Review: The Attic Space by Palindrome Theatre (2010-2013)
by Michael Meigs

Nigel, this is stupid stuff.  There, now, I've said it.

 

You and your friends of Palindrome have made arresting, sometimes astounding art in the three years that you promised yourselves for the experiment after your graduation from the theatre program at St. Ed's. You have shown yourself to be an impressive actor and promoter of our dear, beloved and commercially moribund art of live theatre, gathering award nominations and recognition along the way.

 

You made contacts with Austin's best in the field, many of them teachers  -- Ev Lunning, with whom you worked in the Ar Rude Actors's Equity project of McNeil's A Long Day's Journey into Night directed by Lucien Douglas, and Babs George in that fine Cherry Orchard by Breaking String where appropriately enough you portrayed the eternally yearning and optimistic student Trofimov. You were a memorable drifter challenging a stolidly bourgeois Jude Hickey in Albee's At Home at the Zoo, with Robin Grace Thompson as his wife. You crafted a pungent Hedda Gabler last year by reworking someone's literalist pony translation from the original, staged it with Robin successfully here and at the Edinburgh Fringe, and caught the eye of the flattered Norwegians.

Before approaching its three-year expiration date, Palindrome's artists and sometime provocateurs have furnished Austin with fine stagings of classics. I wish I could have seen them all. I missed Babs with Harvey Guion in Arthur Miller's All My Sons last summer, Dario Fo's Accidental Death of An Anarchist, and Sarah Ruhl's Melancholy Play. I did see, and will long remember, Beckett's End Days with Jarrett King, Gabriel Luna and Helyn Rain Messenger.

 

You've been gracious and forthcoming throughout all of this. I still have a twinge of bad conscience about not recognizing you immediately two years ago when you greeted me in the lobby at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre at the opening night for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where Babs was Martha and Ev was George. I was glad to get a close-up rehearsal view of the revised Hedda before the departure for Edinburgh last year, and I was flattered to be invited along with other theatre scriveners to last weekend's advance staging for the press of your work The Attic Space, with Babs and Ev. It was a remarkable and unexpected opportunity to mingle briefly before the show with Elizabeth Cobbe of the Austin Chronicle, Jillian Owens and Cate Blouke of the Statesman and newcomer Jeff Davis of www.austin.broadwayworld.com.

 

The Attic Space seems grossly derivative to me.  You've brought your two characters Harold and Harriet together in George Marsolek's claustrophobic and dimly lit attic space containing the stored detritus of their lives. The dialogue is a similar in style to that of Beckett, full of ellipses and references to shared but unrevealed events and relationships. Harriet is high strung but disconnected; Harold is restrained, patient and long-suffering. She insists on staying in the attic amongst the boxes, trunks and discarded furniture. She's searching for something but doesn't know what that is. Harold urges her to come back downstairs. The dialogue suggests that they feel the suppressed terror of advanced age even though these two actors are plainly in their flourishing middle age.

 

 

 

 

 

You've subjected this lonely duo to a 'Witness' -- Helyn Messenger -- whose function is never clear. At first we assume that she's an apparition, probably a spectre from Harriet's past, but later, when the couple gets involved in acting out some sort of sequence or fantasy or ritual with puppets of themselves, Messenger appears to be prompting either or both. A black hooded figure rises out of the under stage and directs a hand-held spotlight on the principals and then on the 'Witness.' She freezes and confesses that she can't remember her lines. Jose Villareal as the mystery figure prompts her. The frenetic puppet show and the enigmatic spiel of the Witness provide an emotional climax but do not clarify the situation. Harriet is now ready to abandon this dark space; Harold, overcome, wants to stay. The lights fade; the show ends.

 

Some of my concerns:

 

• Casting.  Precisely because these are powerfully capable artists, anyone who saw them in Albee's piece at MMNT two years ago will be asking why on earth you've locked up George and Martha in the attic and stripped them of all history. Harriet's distracted nagging of Harold appears to have no basis other than habit; his protective stance toward her is unexplained, except perhaps as an indication of his fundamental decency. Are we meant to interpret their struggle as a flailing against approaching death? The disconnected nature of their speech hints less at senility than at long shared and therefore hermetic experience. Harold repeatedly refers to metaphor and then mocks himself for doing so.

 

• The unrelieved grimness and unresolved arc of the story. There are precious few laughs in your script. Beckett's End Game, staged by Palindrome in January 2010, contains relevant comment, voiced by Helyn Messenger in the role as Nell: ""Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. But . . . . Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more." 

 

• Incomprehension. As a playwright in your mid-twenties, you may be trying to say something profound about the desperation of ageing, disappointment and companionship. But the compensation for our brief lives is shared experiences and memories that give our individual stories meaning. What's the story that has shaped Harriet and Harold?

 

• You seem to be attempting to work a Beckettian lode -- but Beckett stopped writing full-length plays 50 years ago. The stark parables of his imagination and the disconnected expression of his characters were striking back then, even scandalous, but afterwards his theatre works became shorter and shorter, curtailing themselves almost to silence. This piece doesn't seem to add anything to that canon, even as an homage. 

 

• Is this work really a brooding by an Austin lad on the long perishing of the art form to which he has devoted roughly the last five years of his promising existence? You have enlisted some of most talented actors and gifted technical practitioners of what used to be called the "legit" stage (in contrast to vaudeville and variety shows, implicitly illegitimate). But in our day the stage with its riveting immediacy has lost vast tracts of ground to television, cinema, video games and the Internet. For almost everyone,  "theater" means the movies. While contemplating the end of the Palindrome era, you show us your protagonists fumbling in the dark with puppets and cryptic dialogue, trying to give meaning to their lives while their Witness -- or perhaps their Muse -- can't remember what she was supposed to say. 

 

Classicist and poet A.E. Housman wrote in his 1896 A Shropshire Lad a humorous defense of poetry that opens with the reproach of a local yokel:

 

'Terence, this is stupid stuff:

 

You eat your victuals fast enough;

 

There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,

 

To see the rate you drink your beer.

 

But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,

 

It gives a chap the belly-ache.'

 

The reply of Housman's protagonist to this disparagement is to point out that the pleasures of carousing and drink are transitory. Verse and its consolations prepare us for the inevitable afflictions of this life -- "If the smack is sour/The better for the embittered hour."

 

Perhaps the same can be said of contrary theatre reviews.

 

And -- if truth be told -- of knotty, enigmatic theatre productions. The Attic Space troubled me and haunted my wee hours; I wanted more from it.  Thanks for the opportunity to be vexed!

 

 

 

 

Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's www.Austin360.com Seeing Things blog, December 12 

 

Review by Jeff Davis at www.austin.broadwayworld.com, December 12

Feature on KUT-FM's Arts Eclectic by Michael Lee, December 17 (2 min.)

Dan Solomon profiles Nigel O'Hearn for the Austin Chronicle, December 20

 

Review by Elizabeth Cobbe for the Austin Chronicle, December 20

 

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The Attic Space
by Nigel O'Hearn
Palindrome Theatre (2010-2013)