Studio Arena Theatre is a big place with a big stage and, many
might think, not particularly suitable for the intimacy demanded
by a one-person play.
The many would be wrong. The opening night performance Friday
of Studio Arena's first venture into solo performance - Jay O'Callahan's
"Pouring the Sun" and "Pill Hill Stories"
- was a joy and a triumph.
O'Callahan, a marvelous and infinitely subtle storyteller creates
his own intimacy. He appears on the darkened stage framed by a
trapezium of light on the floor and accompanied by a few spare
articles of furniture. An unvarying back-projected image, one
appropriate to each act, gently, unobtrusively indicates the world
beyond O'Callahan's words. (Chris Noble and John Saunders, scenic
designer and light designer, respectively, are responsible for
this effective visual focusing.)
Beyond that, it is simply a man talking to us.
And what beautiful, affecting talk. "Pouring the Sun"
is the story of a Polish family that "worked the steel"
in Bethlehem, Pa., from the 1920s to the 1950s in the days before
unions made a hard life a bit more bearable. O'Callahan wisely
filters this family saga through a single character, Ludvika Moskal,
an immigrant woman who came to this country alone when she was
18 and is hardened by the tough life in a steelmaking city.
O'Callahan's Ludvika is a woman of full, melancholy-tinged emotion,
who with each new tragedy becomes a stronger and more resourceful
person. At first, when she's still a young girl barely making
her way in this grim and unfriendly environment, she sends bitter
letters to her parents back in Poland. Then she meets Fritz, a
worker in Machine Shop No. 2 who plays beautiful Chopin, and she
becomes a makeshift romantic poet. "He's giving me a wedding
present - the moon!" she writes to her mother. "But
I'm leaving it up there for you."
After she and Fritz are married and the kids come, one tragedy
follows another. Because of the cruelty of his plant boss, Fritz
loses three fingers and his beloved Chopin. The oldest son, Alex
- so good at football "they put him in the front row"
(Fritz brags) - wins a college scholarship, a dream in a family
that can only hope that its children might finish high school.
But a 25-cent bet is made by one of Alex's friends that results
in a horrible accident, and the dream becomes a nightmare.
Under the strain of life, Ludvika, still surging with her youthful
emotion, becomes a pragmatist. She can sometimes be harsh and,
when it comes to the welfare of her family, always relentless.
Fritz can only follow in her wake. "Let me have my say, and
then you can yell at me, Ludvika" is this constant refrain.
The way O'Callahan does it, this is great and moving stuff, filled
with picturesque but never maudlin snapshots of these struggling
lives. Fritz and Ludvika are rendered with remarkable vividness,
and soon the steady and wise Alex comes booming to life. His brother,
John, is sharply drawn as a courageous individual who draws on
his mother's strength and, against all odds, wins the unionist
battle. His sister, Mary, and the youngest, Freddie, slip in and
out as lively asides.
In a perfect complement to Ludvika's poignant, broadly human
story are the three selections from O'Callahan's "Pill Hill
Stories." These are humorous, lighter autobiographical stories
that tell of O'Callahan's youth growing up in a Boston neighborhood,
called Pill Hill for all its doctors.
These stories - different selections will be alternated throughout
the run - are essentially tales of eccentrics or odd adventures
from a hyperactive childhood. One memorable character is Mrs.
Lawrence, a literature-mongering do-gooder who wants to impart
culture to the neighborhood children. She has them over for "Cookies
and Dickens" - O'Callahan thought "Dickens" was
some kind of ice cream - or more hilariously, to serve as the
chorus, junior division, in her readings from "Electra."
Director Richard McElvain, who has worked with O'Callahan for
many years, writes in the program that O'Callahan is that special
kind of performer not subject to the kind of direction you might
aim at an actor. Instead of guidance in all the ins and outs of
stage business, McElvain says, you only need plant a seed or two
and then watch them grow as the intuitive O'Callahan turns them
into "creations that are as surprising as they are deeply
moving - or funny."
You can see this intuitive process convincingly at work in this
performance. That's mainly because O'Callahan doesn't desert his
storytelling roots to merely play a part. Though at times he sounds
like a sane Robin Williams, he keeps all characterizations to
a minimum. And only occasionally does he resort to mimelike illustrational
maneuvers, as when he imitates Ludvika's peeling phantom potatoes
for her famous potato soup.
But what he does do, and very effectively so, is generously engage
some of the archetypal storytelling devices. With consummate skill,
he uses age-old gestures and movements that must have generated
wonder in listeners even since that first human stubbled into
the cave and started telling about his close encounter with the
local saber-toothed tiger.
February 23, 2004
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