THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 10, 1994 TAG: 9411090188
SECTION: NORFOLK COMPASS PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Theater review
SOURCE: MONTAGUE GAMMON III
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
``The Living,'' by Anthony Clarvoe, is not an AIDS play.
It's a play about the bubonic plague in London, but not about AIDS. Clarvoe is a young American playwright, and the script he adapted from Daniel Defoe's novel ``A Journal of the Plague Year'' is not about AIDS.
An astonished representative of King Charles II asks the Lord Mayor of London, ``You want the government to pay for medical care?'' A healthy woman, traveling through the countryside, is threatened with violence because she is a Londoner, and it is assumed that Londoners carry the plague.
The plague is variously seen as God's judgment upon individual sinners, or upon the whole nation. A character offers the hope that by recounting the events of the 1665 plague ``we might help - next time.''
If ``next time'' is not meant to be today, and if the new plague is not AIDS, then the script is an episodic and mildly interesting curiosity. Only the parallels between the plague of three centuries ago and the rise of AIDS over the last 15 years give the play its deeper emotional force.
Clarvoe tracks the converging courses of three Londoners. Mrs. Joan Graunt is a pioneering statistician who learns how to predict the spread of the plague. Mrs. Sarah Chandler, a shopkeeper's widow, becomes a nurse after all her family has died. Sir John Lawrence, the Lord Mayor of London, strives heroically to protect the welfare of his city when all other authority has abandoned it.
These characters, and any number of others, are portrayed by the students of the Theatre Department of the Governor's School for the Arts with the skill one would expect veteran adult actors to display.
Misty Mastracco brings to the role of Graunt an almost palpable sense of the character's single-minded love of knowledge and enthusiasm for pure facts. As Chandler, Karen Moss is wholly convincing as an ordinary woman who finds extraordinary strength in the face of terrible loss. Matt Caplan, playing the Lord Mayor, conveys the rigorous sense of duty that keeps him in London when almost everyone else flees the city.
The acting throughout the cast, from the students who have large roles to those who play unnamed townspeople, is marked by concentration and commitment. Director Michael S. Tick has led each of his 16 actors to a clearly communicated understanding of his or her character. Even the unnamed Londoners in the crowds become distinct.
Tick has also kept interesting, with good pacing and careful movement of his actors, a play which if less skillfully staged could become an unvarying litany of misfortunes and horrors.
The set, designed like the lighting by Scott Skiles, is especially clever. The slightly ramped staged floor looks like the facade of an English half-timbered house with a shingled roof. Thus there is always the sense of being in old London, without the action being fixed in one spot as it would be if the same facade were used as a backdrop.
Costumes by Angela Winters range from the lush display of wealth affected by nobility to the rags of the poor, always seeming inappropriate and convincing.
Convincing is the key work in describing this production. Even as one notices the similarities between one illness and another, between the behavior of frightened and ignorant people 330 years ago and the behavior of frightened, uninformed people today, one never loses the sense that one really is watching the events of 17th century London. by CNB