The Stillborn Lover
09 July 2003The Stillborn Lover by the late Canadian author Timothy Findley, now playing at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, MA opens on a note, and a stage setting, that set the mood and agenda of a play that is tragedy as well as mystery, on its dynamic and troubling course.
As the light spills up in a giant checkerboard pattern across the multilevel setting of square clean forms and sliding paneled walls, a voice reminds us of an oriental game, played on a board of squares. A game in which a round flat stone placed on a square can never be moved.
When the play opens, the squares of light are gone and the stones almost forgotten until one notices that they are there, great round stones on the ground beneath each of the raised platforms on which the action of the play occurs. They are there too in the handful of tiny pebbles gathered by a character who only half understands what they mean. The setting by Michael Downs beautifully contains this play.
The plot concerns a career diplomat, Harry Raymond (Richard Chamberlain) who has been recalled to a "safe house" outside Ottawa, Ontario following the death of a male prostitute in Moscow. The time is the Cold War and tensions are high. His wife Marion, (Lois Nettleton) teetering on the early stages of Alzheimner's, accompanies him; his daughter Diana (Jennifer Van Dyke) has been called to join them and to face parents she realizes she has never really known.
But the house is anywhere but a safe one, visited by Harry's life-long boss and friend, Michael Riordon (Keir Dullea) whose own ambitions to become Prime Minister of Canada influence his agenda for Harry, whose wife Juliet (Jessica Walter) would almost care for Harry's plight but cannot put the glories of reigning in high society behind her, and especially since Riordon has placed in the house two "spies" with an agenda of bringing Harry down.
These two, Robert Emmet Lunney as Superintentdant Jackman and Kaleo Griffin as Mahavolich, actively pursue Harry-Jackman with his evil envelope of pictures and Mahavolich more aggressively with his macho athletic bare thighs. Both seem devoted to the goal of wiping out homosexuality in Canada -a goal that now rings so differently in Canada's recently legalizing gay marriage.
And buffeted by the ensemble about them are Harry and Marion. They have been married many years, have experience life together at embassies in Cairo, Nagaski, and elsewhere. Her mind at times actively recalls such scenes. His gentleness with her lets her recall them. In this play about acceptance and love, exposure and forgiveness, the relationship of these two, and to a certain extent that of their daughter, is at the heart of the plot.
In one of her almost lucid memories Marion quotes the Yeats lines, "things fall apart, the center cannot hold..." Audience may remember that a few lines later a line reads, "the ceremony of innocence is drowned."
This is a play about the drowning of innocence. Marion in another moment of almost-recall will tell us of a dream (?) of swinging far out over an abyss with her infant daughter in her arms and letting go to crash to the rocks below. She did not let go then and one eventually understands that it was at that moment, the decision not to let go, that her love for her husband was tested, her acceptance of his state accepted, and she had gone on.
Chamberlain is, as always, magnificent, in complete control, so natural that he never seems to be acting at all. He is Harry Raymond, flawed but at last self-owning, self-proclaiming -totally accepting the round stone life has laid on his square. And although his role is pivotal, it is an inclusive one, pulling the close-knit cast into its orbit.
His relationship with his wife is the most vital, the most demanding and played with the greatest variation and skill. With others he can be loudly defiant, with her he plays the tender protection her loyalty in the past and vulnerability in the present demand.
Her role is one of the most varied and difficult in the play. She handles it with a touching child-innocence that at times opens its eyes to ugliness and then hides them behind the umbrella of forgetfulness.
Director Rabbett has moved his actors about the complex set and through the complex plot with great skill. There are moments when actions occurs on two levels at once, with pantomime on one location counterpointing dialog elsewhere. Locale, silently evoked by light or sliding panel, is always clear, although the plot weaving through it may be enigmatic and painful, and although there is, as the program warns, nudity, it is not offensively played.
This is not an easy play, but it is a beautiful and moving one and one that raises as many questions as it answers. It is difficult to describe what occurs without revealing plot elements that should evolve for each viewer, but be assured that they occur with rapidity and concern questions very much still with us, no matter how far we feel we may have come in answering the big questions that concern acceptance of others, acceptance of guilt and innocence, and acceptance, ultimately of oneself. Within the play they are raised. Some of them are faced. A trip to the BTF to see how can be a rewarding, if for some, a troubling experience.
© 2003 Frances Hall
