'Lunacy' is worth mooning over
Story of insanity, 'Lear' deeply rich
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
By TONY BROWN, Plain Dealer Theater Critic
Lunacy, the word, has come to mean just plain crazy. But the origin of the expression (degrees of madness linked to the phases of the moon) hints at the truth of it: intermittently crazy. And aren't we all?
"Lunacy," the new play by Northeast Ohio writer Sandra Penman, might at first glance appear to be just a clever riff on Shakespeare's "King Lear." But Perlman is a smarter and braver writer than that.
She takes us on a haunting exploration of not only insanity and "Lear," but also of the power of family to comfort, that moment of life called death to unite, and - ultimately - the power of the theater to heal.
The Dobama Theatre worldpremiere production of the play, which opened during the weekend as part of FusionFest 2007, packs layer upon layer of richness into 80 compact, funny and emotionally wringing minutes.
Perlman has made a specialty of deconstructing (and reconstructing) classics. Her most successful play until "Lunacy" was 2001's "Jocasta," a psychological feminist revisit of Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex."
What makes "Lunacy" even more effective is the context in which Perlman places her reconsideration of "Lear."
"Jocasta" re-imagined the characters of Jocasta (the woman who marries her son) and her mother, Ismene, as if they existed sui generis, independent of writer, performers or audience. "Lunacy," on the other hand, puts "Lear" into an 1827 theater and an asylum.
A young Quaker woman (Cornelia) comes to a theater in Philadelphia (Penman's hometown) to beg a rehearsing Edwin Forrest (a real actor, the first great American Shakespearean) to visit her father (Benjamin, who thinks he's Lear) in the loony bin.
That scenario alone is enough to tickle the imagination. Forrest's egomaniacal competitiveness contributed to 22 deaths in the infamous 1849 anti-British Astor Place Riot in a New York theater, where a rival actor, the English W.C. Macready, was performing.
Perlman, using humor and pathos, burrows deeper and ever deeper, and all three characters are transformed by their experiences together in ways that are not only plausibly surprising, but also bring transformation to those of us in the audience open to it.
She gets a big assist from director Mark Alan Gordon, who helped the playwright sharpen and shorten the play, and the three actors who perform on the largely blank, walls-exposed stage of the Cleveland Play House's Brooks Theatre.
Dan Hammond, a rising third-year student in the Case Western Reserve University! Play House graduate acting program, is big, blustery and tousled as Forrest, but he's got a soft spot as well. As the Quaker lass, comely Bernadette Clemens packs steely resolve under that demure shyness. And hairy, wild-eyed Michael Regnier pulls out the best Tom O'Bedlam-lunatic stops as Benjamin.
So many new plays seem designed to make the theater less accessible to today's audiences. This one, happily and profoundly, invites us all backstage, where the theater lives and our moments of lunacy await the waxing of the moon.
© 2008 Halem Studios
perl@sperlman.comLast updated June 2008
