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Maury Cooper as Ed, Mary Ann Thebus
as Vanessa, and Ron Wells as Duane.
Photo: Michael Brosilow.
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Detail of a Larger Work
Written by Lisa Dillman
Directed by Robin Stanton
May 21 through June 11, 2000.
Performances Thursday through Saturday at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday at 7:00 p.m.
Tickets: $10
The Garage at Steppenwolf/Steppenwolf Theatre Company
1624 North Halsted Street
Box Office: (312) 335-1650
http://www.steppenwolf.org
The small world of Detail of a Larger Work, a new play by Chicago playwright Lisa Dillman, ought to be a tinderbox. In the isolation of a remote Mexican village, the aging painter Ed Grand, "the greatest of the American nature mystics," and his wife Vanessa quietly smolder. He has not painted in decades and his mind and senses are failing. She is years younger than him and increasingly frustrated with his decline. Only a steady diet of margaritas lets them live in relative civility. Into their unhappy home barges Zach, an arrogant young photographer with a taste for decay, and his girlfriend Chloe, an upright young woman who disapproves of his art, and, increasingly, of him. What starts as a round of margaritas becomes a stay of days as Zach decides he has found his next project: documenting the collapse of a once-great American artist. His girlfriend is determined to protect them from this intrusion, but the old painter sees a chance to revive his lost glory, his wife is desperate to hang on to her rare visitors, and the photographer knows the more conflict there is for him to capture on film the more powerful his work.
What the photographer knows, however, playwright Dillman and director Robin Stanton seem to ignore. Rather than pushing the personal and aesthetic conflicts established in the opening scene of the play to the point of crisis, both script and production let the tensions abate. In place of crises are conversations in which little secrets from the past are revealed. Even the most shocking of these changes no one's life. The tinderbox never ignites.
Near the heart of these conversations is Duane, a recently deceased gay man both couples knew intimately. Much of their talk is fond remembrance. Duane was wild, charismatic, brought a party wherever he went. We learn that the photographer Zach (Joe Forbrich) and his girlfriend Chloe (Katherine Martinez Ripley) grew close with him under unsettling circumstances. When Duane was diagnosed with AIDS, Zach convinced him to become the subject of a photodocumentary entitled "The Living End." For the ten months until Duane's death, Zach photographed him laughing with friends, grimly examining sores in the bathroom mirror, and gasping for life in his hospital bed. This macabre project won Zach enormous acclaim and a $25,000 NEA grant which he has used to come to Mexico to shoot his latest project, a study of doors in Mexico City.
Before they have finished their first margarita, the misery of the old painter Ed (Maury Cooper) and Vanessa (Mary Anne Thebus) has so excited Zach that he decides over Chloe's objections to abandon the door study and turn his camera on the old couple. Ed, inspired by what he takes as flattery, enters his studio for the first time in twenty years, where the undead Duane appears to him and convinces him his life's mission is to paint a group of trees he never got right before. The constant intrusion of Zach's camera annoys Vanessa and Chloe until they refuse to be photographed or to let him photograph Ed. Chloe announces she is leaving Zach, prompting him to reveal an awful secret of hers during a slide show exhibition of "The Living End" for Vanessa and Ed. As the young couple prepare to leave, Ed finishes his final painting. It is, we understand, a success.
Joe Forbrich as Zach embraces the part of the bastard photographer, reeking insincerity while he flatters his subjects just enough to get their guard down and get his shot. Both the production and the play let his energy go to waste. When Vanessa and Chloe object to Zach's photography, he does not wheedle, argue, or steal more than a shot or two. He stops. How much could the project have meant to him? Where did he ever find the determination to shoot a man's slow death for ten months? Or has his NEA grant let him go soft?
For all the beautiful intensity and sympathy with which Katherine Martinez Ripley's Chloe attends to Ed and Vanessa, she seems to have made her one important decision in the play–to leave Zach–before she arrived. She shows no sign of ever having been attracted to him physically or artistically. Their only conflict comes as mild arguments over whether Zach should photograph Mexico City doors or Ed and Vanessa. Zach never abuses or threatens Chloe, and she lets the arguments drop after he says a few phony words of tenderness she clearly does not believe. Chloe does not need to struggle toward her decision to leave Zach, and her announcement that she will is correspondingly underwhelming.
Vanessa is stirred by her desire to share in the vitality of the young couple and her need to protect Ed as his health worsens. The play puts these in conflict only momentarily when Chloe takes Ed on a day trip against Vanessa's wishes. Mary Anne Thebus seizes this opportunity. Her Vanessa hurls abuse at Chloe and takes Ed into her care with equal parts ferocity and tenderness; we feel the strain of her having to be both mother and wife.
The play's most baffling choice is to put the dead Duane (Ron Wells) on stage. For most of the first act he exists only through stories, first as the dearly departed life of the party, a symbol of the joy and warmth missing from the characters' own lives lately. Gradually he comes to life through more intimate stories, both an interesting character in his own right and a means by which the living share their secrets. We learn that he had a self-destructive streak of sexual recklessness, that he joked his way through his horrific physical collapse, that he and Vanessa once planned to travel the world together after Ed's death.
Ed's vision of Duane at the end of the first act shatters the living portrait these stories and the audience's imagination have formed. In place of a Duane constantly evolving in our minds is a physical one telling Ed he has one more painting to paint. Whether this Duane is an otherworldly visitation or an sign of Ed's mental collapse, the production offers no clues. Either way the damage is done; henceforth the audience can only imagine the Duane they have seen. When we see the slide show of "The Living End" toward the end of the play, rather than having the challenge of fitting our elaborate mental picture of Duane to the images we see–investing the photographs with life even as they show it ebb–we simply recognize the Duane we saw and heard an hour ago.
All that is at stake in the second act is Ed's final painting, and the play gives us little reason to invest ourselves in its success. We hear repeatedly of Ed's former glory and recognition; we never hear why he needs a little more now. Maury Cooper's scattered performance makes it difficult to find the struggling genius in the doddering old man. After Ed's vision, the script saddles Cooper with random recitations of "Little Jack Horner" and "Baa Baa Black Sheep," as trite a device to show incipient senility as any writer could devise. In the end Ed announces his painting is done and Vanessa proclaims it a triumph. We are not allowed to see the painting, nor do we know why we might want to.
In an earlier scene Chloe asks Vanessa, "Do you think photographs lie?" and embarks on an essayistic speech which comes to the shocking conclusion that surfaces do not always tell the whole story. In another scene Chloe reminds the enfeebled Ed that he is not just an old codger: "You're a human being! With dignity!"–which she fears Zach's photographs would not show. But photography is not inherently shallow and deceptive, any more than painting is inherently profound and truthful. In an effort to present what it considers to be the seat of human dignity, the stories beneath the surface, Detail of a Larger Work never finds the story on the surface. The play's wisdom is only skin deep.
--Stephen Boykewich
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