Theatre in Review: The Jacksonian (The New Group/Theatre Row)After a brief stay in The Jacksonian, you'll want to check in to the nearest Holiday Inn. The Jacksonian is a motel in Jackson, Mississippi, circa 1964; it is the Christmas season and the rather sad attempts at holiday cheer do little to ameliorate a design that can be best described as early-Charles-Addams. (Even "the carpet is the color of despair," someone notes.) Worse, the staff and guests are unraveling en masse. Fred, the bartender, has killed a woman while knocking over a local gas station; to deflect the police's attention toward the station's elderly black employee, he has gotten Eva, the motel's waitress/maid, to perjure herself on the witness stand. Eva thinks Fred will marry her out of gratitude, but she is misinformed; he feeds her a lie about a weak heart and urges her to throw herself at Bill, the motel's long-running guest. This is bad advice, to say the least. Bill, a once-prominent dentist, is in a tailspin. At first, it appears he is living in The Jacksonian because his wife, Susan, is suffering from mental problems. Indeed she is, but Bill is also addicted to every drug in the medicine cabinet -- he often appears carrying a tank of nitrous oxide, with a mask affixed to his face -- and has destroyed his practice in a flagrant, drug-induced act of malpractice against one of his patients. When big trouble comes, Bill will be at the center of it. The only innocent in this house of horrors is Rosy, the daughter of Bill and Susan, and since the prologue begins with Bill in a blood-stained shirt and Rosy muttering about murder, we have an inkling that things are not going to go well for her. A strong lunge at full-throated melodrama by a writer best known for her Southern gothic comedies, The Jacksonian is something of a good-news/bad news situation. Compared to recent Beth Henley works, like Impossible Marriage and Family Week, it is a model of construction and is possessed of a bleak, powerful vision of the South as a moral wasteland. The Jacksonian's all-white inhabitants are too busy frittering away their sordid lives to take note of the racial tensions, including church bombings, happening just offstage. Fred and Eva don't show the tiniest bit of guilt for railroading a black man into jail; as far as Eva, who uses the N word with abandon, is concerned, he's old and blind and will probably die soon, anyway. (She calls it "Christian pity," not hate.) The patient that Bill harmed is a prominent member of the local Ku Klux Klan, and Bill's family has a hair-raising history with the Klan. An entire society is coming apart, if anyone would care to look outside the B-movie loop in which they are trapped. This is not to say that The Jacksonian is an unalloyed success. The action is so bizarre, the characters so unhinged, that it often plays like black comedy -- but laughs are in short supply. Also, as a playwright, Henley is a hanging judge, laying bare her characters' hypocrisies and sins so thoroughly that little is left for us to discover; she hasn't made a convincing case that her characters matter, nor has she been able to work up the kind of melodramatic momentum that would rivet our attention, no matter what. The action jumps back and forth over the course of several months, filling in information about the characters but stalling the play's forward motion. Clearly, we are supposed to feel for Rosy, who, when not being used as a pawn by her parents, has caught Fred's predatory eye, but she is too drably conceived to provide the play with a moral center. Still, under Robert Falls' direction, a top-flight cast works hard and well to animate this horrific menagerie. Ed Harris' Bill comes apart in front of us, giving way to drug-induced rages that climax in a horribly violent act. Glenne Headly manages to suggest Eva's desperation without asking for any sympathy; she is needy, empty-headed, and cruel in a way that one rarely sees, and the actress works all of these traits into a convincing portrait. Amy Madigan is a fierce presence as Susan, whose rage at Bill contains a remarkable amount of entitlement -- after all, she has a lifestyle that requires support. (Bill and Susan appear to be equal-opportunity abusers; he admits to hitting her, and at one point she tears her nails across his face.) Bill Pullman's Fred is a bizarre creature, deadpanning his lines in an oddly constricted voice that sounds like he just pulled a muscle, but his attempted seduction of Rosy is as creepy as anyone could wish. Juliet Brett, a newcomer, is touching as Rosy, even if she never quite makes her more than a doormat. Equally accomplished is the physical production, led by Walt Spangler's set, which pairs the motel's seedy bar with Bill's equally threadbare room. Daniel Ionazzi's lighting transitions from one location to another and back and forth in time with uncommon grace. Ana Kuzmanic's costumes, including some really elaborate lingerie for Eva, are both accurate to the period and the characters. Richard Woodbury's sound design and original musical are both typical of this fine professional. Both arresting and more than a little off-putting, The Jacksonian suggests that Henley may be headed in a new and more coherent direction. Even when it disappoints, it makes one curious to see where this distinctive writer may go next.--David Barbour 
|
