Issue date: July 01, 1998
Play: Boring or moving? It's a judgment call
By BRYAN WIGGIN
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm insensitive and obtuse. Maybe I just don't get it.
Let me explain.
The TheatreWorks production of "Talley's Folly," by Lanford Wilson, at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, impressed me as excruciatingly tedious, taking over 90 minutes for the boy to kiss the girl while telling only about 10 minutes' worth of story.
By 20 minutes in, I was feeling restless, and during the last half-hour I wanted to cry out, "Get on with it!"
But near the end, as I was calculating how many bombs to load into the rack for this particular raid, I noticed that the woman sitting next to me -- my wife, in fact -- was reaching for a tissue and applying it to her eyes. While I was being moved to revolt, she was being moved to tears. And the applause of the audience was clearly heartfelt, as well as prolonged.
So, who was right, everyone else in the theater or I? False modesty prevents me answering honestly, but I can at least tell you a bit about the play.
Matt Friedman is a Jewish accountant who lives in St. Louis, Missouri. On July 4, 1944, Matt is in Lebanon, Missouri, to woo Sally Talley, having met her a year before while on vacation. Since then, he has chronicled his life to her in detailed, daily letters, though her only reply has been a single note telling him not to write.
Now, having been driven from the Talley manse at shotgun point by her wildly anti-Semitic brother, Matt waits for Sally at the family folly -- a crumbling old boathouse and gazebo built by her grandfather.
He chats with the audience for about 10 minutes before Sally arrives. We then have over an hour of his theatrical posturing and attitudinizing, his irrelevant jokes, gags, and pratfalls, as he deflects Sally's efforts to learn about his past.
Finally, febrile and overwrought, Matt tells the story. Before World War I, the members of his immediate family were tortured and killed, for information they did not have, by both the French and the Germans. Matt escaped to America, but, knowing of the depredations of the Nazis, he has decided that no place is safe and has isolated himself from all human contact -- until he met Sally.
Sally, even more overwrought, then tells her story: how the daughter of wealthy family and the son of an even wealthier family were assigned to a dynastic marriage until Sally suffered a disease that changed her life.
These are poignant tales, but by the time we got to them, I no longer cared.
As Matt, Jackson Davis gives what must be an exhausting performance, loud and intense almost all the time. As Sally, Julie Eccles is not only very pretty, but also more varied in tone. Her rises and falls in volume and intensity make her easier to like and easier to take.
Andrea Bechert has created a perfect set: old wood greened by a hot, wet climate.
Director Robert Kelley creates a fast pace, with the actors often overlapping each other. But the script simply takes too long to get where we're going.
At least, that's how I felt. Others felt differently. And while an admission of fallible judgment is foreign to my nature, I suppose -- Choke! Gasp! -- I could be wrong.
PERFORMANCES: "Talley's Folly," by Lanford Wilson, is being presented by TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts through August 9. For information, call 903-6000.
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