pt at large

Wings of Desire, brilliant or baffling?

Wings of Desire
Directed by Ola Mafaalani
American Repertory Theater
64 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
November 25-December 17, 2006
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

The American Repertory Theater always produces sound and fury. Sometimes it signifies nothing, sometimes it baffles and sometimes it produces brilliance. Often it occurs within the same production.

Case in point: Wings of Desire, a stage adaptation of a Wim Wenders 1987 film of the same name.

The screenplay is heavenly. Two angels, Damien and Cassiel, are assigned for eternity to observe and catalogue human behavior. Damien begins to question his lot to live a spiritual existence and begins to long for human contact, physical sensation of biting into an apple, and for love. He observes Marion, a lonely trapeze artist, falls in love with her, and over time decides to shed his wings and descend to earth to join her in the mortal world.

Most of us eye heaven as a place in which our worldly burdens melt away - the ultimate oasis where we bathe in pools of harmony and respite. We’ve experienced the crests and troughs of love and might envy Damien’s benign existence. But we understand the power of a yearning heart. Even though we know the costs and the disequilibrium that often attend love, we root for Damien make the leap.

What could be better? An angel willing to sacrifice heaven for an earthly love falls for a trapeze artist, of all people, a beauty who nightly soars toward heaven and earthly fulfillment. Beautiful irony. The handsome angel and the gorgeous trapeze artist in a cosmic collision that promises heat and light.

It never happens.

The set over which the aerial artistry takes place is spare and effective. The stage, stripped to its black rear wall and up to its forty-foot ceiling, suggests heaven and earth. The rooftop of a white canteen wagon parked at center stage acts as a perch for the two angels to view Earth. A pair of musicians play and relax to stage left, various characters, and local news personality Robin Young, take turns occupying stage right.

Suspended over all is the trapeze harness in which Smith frequently glides in stunningly sensual arcs. She seems most herself as she defies gravity. Longing for her from above is Damien, who has never felt its pull.

Between the philosophical conversations between Damien and Cassiel, other things happen. Music, loud and often inaudible, blares occasionally from the musicians. Robin Young reads the news. Other characters come forward to comment on the human condition. As a former angel who came to earth for his own reasons, Stephen Payne leavens the proceedings with panache. His gravel voiced cowboy philosopher in a rumpled hat comes across somewhere between a jaded hippie and a wise Zen monk. By the play’s conclusion, it isn’t at all clear that Damien will have integrated life and love as well as this free spirit.

Sand drifting silently down pools of light gives beautiful texture to the metaphor of the passing of time and suggests a channel through which mortals pass into heaven. Alas, the disparate elements and characters don’t add up to a coherent narrative.

Damien’s first steps on earth are acted out in an inexplicably madcap and manic rushing about the stage. It’s unsatisfying and out of synch with the romantically poetic nature he's demonstrated from his perch in heaven. The final scene with Damien flying sensuously with Marion would be a stunning act for the Big Apple Circus but it gives us no idea what Damien thinks of his choice to subject himself to the laws of gravity and vagaries of love. His ‘voice over’ during this flight suggests his ecstasy at being joined to Marion but seems awkward since there’s been so little exposition between them since his descent to earth.

So here we are again with the ART’s sound and fury, signifying something, I’m just not sure what.

"A Night in November", a candle in the darkness

“A Night In November"
A play written by Marie Jones, directed by Tim Byron Owen
Jimmy Tingle Off Broadway Theater
www.jtoffbroadway.com
255 Elm Street, Somerville, MA 02144  (617-591-1616)
2 acts, one 15-minute intermission, running time approx two hours

The play’s final performances are Friday, Saturday, and a Sunday matinee, December 8-10

We are putty in the hands of a gifted storyteller. With gestures, timing, and imagination, he can whiplash us from of tears of laughter to tears of grief within one deft scene. He can transport us to faraway places but the most powerful trips march to the interior.

In the Jimmy Tingle Off Broadway Theater in Somerville production of “A Night in November,” the storyteller’s journey becomes a mirror to any who have the nerve to acknowledge patches of hard wired ugliness that reside in the dark corners of our psyches.

Irish actor Marty Maguire portrays the transformation of Kenneth McAllister from a go along to get along Protestant in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to a man of conscience, compassion, and action. His actions are not of the heroic stature that change the course of history but those of a man who comes to realize the life-sucking costs that hate and bigotry bring to himself and his country. And does something about it.

Photo: Avanti Studios
The lilting Irish inflection has an uncanny ability to plumb the range of human emotion. Maguire milks the nuances of Irish class dialects to portray a whopping twenty-six characters that make up the two-act play written by Marie Jones. Using a few props and a mannerisms which can register an attitude with a beautifully timed arch of an eyebrow or a full body mime displaying several feelings in slow motion, he constructs powerful characterizations which give the play emotional context and clout.

The play opens with Maguire portraying the scene in which his wife dragoons him into taking his father in law to the world cup soccer match in Dublin 1993. The match was a game actually played between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a game that determined who would play Italy in NYC for the world cup championship. 

Playing the roles of McAllister, other spectators, and the crowd itself, Maguire paints the disturbing, unfettered hatred of the Protestant fans toward their “papist” rivals. McAllister had grown up with and been part of the routine bigotry the Protestant majority had over the minority Catholics who live in a nearly apartheid section of Belfast but is repelled by the hateful ferocity of thousands of his Protestant countrymen, including his mercilessly racist, bigoted father. He registers revulsion then shame as he hears thousands of Protestant fans chorus “Trick or Treat,” a reference to a recent October 31 incident in which Ulster gunmen shouted “Trick or Treat” as they entered a pub filled with Catholic patrons and sprayed machine gun fire killing seven men. He’s appalled to realize that he’s too afraid of the mob to do anything but play along.

A seismic emotional shift has begun rumbling in his conscience as he struggles to find his center of moral gravity. The power of the play is watching this ordinary man question then defy the forces that he’s never questioned and have shaped his entire life. It is every bit the gut wrenching, soul searching struggle of a King Lear except with huge wallops of black humor that keep exploding the tension, and giving McAllister the stones to keep driving at full speed without headlights down his dark night of the soul.

The genius of the play is how Maguire uses everyday vignettes to deconstruct then reconstruct his unexamined life. The chit-chat of office politics and a marriage in which keeping up appearances is paramount demonstrate the power of everyday prejudice and the fear of straying outside the class norms. The last of several scenes in which Maguire acts out bureaucrat McAllister lording it over a Catholic man applying for work is the most quietly moving scene you will see anywhere this theater season.

McAllister’s struggle resonates with us in the audience. Safe to say, we’ve all been silent parties to casual prejudice or worse. And safe to say, we’re all carrying innate or learned prejudices that burrow into our psyches. Establishing dominion over them is one of the most relentless battles we face every day.

His stand against the eternal night of prejudice is not going to make the headlines but it’s going to make a difference in the one piece of Ireland that he can control - his own.

To any who read or watch the news, there’s no respite from seemingly intractable intolerance and hatred in every corner of the world. If there was ever a time we needed a Norman McAllister in our midst, it is today.

The play is a perfect embodiment of the proverb, “Better to light one candle than curse the darkness.”