.jpg)
(Photo by James D Palmer)
Perhaps
half an hour into "Elephant's Graveyard", the forebodingly titled play
by George Brant, which opened at Red Tape Theatre this past Monday, I noticed a
fortuitous design quirk. On the floor of Red Tape's undisguised gymnasium at St.
Peter's Episcopal Church, faintly visible, are three faded circles of what was
once a basketball court. I quite like that Red Tape has allowed them to remain.
Whether they are there on purpose or the theatre just can’t
afford the paint to cover them up, those circles pay tribute to the building's past and
contribute a richness to its present offerings as a company. Red Tape’s
“Elephant’s
Graveyard”, an absorbing though flawed play, is
very much about a cultural acknowledgement of the past, however messy and
ferocious that past may be. The play also, with an involuntary wink to those
basketball court circles, takes place in a three-ring circus.
The 1916 event in which Mary, a Sparks
Circus elephant, mistakenly killed a new animal handler on a parade route in
full view of the crowd and consequently was condemned to die by hanging in
small town Tennessee, is depicted gently by Brant and interpreted with stylized,
somber fancy by Red Tape Artistic Director James D Palmer. Brant's maudlin circus drama is told
though a series of disjointed, direct address recollections. All of the
characters onstage offer their own perspectives of these happenings through
monologues that are interrupted and fed by the other characters' thoughts and
feelings. At the play's most frantic, this device makes for vigorous and
engaging storytelling; however the play's first half-hour, going on about the
wonders of Sparks Circus with empty grins and too much nostalgia, becomes
repetitive and overlong.
Although
the scattered first-person narratives all sound somewhat similar, the thirteen-person
ensemble of circus freaks and townspeople succeed tremendously in
differentiating themselves from one another. The actors’
togetherness is markedly fantastic as they sentence Mary to death –
bravely encapsulating all of humanity’s prejudices and
fears into this one small piece of forgotten history. Of the townspeople, only
one, the Preacher, speaks out in defense of Mary. The Preacher, in a crafty
casting choice, is played by a woman, Meghan Reardon. Interestingly, the character,
adorned in a tie with Reardon’s hair pulled back, is still very
much a man. Truth be told, Reardon’s empathy and
inherent femininity makes you weigh what the Preacher says more conscientiously
than had the character been played by a man, as written.
Two
roles in “Elephant’s
Graveyard” are of particular interest –
The Trainer, played with colorful humor and heartfelt anguish by Carrie Drapac,
and Charlie Sparks, a dexterous Sean Thomas. The opening of the play and the
subsequent transitions see Sparks, the now-retired owner of the circus, barely
mobile, being cared for by a Nurse, also played by Drapac. Sparks suffers, not
only from the usual ailments associated with aging, but from his agonizing guilt
over what he allowed to happen to Mary – and how he
further capitalized on it.
As
the elderly Sparks sits, heavily medicated in his comfy chair, the embodiment
of his fears – a limping, hooded creature with
spikes covering its body – nightmarishly haunts him. Myah Shein
has choreographed this movement with griminess, peeling back at the text’s
too polished exterior. Similarly, Thomas portrays, with impressive
transformation, Mary the elephant both as she marches triumphantly and as she
is hanged in trembling terror. Personifying Mary adds another layer of disgust
to this real-life horror story.
The
play is accompanied by a score of dark, plucky country music, sounding like
Bluegrass but evoking the southern rebelliousness of Rockabilly, composed by
Jonathan Gullien and performed by The New Switcheroo. The songs are neatly
multifaceted, with the lyrics doing double duty as euphoric celebration and vengeful
crowd damnation. The exciting melodies pair elegantly with the choreographed
transitions, and lend the play a quickening pulse. The New Switcheroo is
performing some of the best music on a Chicago theatre stage right now, in a musical
or a straight play, and this heated, unnerving production would not be quite
the same without it.
Emily
Guthrie's wooden set continues to push the malleability of Red Tape's space
with elevated seating in an alley configuration. Together with Kyle Land’s
lighting design of extreme warms and extreme cools, the play visually bounces
from emotional high to emotional high. Bringing to mind the undefeatable modern
court of public opinion, the audience is positioned high above the actors,
facing each other on two sides – the play envisioned as a
stage of witnesses appealing to we the jury. Ascending the tall stairs to find a
seat in these makeshift jury boxes is a stark initial reminder of our constantly
shifting positions, the judge to the judged, and, more importantly, the terrible
consquences of our personal hypocrisies.
Red Tape Theatre’s
production of “Elephant’s
Graveyard” by George Brant runs at St. Peter’s
Episcopal Church through June 16.
