Review: Defiant by Debutantes and Vagabonds
by Michael Meigs
George Brant's Defiant is bleak and stupid.
There, after chewing on it for a week, I have spat it out. Not happily, because this gives me an unbroken record of writing negative reviews about this theatre ensemble. Of the four of their productions I've tracked to date, I missed A Brilliant Revolution and The Virgin with 10,000 Arrows, both of which got respectful reviews. After seeing their May 2009 evening of short works under the title Are You Alive? which featured entr'acte music by The White Ghost Shivers, I wrote, This evening was a predictable success for music and a huge disappointment for theatre.
Brant's piece is non-reflective agitprop. He's either willfully wrong-headed or simply not connected with the society that he's criticizing or satirizing.
Brant's website notes that he received a master's in writing from the Michener Center, so one assumes that the Debs and Vags met him in that connection.
Premise: an unexplained major national catastrophe killed many citizens, and the government has decided to compensate their families and to build a towering memorial. An earnest government accountant has been writing daily to Ann Martin, surviving spouse of one of them. She refuses to have anything to do with the undertaking -- either with the compensation or with the memorial. Twist: unless she checks the box and signs on the dotted line, none of the other beneficiaries gets a cent and the memorial will not be built.
So what society are we talking about?
Brant trots on a "chorus of taxpayers" who periodically discuss this dilemma during his 70-minute drama. Wimpy but earnest government official Mr. Taylor (Craig Nye) comes onstage to plead with Ann Martin, giving her the opportunity to explain with great vehemence that she hated her disappeared husband, an abuser who broke her jaw and ignored her for years.
Pressure builds. Wimpy government official Mr. Taylor discusses his dilemma with his wife at home, sends along an impoverished, bereaved widow to accost Ann in the supermarket and plead with her. Martin loses her job as a teacher -- or, at a minimum, sees all of her grade schoolers transferred out -- because a coalition of parents considers her unfit since she won't mourn or sign.
Indignant crowds surround her house, throw stones and threaten her. The pizza delivery guy who manages to get through to deliver her food can do so only because one of the demonstrators seized the pizza and spat upon it. Martin is hungry enough to eat it anyway and to invite pizza guy to join her. The unfriendly crowd doesn't go away. Toward the finale, Martin comes back home drenched with blood -- not her own, but a bucket's worth poured upon her by an indignant citizen.
After briefly considering a suggestion to have Martin eliminated ("if she's no longer alive, there's no obstacle"), government official Mr. Taylor forges a note that appears to be a final conciliatory message from the vanished husband. That message devastates Martin. She signs.
Debs and Vags perform all this with determined sincerity under the direction of Amanda Garfield, who appears in the chorus and plays a socratic Mrs. Taylor, wife of the wimpy government official. Lead actress Dawn Erin almost -- almost -- redeems the nonsense with the dignity and depth of her performance as the battered, abused and deceived Ann Martin. The chorus stuff, spoken by the five actors in unison most of the time, is a pretty feeble substitute for real dialogue. Jorge Sermini as the pizza guy provides a welcome but brief moment of deadpan comedy before he gets huffy and leaves (perhaps annoyed that social politeness obliged him to chew tentatively on a spat-upon pizza slice).
I can't accept the basic construct, at least not as long as Brant implies that he's saying something about our own society. The logic here is entirely totalitarian and would make ample sense in, say, any eastern European country between about 1950 and 1989, or in the Russian Federation today. The premises of this tale are that the individual is entirely subject to the will of the collectivity; that all must obey the illogical dictate of forced consensus; that a government official must secure that consensus or face professional disaster; that there is no recourse for a citizen who elects not to comply; that society provides no mechanism or enforcement to protect the autonomy, privacy and safety of the dissenter; and that your government will lie to you without scruple to elicit your obedience.
Pizza delivery, national catastrophe, a chorus of taxpayers -- he's writing about the United States. Brant could have usefully and instructively explored the rich contradictions of resentment and grief suggested by Dawn Erin's performance. But his naive nightmare vision of this country is so astonishingly distant from our reality that it entirely undermines the emotional content.
EXTRA
Click to view program for Defiant by George Brant by Debutants and Vagabonds
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Defiant
by George Brant
Debutantes and Vagabonds
