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Thaddeus Newell (Harry Eddleman) rescues Riley MacDougal (Don Tieri) from his midnight trance in Chagrin Falls. Photo: Leigh Barrett. |
Chagrin Falls
by Mia McCullough
directed by Kevin Heckman
September 25 - November 3, 2001
Stage Left Theatre
3408 N Sheffield, Chicago, IL.
Thurs-Sat 8p, Sun 3p
Tickets available by calling 773.883.8830, or see http://www.stagelefttheatre.com.
Chagrin Falls, a new play by Chicago playwright Mia McCullough, poises itself to create controversy and provoke viewer response. Set in a contemporary rural town in which the economy is driven by engines of institutionalized death - slaughterhouse and penitentiary - the play arranges itself for contrast and controversy: urban versus rural; an outsider versus the locals; death in its guises of illness, execution, or butcher's air gun; the validity of killing, whether it is a cow, a criminal, or "the enemy." But poised as it is to create controversy, Chagrin Falls pretty much stays poised. It delivers drama, but only dips a toe into the abundant possibilities of its premise.
The plot follows the visit of half-Vietnamese graduate student, Patrice Dougherty (Jennifer Willison), to the small town of Chagrin Falls, Oklahoma to complete a graduate project on the death penalty, including interviews of Death Row guards and witnessing the execution of a condemned criminal. Staying in town she is thrown into company with a variety of locals, including Irene Delford (Morgan McCabe), who runs the motel and diner; Henry Harcourt (Cory Krebsbach) and Thaddeus Newell (Harry Eddleman), who serve as guards at the penitentiary; Father Macomb (Jack Tippett), the local priest who also serves as religious counsel at the prison; and Riley MacDougal (Don Tieri), a recent retiree from the slaughterhouse, also a Vietnam veteran. Patrice's presence as an outsider, her mission to interview those connected with the execution (a necessarily intrusive process), and her persistence in obtaining an interview with the condemned man (we finally see why) put her in the uneasy center of revelations of the town's various inhabitants - as well as revelations of her own secrets.
Dramatic emotion and wry humor take the stage in turn, generally working well enough; and there is some growth and discovery, mostly for Patrice and Riley. But the script and the performance suffer from unevenness, by turns decent, in spots very good, and at times, clichéd. In some places where an eloquent reaction would have said it all, the playwright has inserted clumsy verbal responses; and overall, both the script and the performance suffer from a too-heavy reliance on stereotype, especially in dealing with areas where few of us have familiarity.
Stereotype can be a useful shorthand, but used to excess, or when we do not have a fund of readily available images, it drains vitality, and blocks the deep visceral response that comes from detail. This is unfortunate in a play which wants to surprise and startle us into new ideas. On the side of character, Jennifer Willison's Patrice seems too formed of catchphrases - "vegetarian," "Buddhist" - which are not explored, and her urban naivete (she holds a stalk of wheat as if never having encountered the concept), intended to be humorous, is a groaner of a cliché. Jack Tippett's Reverend Macomb appears less a real person than a conventionalized, "Father Mulcahy" idea of a priest: the soft-spokenness, the comic earnestness, the clerical effeminacy. It is not so much Tippett's performance at fault but that this characterization is too "stock" to be taken seriously.
Similarly, the slaughterhouse is but briefly sketched, and the penitentiary experiences, for the most part, recall prison-movie scenes. For the slaughterhouse, the momentary appearance of a paper-wrapped haunch of beef (Riley brings it across stage, and gets blood all over his shirt) and a bit of job description by Riley are all we get, perhaps expected simply to react to "slaughterhouse" as a stereotypically grisly idea. To effectively foil the penitentiary, and fuel the controversy, we need to experience - through words and images - the blood, stink, and turbulence of an industrial plant whose "processing" consists of the dehumanizing assembly-line killing, skinning, gutting, dismembering, and packaging which turns frightened cows in the killing chute into shrink-wrapped steaks at the butcher counter - "the rattle of chains and the whine of the bonecutters' saws...the time-driven, death-driven ballet of the men and beasts" (Michael Lesy in The Forbidden Zone). Simply using the buzzword "slaughterhouse" doesn't bring that brutal vision into relief; and because of it, our response is muted. For the penitentiary, we do get some immediacy because of onstage narration of Henry's and Thaddeus's experiences; but otherwise it is much like movie and TV images of prison, and some of the reactions ("I need to go wash his eyes off me") are things we've heard before from those very same sources.
