The Peacock
Written by Calamity West
Directed by Marti Lyons
at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr (map)
thru Dec 8 | tickets: $10-$15 | more info
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Plenty of cruelty to go around
Jackalope Theatre presents
The Peacock
Review by Lawrence Bommer
Archly coy to a fault, too clever to persuade, this 85-minute world premiere by Calamity West is a nasty piece of goods. It depicts a gratuitously hostile fiction-writing workshop at an American university in December 1946 where it symbolically snows a lot. A recent suicide–frustratingly unexplained like so much here–by a would-be writer named Elinor provides fuel for denial and distraction. The mainly male class indulge in brittle byplay, harshly criticizing each other’s stories and the professor’s credentials. These corrosive young patricians–trust-fund brats, embittered ex-G.I.s, public drunks, a nerd who’s a closet homosexual—are even harder on Nan, the unfortunate young woman with an unexplained prosthetic leg. The treatment she endures hints at why Elinor hanged herself from a lightbulb.
Festering but well-wrought, Marti Lyons’ staging for Jackalope Theatre Company contrasts the main antagonists—AJ Ware’s surly and simmering Nan with Tim Martin’s insufferably misogynistic Calvin. The latter has written “The Peacock,” a half-baked story about a woman’s Virginia Woolf-like suicide: It’s sufficiently inconclusive and undeveloped to make us fear that Calvin is shielding himself from guilt over Elinor’s demise. Equally sketchy and cryptic, Nan’s purportedly un-feminine tale, “The Red Corpse,” depicts torture, an experience that veteran soldier Calvin denies Nan any right to describe. But then he thinks she shouldn’t write at all, but he is perversely fascinated by her artificial limb.
West spares no lacerations in portraying the spiteful, motor-mouthed workshops where boozing, sarcastic and self-entitled Henry (Nate Wheldon), geeky, self-proclaimed “romantic” Eugene (Jack Higgins), vicious Calvin and haunted William (Andrew Burden Swanson) overthink their petulant analyses of the stories at stake: Like medieval monks disputing scriptural interpretations, these petty, picky guys pontificate over authorial intent and whether art can imitate life. All along their teacher (Ed Dzialo) is helpless to rein in their narcissistic excess.
West contrasts these hothouse classroom bull sessions with off-campus scenes that show Nan occupying the late Elinor’s digs (metaphorically becoming the next martyr, it seems) or the boys crashing a history department party to secretly read Henry Miller’s banned “Tropic of Cancer.”
Near the end there’s an atrociously ugly and utterly unedifying showdown between, of course disabled Nan and sexist monster Calvin. It becomes the proverbial last straw. The writers’ final workshop–as maddeningly unresolved as every one before it–hints that Nan may turn the tables on Calvin. She returns after the assault to read her new story, now called “The Peacock” (after Calvin’s suicide story). But, like so much in West’s “I’ve Got a Secret” script, we never learn what it contains. If this is revenge, it’s thin gruel indeed.
To the opening night claque, much of The Peacock seemed a hilariously dark comedy, its dysfunctional take on other people’s pain a source of malicious merriment. (Somehow Eugene saying that “Faulkner makes me sad” struck the yahoos as irresistibly amusing, one of many unfunny howlers.) To a paying crowd, alas, West’s work will seem as much an indulgence as the workshops, literal object lessons to cast doubt and discouragement on anyone’s reason to write. Or see this play.
Rating: ★
The Peacock continues through December 8th at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr (map), with performances Thursdays-Sundays at 7:30pm. Tickets are $10-$15, and are available by phone (773-340-2543) or online here (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at JackalopeTheatre.org. (Running time: 85 minutes; no intermission)
artists
cast
AJ Ware (Nan), Andrew Burden Swanson (William), Ed Dzialo (Professor), Tim Martin (Calvin), Jack Miggins (Eugene), Nate Whelden (Henry)
behind the scenes
Marti Lyons (director), John Wilson (scenic design), Mac Vaughey (lighting design), Samantha Jones (costume design), Mel Gill (props design), Mikey Moran (sound design), Claire Sangster (master electrician), Ryan Bourque (violence design), Jen Dorman (poster design), Bobby Kennedy (dramaturgy), Jon Cohen (historical research), Josh Lambert (technical direction), Allison Raynes (production stage manager), Mikayla Pasquale (assistant stage manager), Nate Silver (producer).
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