Senseless acts of bigamy

"The minute you talk about truth," Lyman Felt is told, "you sound better than anyone else." As the lead actor in Arthur Miller's comic drama, Brian Tanen, TD '01, glows. His character is a hypocrite and an idealist, bigamist and devoted lover, sensualist and Platonic truth seeker; Tanen maintains it all with earnest glory. His duplicity and innocence come together so smoothly that you can't help but want to give in.

The Ride Down Mount Morgan is a senior project for director Pedro Kos, ES '01, set designer Colin Spoelman, MC '01, and sound designer Colbert Davis, CC '01. The title of the play comes from the car crash that starts it off, when Lyman's car takes a trecherous dive down an icy road in Elmira, New York. The crash brings together Lyman's two wives, who had not known of each other's existence. Stoic, middle-aged Theodora (Marli Guzzetta, TD '01) and the younger Leah (Elizabeth Shapiro, ES '03) meet in the waiting room at the hospital.

Guzzetta and Shapiro complement each other nicely. Guzzetta brings an incredible mix of sobriety, humor, and strength to witty, conservative Theo. Shapiro brings out both the anxious professionalism and sweet sensitivity of Leah, a young businesswoman who met Lyman at an insurance conference. Theo's daughter Bessie (Emily Pataki, PC '01), Tom (Jeffrey Little PC '01), his best friend, and Nurse Logan (Akina Adderly, ES '01) round out an exceptionally strong cast.

If Theo and Leah form the two ends of Lyman's love life, for most of the play nothing is at the center but an empty hospital bed. For even the initial contact between the two wives is undermined: it is initially framed as a hypothetical situation, the horror that Lyman has always imagined would happen, and moves backwards before it goes forward. As the story of Lyman's nine-year deception unfolds, fantasy and memory overlap and intertwine with the present-day hospital scene.

With echoes of Death of a Salesman, the play is funneled through Lyman's unyielding yet dubious certainty in himself and his perspective on the world. Miller himself had described this play in part as a commentary on the materialism and self-interested nature of the '80s. But the strength of the play does not rest on such tendentious deliberations. Rather than pushing at the issues head-on, the play has the most fun and carries the most dramatic weight in "delay[ing] as long as possible," pulling Lyman out of his body cast into the depths of fantasy and humor.

The set itself is beautifully constructed. Painted entirely black, it stretches upward and backward, providing multiple levels for the actors to stand on and move across. The architecture allows for the fluidity of space, time, and reality that are central to the play. A sudden flashback is simply a move to the right; a new scene can be started from above while the one below is still in progress. The architecture also allows the play to make the most of its comic potential. In one of the most outrageous scenes, Lyman's two wives stand on opposite sides of the upper side, melding together his ultimate fantasy of housewife and sex kitten. Shapiro and Guzzetta camp it up with great gusto. The entire cast carries out the comic sensuality of the play with natural skill and delight.

But, plot-wise, the thrill of Mount Morgan dissipates toward the end. The shine has worn off Lyman's charm just a little but it isn't quite replaced by the poignancy of despair. Miller's script returns him, immobilized, to his hospital bed, and the play does not have anywhere to go that it does not already know. Nonetheless, the incredible acting, delightful humor, and beautiful technical direction make Mount Morgan a sheer pleasure to watch.

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