Chagrin Falls is intended to be controversial, but controversy springs from that which is contested, involving disagreement, debate, and conflict; and there isn't that much controversy in the situations or among the characters - drama, but not necessarily controversy. The condemned man, a rapist/murderer, is a regular "bad guy" - unrepentant, vindictive, and a real S.O.B.. Patrice and the motel locals are virtually all anti-death-penalty, and everyone is so darn nice about not wanting to kill him that the audience is almost forced into the polarized role of hoping this nasty piece of work will get the chair (or rather, the lethal injection). The conflict is apparently to be based on the basic question of whether it is right, or not, to execute the convict; but it is hardly the emotional flare which could have been ignited by an exploration of, for example, the execution of a seriously repentant, unfairly tried, or mentally impaired individual (the latter two being current real-life controversial issues with regard to the U.S. death penalty). There is a nod to the grotesque circus surrounding the Timothy McVeigh execution, but it is only a nod, and an oblique one at that.
Riley MacDougal (Don Tieri) confronts Patrice Dougherty (Jennifer Willison) in Chagrin Falls. Photo: Leigh Barrett. |
Of the more notable performances, Harry Eddleman's Thaddeus Newell smolders and burns with repressed fire; his expression of Thaddeus's situation - captive in the rural town of his birth, waiting painfully for his mother's grueling illness to finally free both her, and him - is one of the poignancies of the play. Don Tieri gives an unexpected depth to retired slaughterhouse foreman Riley MacDougal, with a confession of events in Vietnam that is moving and heartbreaking. Cory Krebsbach provides a sprightly foil to Thaddeus as the perennially happy Henry Harcourt. Morgan McCabe's performance has its moments, showing the tenderness - and loneliness - of the woman who has run the Chagrin Falls motel, all her life.
Chagrin Falls does have a few surprising insights, more in the nature of personal experience with death, and a few good digs about our distance from our food; and it does have appeal in the portrayal of the characters' camaraderie and acceptance of one another: the careful way Irene and Thaddeus rescue Riley from his midnight trance, and the concern of Riley and Father Macomb for Irene and for offstage characters such as Thaddeus's mother. (For the curious, there is a real town named "Chagrin Falls," but it's in northeast Ohio, not Oklahoma.)
On the technical side, Stage Left does well with their space, a shoebox of a storefront theatre with an intimate, roughly 80-seat house. The motel-diner set makes good use of the small stage. The theatre is a friendly little space and very accessible in its Wrigleyville location.
Chagrin Falls succeeds where its shorthand refers to things within the realm of our experience: death of a spouse or parent; loss of a loved one in wartime; watching a relative die slowly and painfully through wasting disease. But where it refers to realms beyond our ken, it doesn't give us enough data to boost our superficial images into visceral, emotional reality. Some more time in the cooker (this production is a world premiere of the play, which was the first prize winner of the 2001 Julie Harris Playwrighting (sic) Competition) might have given the script time to mature, time to weed out the superficiality, and to boost the controversy level with a rewrite or two. The production ends up being a mixed bag - however, some of its ideas are intriguing, some of them very original, and it has moments of real human connection. The show runs through November 3rd, 2001 at the Stage Left Theatre. Tickets are $15 Thu., $18 Fri.-Sun., $20 Sat.; $40 Gala ticket on October 6th includes pre-show buffet, with post-show dessert and guest speaker.
--Katherine Rook Lieber
Katherine Rook Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual and Performing Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net.
Editorial Note: Books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews may be purchased through this site's Amazon.com link. Michael Lesy is quoted from his book The Forbidden Zone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux:1987), an exploration of attitudes toward death in America.
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