Imagine yourself living in 1919, most especially steeped in the era’s language, social constraints and customs as regards class and privilege. Admittedly, it’s a challenge, knowing what we know now.
Set in April 1919 in a fledgling publisher’s office in Manhattan, Richard Greenberg’s “The Violet Hour” is a fanciful playground of the mind, a “what if?” that explores precisely that challenge, fraught with linguistic difference and historic significance. It was an era of optimism immediately following “The Great War” when the future seemed golden, when at twilight it seemed that evening was about to reward you for the toil of the day.
Greenberg takes the words “violet hour” from a line in T. S. Eliot’s not-yet written “The Waste Land” and puts them into the mouth of an aspiring novelist, Denis McCleary, wondrously played by Patch Darragh. One hopes to see more of this young man. McCleary was a Princeton classmate of John Pace Seavering (Lucas Hall), who has taken part of his trust fund to establish a publishing firm. His quandary, in an office littered with manuscripts, is which book to publish first, McCleary’s disjointed epic or a memoir penned by Jessie Brewster (Christen Simon), a well-known Negro singer of the era, who happens to be Seavering’s mistress.
The play implies that Jessie’s passion for the younger white man might be fueled by the hope of publication. In the social context, these two characters, McCleary and Brewster, represent downtrodden populations trying through art to claw their way to prominence and privilege in a world where everything is changing. Also representing old money is heiress Rosamund Plinth (Kristen Bush), a mentally precarious, beautifully turned-out young woman who wants to marry McCleary over her father’s objections.
Trying to assist the confused Seavering is the wry Gidger, who interrupts all aforesaid meetings with news that a huge, unordered machine has been delivered. The machine proceeds to disgorge pages from the future, revealing to McCleary the implications of his decision, something none of us ever knows. T. Scott Cunningham, who made an astonishing Globe debut as the newbie baseball fan in Greenberg’s earlier play “Take Me Out,” portrays the delightful Gidger, but the play’s virtuoso speech is given to McCleary, speaking as if from the future. It’s a stunning moment.
One need not know that Greenberg’s characters resemble such American icons as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, their editor Maxwell Perkins and singer Josephine Baker.
Carolyn Cantor is a director to watch, and she is supported royally by David Korins’ endlessly fascinating set, Robert Blackman’s luscious costumes, Matthew Richards’ lighting and Paul Peterson’s sound design.
“The Violet Hour” continues at The Old Globe Theatre through June 25, with performances at 7 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday; 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
For tickets ($19-$59) and information, visit www.theoldglobe.org or call (619) 23-GLOBE.
Sledgehammer’s ‘Chiang Kai Chek’
As preparation for my attendance of Charles L. Mee’s “Chiang Kai Chek,” a friend, who just returned from China, read aloud three or four pages about Chiang Kai Chek from his guidebook. He needn’t have bothered. Knowledge of any despot will do, though Eastern theatrical traditions provide such a cool and ritualized context for ideas in this play, written in the mid-’90s.
To these Mee adds his trademark classical music, in this case Franz Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” sung with luscious tone by mezzo-soprano Markee Rambo-Hood. She is dressed by designer Sarah Golden in stylized Kabuki garb, replete with fan, an elaborate brocade obi and long panels, all managed beautifully while she traversed Nick Fouch’s extraordinary and atmospheric set.
Composer Tim Root adds eerie (and sometimes annoying) electronic music performed by Nicolas Carvajal. David Cannon’s videography, Chris Hall’s marvelous lighting design and dancer Ericka Moore’s shattering sound design and choreography enhance the 90-minute production, performed without interval.John Polak portrays the character listed “Chek.”
His performance of Mee’s deceptively simple little fables, all the while building houses of cards, is mesmerizing and chilling. Mee’s disturbing denouement, in which Chek proposes that Socrates may have been wrong, “that we have never seen the truth, and so, if we do see it, we won’t recognize it,” is bleakly nihilist.
Certainly, the play provides an oblique and brutal wake-up call. It is quite unlike the playwright’s more transparent plays, among them “Wintertime” and “Limonade Tous les Jours.”Scott Feldsher, back at the helm of Sledgehammer, is just the man to stage such fraught work. As for the space, it’s so accommodating to excellent design that it could become a favorite of theatergoers.
“Chiang Kai Chek” continues through July 2 at the 10th Avenue Theatre, 930 10th Ave.
For tickets and information, visit www.sledgehammer.org or call (619) 544-1484.
