Review: Never Such Rain by Tegan McLeod
by Michael Meigs

Lily Wolff places Tegan McLeod's Never Such Rain on the stage of UT's Lab Theatre with the audience sitting on the twenty folding chairs along three sides of that space. This is theatre up close and in your face, the way I like it most. I was lucky to snag a chair at the Wednesday opening of this short run, for most had names of IndieGoGo supporters taped on them. I'd thought I could buy a ticket at the last minute but there were no tickets, just Lily herself with a greeting and a gratis program sheet.

 

McLeod's piece takes place in a single room with a rumpled bed and a miscellany of furniture. The intentional claustrophobia of the setting is both physical and mental, for Brandon is a young man besieged, even though we see no one after him except the barefoot half-waif auburn-haired Jesse. He wants a gun and she steals one from her father the gun collector. Initially she doesn't even provide him any bullets. Brandon tells her he's going to sell it, but weeks pass in a succession of scenes, he dialogues with his bedridden mother, and Jesse comes back again and again. She pushes him, teases him, demands her money and even brings him a shotgun. Remembering Chekhov's law, we keep watching for one or another of those weapons to fire.

 

 

Juliet Robb portrays Jesse with a rushing breathlessness, making her a creature of unpredictable agility and total spontanaeity, while Nate Jackson as Brandon is baleful and fiercely contained. Despite some brief flickers of sexual attraction, this isn't a courtship; it's more a gradually solidifying alliance of two children of the damned. Rebecca Robinson as Brandon's mother brings a wearied, exploited all-too-grownup contribution in her fleeting scenes, but for all practical purposes these two young people are alone and not even alone together. Brandon's a drop-out despite his mother's encouragement and admonitions, and we have the feeling that Jesse, reported to have burned down a barn for fun, may never have gone to school at all.

 

More striking than these plot elements or even the mind-twists McLeod lays down in the plot is the language. Sitting through the hour or so of Never Such Rain I found myself wanting to have the script in my hands. McLeod gives these apparently uneducated half-grownups language that's rich in images, concrete but without much in the way of metaphor. It's language they wouldn't speak, language untainted by television and enriched by observation. 

 

Brandon mentions that his mother's books included the Bible and a Faulkner novel -- was it The Sound and the Fury? That's a giveaway. We're simultaneously in this dreary room and in the febrile mind of the playwright. He is lifting the banal purposelessness of these two young creatures with a rush of hot language. His plot is unclear, with a gotcha! toward the end, and the physics of his revelation, as grotesque as some in Faulkner, are questionable. To buy this, we have to let go of expectations and allow ourselves to sail into a dark land where almost anything is possible. This is a world where Jesse keeps rats as pets, where she goes barefoot everywhere, where she can enumerate the 'rock-paper-scissors' of the trio of principal causes of her pets' deaths. Not without reason does she liken her copperheaded self to the snake.

 

Lily Wolff moves the two main characters with tense and almost balletic grace. Those moments when Brandon and Jesse move into close proximity to one another are charged. Jackson has the presence that could be overpowering and yet the control to remain seethingly passive. Robb puts a lot into Jesse's breezy taunting insouciance, but she's not sufficiently conscious of her consonants. There's a crucial difference between little-lost-girl bubbling and stage talk; too often the author's striking words were swept away because she did not articulate.

 

 

Never Such Rain has haunting moments. Brandon's injured arm is wrapped in duct tape, his awkward attempt at self-healing; the inevitable moment when Jesse tears off that protective shield is harrowing, particularly when she leans down and seizes a length of it -- of him, somehow -- in her teeth. The effect is wasted somewhat when the improvised bandage subsequently applied seems to obviate the pain that Brandon was feeling. And the moves of the final moments, when Jesse twists sinuously around Brandon and the clasp of their pistol, are deft, neat choreography summing up these two damned souls' relationship to the pitiless outer world.

 

This is an avowedly 'in-progress' staging, and it's a promising one. I'll happily attend a fully staged production. And work at retaining the prose-poetry of the language.

 

EXTRA

Click to view the program leaflet for Never Such Rain

 

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Never Such Rain
by Tegan McLeod
Tegan McLeod

5 performances only! 
Wednesday, September 16th 8 pm
Thursday, September 17th 8 pm
Friday, September 18th 8 pm
Saturday, September 19th 8 pm
Sunday, September 20th 8 pm

Come and play a role in the development of the next generation of new American plays. 

Reserve your seat in advance by contributing to our Indiegogo campaign or risk it at the door:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/never-such-rain-a-developmental-showing#/story

Seating is extremely limited...