21, 2024. Closing: February 25, 2024.
Category: two one act plays
Length: 1 hour, 30 minutes, no intermission.
Creative Team
Playwright: Lanford Wilson
Director: Mark Cirnigliaro
Designers: Bethanie Wampol Watson (Set), Noa Smidt (Costume), Zack Gage (Lighting), Jeff Watson (Sound and Projection), Tye Palmer (Scenic Carpenter), Jennifer Bonilla (Scenic Painter), Shawn Walsh (Scenic Painter), Cat Gillespie (Stage Manager), Amanda Quaid (Dialect Coach to Margaret Curry), Patricia Fletcher (Dialect Coach to Geoff Stoner), Katie Rosin, KampFIRE Films PR (Publicity and Marketing Consultant), Alan Buttar (Graphic Design).
Cast: Margaret Curry, Geoff Stoner.
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