Issue date: February 10, 1999
By BRYAN WIGGIN
Heathen Valley doesn't sound like a place you would want to visit. And the eponymous play by Romulus Linney, currently at the Bus Barn Stage Company in Los Altos, isn't a show you are likely to enjoy.
In the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina in the 1840s, an Episcopalian bishop has heard of "the valley that forgot God," and he determines to bring Christianity to the place. He enlists Starns, a native of the region who has killed a man in a fight and served 10 years in prison, as a guide. Traveling with them is Billy, an adolescent orphan who is a ward of the bishop.
The residents of Heathen Valley are so primitive that they cannot fully distinguish between dreams and visions, and actual reality; their lives are driven by superstitions and blood feuds. They also are dirty and have bad teeth.
Now, it's perfectly possible to write affectingly about the poor and ignorant; John Steinbeck did so repeatedly. But playwright Linney has created types instead of people. And he has trapped them in a sequence of events so arbitrary and unmotivated that neither they nor their pitiful circumstances can affect us at all.
There is a lot of content in this play, but instead of being presented as an unfolding narrative -- what's called a plot or story -- it is conveyed in snippets. Someone runs in and shouts about something that's happened, but nothing is made of it. Then somebody else yells about something else. And those who aren't yelling generally stand in frozen tableau, waiting their turn to speak. Pulled in too many directions, and too briefly in any of them, we lose interest.
There really is too much shouting in this play, and it comes from characters we haven't come to care about, or even comprehend, and it's about events that aren't portrayed but are only ... well ... shouted about. There's quite a bit of platitudinizing, as well, creating the impression that the author has too many messages he wants to send. It all grows wearing and, before too long, boring.
Act II begins a bit encouragingly. Under the guidance of Starns, the rustics are doing well in their malevolent Eden: they plant more crops and they don't shoot each other with their former abandon. But when the bishop attempts to impose too much church ritual on them, they chuck the whole business and ostracize their former mentor, Starns. When he finally dies, with some very loud cries of anguish, not a single eye in the audience is moistened.
It's difficult to evaluate the production because it's difficult to gauge the verisimilitude of actors who are forced to portray the cardboard cutouts of this play.
Noel Wood, as Harlan, a young man who killed the man who killed his wife (who was his sister) and children, has the dirty, demented look of someone you hope will not approach you on the street. As Cora, his new wife -- who is not another sister -- and Juba, an Earth Motherish midwife, Valerie Allen and Melody Cole are also dirty, but not demented.
As Starns, Jim Hiser has an earnestness and an honesty that would work well if he could graft them onto a credible character. As the bishop and Billy, David Garrett and Frank Medina speak clearly and go through the motions, but that's all they're invited to do.
I'm at a loss as to what to say about the direction of Tom Gough, because I don't think this play could be redeemed by even the most inspired hand at the helm. I can say that the set of Brenda Ellis is so vaguely painted that I wasn't sure if it was supposed to represent trees or rocks or something metaphorical. I do know that, like the play it adorns, it is dreary.
PERFORMANCES: "Heathen Valley," by Romulus Linney, is being presented at the Bus Barn Stage Company in Los Altos through February 20. For information, call 941-0551.
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