Talk about swimming against the prevailing tide. The Shadow Box by Michael Cristofer, the summer production choice of A Dreaming Experiment at the University of Chattanooga’s black box theatre, is not exactly your average escapist fare. Cristofer serves up the story of not one, but three people dying simultaneously from cancer and the effect it has on their families and loved ones. A Midsummer Night’s Dream this isn’t.
In our post-9/11 “new sensitivity” we are not supposed to deal with serious subjects during our leisure time except at fundraisers or memorials or memorials that are fundraisers. This collective inability to face, understand, and cope with the harshness of life is, of course, what tends to get us into trouble in the first place. Folly is doomed to repeat itself.
Having lost a father, an aunt, an uncle, and an employer in recent years to the big “CA” (medical code for cancer), I could certainly empathize with the proceedings. In fact, this disease has become so prevalent and insidious in our society that there is hardly anyone among us who has not endured or who will not experience a cancer death close by. Perhaps there are some lessons to be learned from this play.
The trouble is we don’t like lessons.
The obvious requirement in A Dreaming Experiment’s production of this play is to make its necessary message palatable. We as a culture tend to walk away immediately from items on the table that are unpleasant, foreign, unfamiliar, or for our own good. The irony here is that cancer is a taste most of us are already familiar with, and if we aren’t, it’s only a matter of time before we will be. Can we be blamed for not liking that particular taste?
If anything, the production directed by Michael Persad suffered at times from what we used to call at the Washington Theatre Laboratory the “iron lung syndrome,” or taking itself far too seriously for its own good. When you have three people progressively dying on stage, and everyone else grieving in one fashion or another, you really don’t have to work hard on making it serious. This part is inescapable.
I once worked as a hospital orderly, and I can faithfully attest to the fact that there is a fair amount of black, ghoulish, or “gallows” humor surrounding death. This is what makes it possible for most of us to deal with it at all. This was highlighted in the play when Felicity, a wheelchair-bound mother with various parts of her body missing or tubed and convincingly played by Margaret Green, starts singing a rousing chorus of “Roll Me Over in the Clover” to her sexually frustrated, but otherwise healthy, daughter, also nicely performed by Kelly Grey Evans. The audience loved it.
The action all takes place in a cancer hospice in California where all the patients live side by side in “cottages.” This gives the place the feeling of being some odd lake-front resort complex. The residents have periodic interviews with the “medical authorities” played in the form of a disembodied voice by Laura Coates. She does this with all the dispassionate charm of a voice-mail answering system. The frustration of never talking to a human is equated to the frustration of the medical world’s inability to find a cure or a satisfactory coping mechanism for the people suffering.
Set designer Rachel Burnett and lighting designer Steven W. Kidd actually do a very nice job with the difficult assignment of creating three cottages side by side with action often making rapid jumps from one to the other. I can’t say the same for the actors as they moved in and out of position for the same rapid flow of action. They tended to creep from one place to another rather than walk naturally. This is Acting 101 stuff. Creeping immediately steals focus, the opposite of the actor’s intention at the moment, since it makes the audience wonder what nefarious deed the creeper is up to. It also repeatedly added to the pall of gloom that hangs over the place which needed to be avoided at all cost.
The theme of the play is actually a human trait far more prevalent than cancer and perhaps more destructive – denial. Almost everyone onstage is experiencing it to some degree, whether it be a mother unable for years to accept the death of one of her daughters to the point where another living daughter forges letters from the dead one to read to her mother, or a wife who refuses to enter the cottage of her dying husband because somehow this would be a sign of accepting the inevitability of his outcome.
A second theme emerges towards the end of the play – that the mystery and indignity of death can be effectively faced with grace, humor, and in the company of loved ones. It would behoove us all to find ways to prepare ourselves and those around us for the quiet acceptance of this continuation of the natural process. I have tried to do this recently, as my nine-year-old daughter expressed her concern over which way, up or down, she would be headed upon death. The question troubled me, or the fact that she should be asking it, and I tried to give an answer filled with encouragement. It seems once the questions begin on this subject, they never really end, do they? It also might behoove us all to go back for one more hug before parting. Who knows when the chance might come again.
The Shadow Box continues through July 27.