Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 8, 1990 TAG: 9005080494
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT RIVENBARK SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Long
The idea is to give audiences a feel for the kinds of plays that have helped shape the American theatrical scene.
Lanford Wilson's "Hot L Baltimore," Ed Graczyk's "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" and Mary Chase's "Harvey" will comprise the mainstage season, and several experimental works, possibly including a new play, are planned for the studio theater.
"We never want to present warmed-over Broadway - that is, plays that have just run in New York the previous season," said theater department Chairman Jim Hawes. "People in New River Valley are close enough to New York that if they want Broadway, they can go to Broadway. So we went back in time a little bit to choose these modern pieces."
Chuck Hayes, another faculty member, said that after a season emphasizing theatrical classics, the plays planned for next year will give audiences and actors a chance to sample a wide range of styles and genres.
"We try to do a mix of plays over a four-year period, to give students a balance of things from major periods of theater history," Hayes said. "That works better than doing all recent Broadway redos, or all classics, or all arcane intelligentsia stuff."
Hayes said cycling through major periods of theater history also helps educate students so they will support theater in years to come.
Jerry McGlowen, another faculty member, said this past season, which included Shakespeare's "As You Like It," Jean Anouilh's "Ring Around the Moon" as adapted by Christopher Fry, and William Inge's "Picnic," stretched his student actors by confronting them with plays from three very different cultures.
"Even `Picnic,' which was written in the 1950s, was foreign to these young actors, because most of whom were born after the play was written," McGlowen said.
McGlowen holds that doing a season like the one just ended is a good exercise, but one that, if protracted over more than one season, could lead student actors to creative exhaustion.
"When you start a season with one of Shakespeare's high comedies like `As You Like It,' it's a stretch for all concerned," he said.
"A play like that is written in a different language. It's set in a different culture with a different set of values. Students sometimes have a difficult time with Shakespeare for that reason. The director is put in the precarious position of trying to bring the student and the play together.
"Now it can be done, but when you have several plays in a row like that, actors can get tired of stretching. That's when it's nice to switch to more contemporary pieces."
"The Hot L Baltimore," slotted for production in October 1990, is the play that put Lanford Wilson on the theatrical map, McGlowen said.
"Wilson had a few short pieces done successfully Off-Broadway before this one, but he was still considered an avant guard playwright until `The Hot L Baltimore' moved him into the American mainstream," McGlowen said. "It wasn't long until he had a play on Broadway, and won the Pulitzer Prize."
Wilson's cycle of plays dealing with the Talley family, which includes his Broadway hit "Fifth of July," has, Hayes said, brought back a neoromantic-realistic style of playwriting to American theater that declined under the influence of playwrights born before, during, or shortly after World War II.
These writers include Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who died in 1989, English playwright Harold Pinter, and two younger American playwrights very influenced by Beckett and Pinter, Sam Shepard and David Mamet.
Beckett and Pinter, Hayes said, were so deeply affected by the horrors of World War II and its aftermath that their work became predominantly nihilistic and despairing, and set a dark tone for modern theater that playwrights like Wilson have only just begun to break through.
"Wilson's work still, to an extent, strips away the romantic trappings, just as Beckett and some of the others do," Hayes said. "But by dealing with several generations of an American family in his Talley plays, he's also reviving a romantic style of writing. It's a strange combination of romanticism and realism."
Hayes said Wilson is not the only contemporary playwright whose work has taken on a more optimistic and affirmative tone. He mentioned Wendy Wasserstein, who's recent hit play "The Heidi Chronicles" garnered much praise from the New York critical community, and won Wasserstein the Pulitzer Prize.
"With this play, Wasserstein is saying there's some hope, that the despair of the 1960s will not necessarily prevail," Hayes said. "That's a distinct change from the kind of message we've been getting in American plays for some time now."
The other two pieces planned for next season are quite different plays from Wilson's. "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," a success on Broadway and as a film, deals with a group of women approaching middle age who must come to terms with the myths of their youth.
"Harvey", which recounts the misadventures of charming eccentric Elwood P. Dowd and his invisible rabbit friend Harvey, has long been an American mainstay, both on the stage and in its various film versions for the big screen and television.
For information about upcoming plays at Radford University, call 831-5289 in Radford for more information.
by CNB