WAM Theatre in Lenox
Written by Stacey Isom Campbell
Directed by Genée Coreno
“What is this, really?”
When a student calls and wants to interview a teacher, there are important questions to be answered and equally important answers to be rendered. Naomi wants to ask a lot of things, and Emma is prepared to answer them. The story imparted is one of great sacrifice, mentorship, and a friendship that ends disastrously. Emma is a working professional in movies, and she teaches the arts and skills of moviemaking and appreciation to her eager, adventurous students for at least two generations. Her story, told in this new play produced by WAM Theatre at Shakespeare & Company’s Bernstein Theatre, is an uplifting tragedy about a third woman, Reese, who has been driven to suicide by her disastrous experiences. While men may be blamed for this calamity, it is truly the woman, or women, who have engineered this disaster.
Reese is beautifully played by Caroline Festa, who turns her character’s juvenile notions into an uncomfortable adulthood. Reese never understands her impulses and their results and instead lives with the shame of self-blame and the ugliness of couch-casting and its inevitable outcome. She and Emma endure her endless self-recriminations and her lack of convincibility of the possibilities that are open to her for retribution and realization. Instead, she suffers the shame and the horror of misunderstanding her situation.
All through the play, I could not help thinking about film director Roman Polanski who, 20 years before the date and title of this play, went through a horrifying experience. On March 10, 1977, 43-year-old Polanski was arrested and charged in Los Angeles with six offenses against Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old girl: unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, a lewd and lascivious act upon a child under the age of 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. While Stacey Campbell’s play does not disclose the extent of the unnamed director’s abuse of Reece, it may be considered to be something similar for her reaction is otherwise over the top. If Reece’s own experiences were less devastating than Gailey’s, perhaps her reaction is a bit hard to understand, but if they were comparable in any way, then her anger, humiliation, despair, and eventual demise are explainable.
Naomi, played with a delicately expressed brutality by Zurie Adams, never truly gets the answers she seeks, but she does get a sense of what may have occurred in the past. Adams is a good actress, and her relentless presentation of her character’s needs never reach the point of violent attack, but she consistently approaches that. I thought for some time that she was the illegitimate daughter of Reese’s rape experience, but I was corrected after the play. I would love to know what you think when you see the play.
Emma is played by Zoë Laiz, who gives us a full-time professional who knows what can, and often does, happen to young people seeking that big break in the world of performance. Too often, she softly relates, the give and take of that step is devastating. Still, she knows why some people make it through and others do not. In the case of Reese, the student’s response is on the bad side, the wrong side, and the least rewarding side. There is little she can do, and this takes its own toll on her as well as on her student. Laiz is a marvel in this role. She plays the impassioned, compassionate mentor whose personal passions must be restrained. Emma pays a high price for her high pride. Laiz lets us feel those passions and their impact on herself and on others.
Directed by WAM’s new artistic director, Genée Corena, the play has a fluid presence on the awkward thrust stage at Shakespeare & Company. Clearly, a lot of time has gone into the intricate physical and emotional choreography of the play that Campbell has created so carefully. The press opening performance was sparsely attended, which was a shame for this sort of play really needs an audience’s emotional participation to be fully realized, and hopefully subsequent performances will better balance the experience. It is always good to be a part of a new play’s emergence, and this one offers so much it should be your goal to see it, feel it, and give the actors what they need.
“1999” plays at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, MA, through November 2. For information and tickets, visit WAM Theatre’s website or call (413) 274-8122.
