Overlong play clogs the heartland of America

JULIA TIERNAN/YH Max Dana, BR '99, and David McMillan, JE '00, go American Gothic.

Director Claire Lundberg, TC '98, DRA '01, and her skillful 10-person cast give playwright Len Jenkin more credence than he deserves. Their production of his American Notes makes only a few adjustments on an overly long, indulgently tangential script that could easily have lost two secondary plot lines. In its regrettably unadulterated form, American Notes mixes sci-fi zaniness, sweet melodrama, social commentary, surrealist farce, and nuanced character study into a concoction that's undeniably original and, as Jenkin would have it, uniquely American. But this play's peculiar brew of a UFO fanatic, a neglected lover, a lonely drifter, and a homeless wise man is always on the verge of bubbling into an unpleasant mess.

That it never does is a tribute to the cast's focused performances and the director's leadership. Lundberg remains faithful to Jenkin's loopy script and derives from it an innovative showcase for a batch of talented actors. Whether this makes it more or less than a decent play depends on whether you're more concerned with the startling finesse and emotional range of performers like Maiya Murphy,
CC '99, and Gideon Banner, BR '99, than with Jenkin's facile disregard of coherent narrative.

At the core of this two-hour play is a pair of affecting slices-of-life set in a small-town motel. Karen (Murphy) spends the entire night in her rented room, slugging away at a liquor bottle, rifling through junk-food containers, and agonizing about her absent boyfriend, played by Reggie Austin, BK '01. She's still young and pretty, but she's old enough to be wary of younger potential rivals. As she puts it, with a typically deft shift from self-doubt to extroversion, reinforced by a pat on her hip: "All right, some of it's missing, but most of it's there." In the office, the charming college-age motel clerk (Stacie Lents, SY '00) does her English homework while alternating between impersonal chatter and emotional intimacy with the rootless Faber (Banner) who recently checked in.

Faber is both a self-assured drifter with the wherewithal to kick a threatening vagrant in the face and a vulnerable sad sack trying to recover from a broken marriage. In one of the finest interludes in the play, he and Karen exchange brief songs. Faber begins with an earnest, off-key ballad, breaks off in embarrassment, and then tries to heal his wounded machismo with a chair-banging rendition of "Let's Twist Again." With a wonderfully played combination of silliness and sincere panic, Faber moves from glib sentimentality to emotional self-exposure to a scrambling attempt to regain his guard. There are many such winning moments in American Notes. But too often they're undermined by abrupt cuts to scenes that have nothing to do with the characters in the motel, intent only on revealing this small town's tawdry underbelly. One subplot features Tim, played by David Blasher, DC '01, and Linda, played by Maria Oliveras, MC '01. They're an odd pair, at times teaming up for a Sonny-and-Cher-like lounge act, at times appearing to be a pimp-and-hooker combo, at other times coming across like two rowdy teenagers who delight in telling a carnival pitchman how lame his act is. This barker, played by Lauren Popper, ES '01, occupies a second incongruous subplot. He's a sad anachronism failing to draw many customers to the giant crocodile he keeps in a tent. The three actors bring a lot to their roles but can't keep us from thinking that this unforgivingly long play might have been better without them.

Contributing to the play's surreal quality is the Chaplinesque character of Chuckles, played by Max Dana, BR '99. Dana brings to this largely silent role a physical humor filled with cringes, nervous looks, stiff-legged walks, and fluttering hand gestures. Chuckles somehow moves from waif to carnival barker's assistant to motel custodian, and finally to servant for a paranoid professor obsessed with UFO's, played by David McMillan, JE '00. McMillan makes a convincing loon, even if his get-up of green bow tie, waistcoat, and frying-pan hat is a touch overwrought.

The arrangement that Lundberg and production designer Andre Thomas have devised is true to the intention Jenkin expressed in his production notes: the audience should feel that the distances surrounding it are "vast." Lundberg and Thomas set the seats 20 feet away from the nearest site of action and spread the set across the 70-foot length of the Whitney Humanities Center Gymnasium. With the gym's radiators clanking and its cavernous emptiness swallowing lines, the audience is forced to hunch over and strain to hear the actors. Our remote position effectively heightens their sense of the motel's characters' loneliness and the secondary characters' estranging incongruity.

At the end of this long night, one is grateful for the expertise and devotion of Lundberg and her cast and crew, and disappointed that such careful performances were devoted to such a sloppy script.

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