Review: The Book of Grace by Zach Theatre
by Michael Meigs
The marketing strategy of putting the playwright on the poster bothers me. It's a feeling made all the sharper by the Zach Theatre's importing of MacArthur 'Genius Grantee' Suzan-Lori Parks twice over the past six months for sessions entitled "Watch Me Work." The public was invited to watch Parks write -- at a desk? on a computer? on a yellow legal pad? -- for most of an hour, following which she had an exchange with the spectators. Now, that does not at all fit my concept or my requirements for writing; I find that I have to assume something of a hypnotic trance before the computer screen, capturing thoughts and words as if I were hunting elusive butterflies with a keyboard. I may well be wrong, for I didn't attend, but "Watch Me Work" seemed a bit too glam or too cult, the equivalent of displaying the playwright in the shop window.
The Zach has continued that "See The Playwright" marketing, even including in the program an insert with Dave Steakley's interview of Parks.
I didn't read it. Parks seems in Kirk Tuck's rehearsal pictures and in the Zach's videos to be a pleasant and intelligent person, but the identity of the playwright is not what lures me into the theatre. In similar fashion, David Mamet's newly celebrated political conversion from leftish to glowering rightish is frankly irrelevant in my mind to the performance of his work.
Parks' play The Book of Grace first went on stage at the Public Theatre in New York in April, 2010. The Zach Theatre recruited Parks herself to direct the play in this "definitive" version, playing now until July 20. The published play script will be the text used in this production. Parks was evidently still adjusting it during rehearsal. The program advised that there would be no intermission but the Steakley insert informed us correctly that there were two acts with a fifteen-minute intermission.
The Book of Grace is a fierce fable with only a tenuous grasp of the borderland that it's supposed to occupy. Parks takes two men, father and son, both with deep psychological problems and scarring, and mixes them up with Grace, the father's none too subtly named second wife. She inexplicably sticks with Vet the father and seeks with a delusional Polyanna approach to effect a reconciliation even though the men haven't seen one another for ten years. The occasion is the Border Patrol's awarding of a medal to Vet for capturing a busload of marijuana with illegal immigrants sitting on top of it. The playwright would have us believe that this inarticulate, brutal and rigidly self-mastered man is expected to deliver a speech at the occasion.
The Zach enlisted charismatic Equity talent for this cast -- Eugene Lee of Texas State, sullen and low-watt as Vet, the father; Shaun Patrick Tubbs, recent UT MFA grad with a long c.v., muscular, wound-up and resentful; and Nadine Mozon, writer, New York stage veteran, and also on the faculty at Texas State. Although the cast is entirely African-American, nothing in the script dictates that ethnicity; in fact, the piece could be staged with a Tejano cast instead, which would make for even more interesting dynamics within this imaginary world.
Parks throws son and father at one another, letting us know pretty quickly that somewhere in Vet's suppressed past he committed "unspeakable acts" upon his son Buddy. Vet does not or will not remember them; Buddy clearly does, and he is torn between winning his father's approval and blowing up the old man and the rest of those at the ceremony with a taliban-style explosive jacket. Poor simple Grace tries to placate each of them and makes the mistake of revealing to Buddy that she is keeping a hidden journal with notes of everything for which she is thankful.
There's a pretty gripping series of confrontations and unexpected twists, especially in the second act. I glimpsed an on-line comment that The Book of Grace "delivers a punch in the gut." Hmm. Maybe. What I recall is the subdued ironic comment heard behind me as I exited the theatre: "Well, that was certainly an uplifting evening, wasn't it?"
Parks has written some very long monologues, especially for Buddy, and as a director she sought to keep them interesting by showing the son recording himself with a smart phone. Set designer Michael Raiford placed video screens high up on the four walls of the Whisenhut theatre-in-the-round so we could witness the video as post-explosion investigators might. Problem: the video projections are all pre-recorded, not live depictions, and one is quickly distracted by the game of tracking how well Tubbs' live action corresponds to the images. The game is impossible for the actor to win, and the visuals are too "hot" to allow the text and the live actor to come through with full impact.
The fable and fantasy were tarnished for me by Park's MacGuffin: craggy old Vet is on-again, off-again about promising to get son Buddy a job with his unit of the Border Patrol. All he has to do is put the word in. Buddy is hypnotized by the prospect of riding like Jesus Christ at the side of God the father (although he doesn't put it in those terms). Vet eventually reneges on the promise and intimidates the stunned Buddy into some nasty violent, immoral illegal business.
But hey, the Feds don't work that way. Stringent anti-nepotism laws strictly bar any intervention in the recruitment or employment of a family member, and no way under the regs would Buddy be assigned to the same Border Patrol unit. He could qualify on his own merits, perhaps, particularly with the report of meritorious military service, but he would be serving his probationary period hundreds or thousands of miles away from his father. Okay, so maybe Vet was lying, trying to give himself greater importance in the eyes of a son whom he appears to despise. That would solve the plot flaw -- but maybe in her final edit of the text the playwright could give Vet a line or two to reveal his mendacity.
Zach Theatre dialogue between Suzanne-Lori Parks and Zach Artistic Director Dave Steakley, June 1
Kirk R. Tuck on shooting dress rehearsal of The Book of Grace, with images, June 2
Kirk R. Tuck's dress rehearsal images at the Zach blog
Review by Rachel Perlmutter for the Daily Texan, June 5
Feature by Deborah Martin for the San Antonio Express-News, May 31
Review by Clare Carnavan for the Statesman's Austin360 Seeing Things blog, June 13
A blog letter about the production from Zach's Producing Artistic Director Dave Steakley, June 13
Robert Faires interviews playwright-director Suzan-Lori Parks for the Austin Chronicle, June 16
Review by Robert Faires for the Austin Chronicle, June 23
Review by Ann Boyd at soulciti.com, June 23
Review by Georgia Young for austinist.com, June 29
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, July 5
Review by Michael Graupmann at www.austin.culturemap.com, July 18
Hits as of 2015 03 01: 1544
The Book of Grace
by Suzan-Lori Parks
Zach Theatre
