Review: Still Fountains by Michael Mitchell
by Michael Meigs
Glum and dreary exercises in male homosexual misery, these two plays by Michael Mitchell now playing at the Salvage Vanguard seem curiously dated.
Maybe early Tennessee Williams?
The first play, Highway Home, brings together two brothers, each probably a homosexual frustrated in his own way, with their nephew Blake (Jude Hickey) and his new wife Alison, an African-American attorney (Gina Houston). The occasion is the long-delayed death of their mother.
Sourly garrulous Shannon stayed and wiped Mom’s butt, after his wife and his house burned up nine years ago. Fugitive Patrick has moved from city to city searching for attachments but always fulfilling his promise to Mom to come back home for Christmas.
Looming as an embarrassingly obvious symbol in the middle of the scene is “Mom’s fountain,” which has been dry for years. Much of the talk of the play is about fixing the fountain, selling or not selling the house, staying or going on the road.
Playwright Mitchell gives the brothers (Douglas Taylor and Garry Peterst) some ridiculous word games to play. I have nothing against verbal games, as long as they’re witty or meaningful, or even suggestive – but these guys are very lame punsters. And Mitchell gives Shannon this impossible geometric obsession to explain, something to do with the way grammar school kids draw windows in their pictures of houses, and how you can take scissors to convert them into perfect circles. To make it worse, Garry Peters has to trot out an example and clip it with scissors so as to reassemble it and demonstrate the absurd and irrelevant point. The eventual epiphany is that you can get to a perfect circle whether the windows are square or rectangular. (Insight!)
Even the bluster is annoying. Shannon’s tic of addressing Alison as “counselor” rapidly gets tiring, both for her character and for us; and Shannon needles her unceasingly because at the wake her father remarked in passing that the fountain was broken. Garry Peters does what he can with the role. His stolid presence, nervous spontaneity and aggressive vulnerability make Shannon bearable.
It appears that the nephew’s decision not to allow a sale of the house convinces brother Patrick (Taylor); nephew Blake even has to deliver an address to Mom, directing it to the fountain.
Once Shannon’s plan to sell out is frustrated, we get a painful dramatic monologue from Patrick, in which he relives the unhappy confrontation with Mom when she threw him out of the house for being queer – but insisted that he come back every Christmas. Taylor bares the man’s soul, but the revelation appears to have little to do with the other action of the play.
The second play, Them, features all four cast members but it is really a duet, something along the lines of Edward Albee’s first play, Zoo Story (1958). This time the locale is a park near a hospital, known as a cruising spot for homosexuals (according to an exasperated Houston in her walk-on). Douglas Taylor is a preacher from Corpus Christi who has struggled with homosexual impulses for twenty-one years without giving in. He arrives in the park to read his copy of People magazine while waiting for an appointment, and he initiates a conversation with the young man (Hickey) who spends hours and hours each day in the park. Cat-and-mouse, some pretty good repartee, and the gradual shift from conversation to courtship.
There's a sign admonishing "No Wading in the Fountain," so we have an obligatory symbolic moment of splashing liberation.
Taylor is stuck with the role as the earnest mid-40s preacher Sad Sack. Hickey, on the other hand, is alert, focused and elusive, in the best role and performance of the evening. Of course, it ends in desperate grasp and disaster, as everything preceding it would lead you to expect.
Michael Mitchell successfully creates movement, rhythm, and conflict for this odd bunch. Dialogue is spotty but at times very punchy. Far too often, the writing and plot devices are far too precious.
I look forward to seeing what Mitchell can do with characters, homosexual or not, who are not stuck in terminal stages of self pity.
Review by Robert Faires in Austin Chronicle of December 5
Review by Joey Seiler in Austin Statesman's Arts Blog, December 8
Jeanne Claire van Ryzin's pre-opening piece in Austin Statesman's XL supplement of November 27
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Still Fountains
by Michael Mitchell
Michael Mitchell
