 |
| Look
at that! (l-r) Greenhill and LaPlatney in Falling:
A Wake. |
Descending
Into Honesty
By
James Yeara
Falling:
A Wake
By
Gary Kirkham, directed by Laura Margolis
StageWorks/Hudson, through Sept. 28
The houselights fade. The crickets begin chirping. In the
darkness, a jet in flight is heard—then an explosion. My stomach
involuntarily tightens. The dim stage lights cast a dusky
glow on scenic designer John Pollard’s raked set: Upstage
right, a windmill’s arms slowly turn over an expanse of starlit
meadow, which could exist both far away and long ago. “What
was that noise?” asks a tall, thin, middle-aged man. “Harry”
(Martin LaPlatney), his wife calls after him as he walks into
the meadow, his faulty flashlight sending out an erratic Morse
code across the field.
“What
is that, a falling star?” asks the short, thin, middle-aged
woman entering behind him, Elsie (Susan Greenhill), or “Pudding,”
as Harry calls her. They are immediately and comfortably identifiable
and believable as a couple, speaking in the shortened syntax
and weighted diction of people who’ve known and loved each
other. “Satellite. It’s falling too slowly,” Harold finally
declares. Elsie decides to wish on what she insists is a falling
star. “Just a hunk of metal. A satellite. It’s falling too
slowly,” Harold repeats to undercut her romanticism, staring
at the object falling somewhere out over house right. Some
in the audience turn to look, too.
Then the stage lights black out and a series of thuds and
crashes, increasing in tempo and volume, seem to land all
around; some are metallic crashes, but the thuds are fleshly.
The thuds and crashes slacken and end as abruptly as they
began. When the dim stage lights cast their dusky glow on
the meadow again, Elsie and Harry survey the jet debris scattered
about the field. Then they focus their attention on the airline
seat downstage right. The audience notices, too, then takes
in the man (Kyle Filiault in a faultless performance) sitting
in the airline seat, seatbelt and headphones still on. He
is sitting three-quarters closed to the audience, his back
visible, his face almost totally in shadow. Harold checks
for a pulse: nothing. “He’s just a boy,” Elsie declares. She
squats down three feet in front of him, face to face. “Sorry,”
she whispers. And if the boy were alive, I know he’d believe
her, because I do, and so does the audience.
Canadian playwright Gary Kirkham’s Falling: A Wake
deserves an honest, believable production with actors who
can be honest and believable. StageWorks/Hudson gives Falling:
A Wake the treatment the script deserves. The improbable
event of a man falling from the sky to land intact in a field
is made plausible by the acting of Greenhill and LaPlatney,
and that makes all the difference. StageWorks/Hudson artistic
director Laura Margolis has, yet again, helmed a new play
in its American premiere, creating a space where the epiphanies,
revelations, and emotions can play out truthfully without
crashing and thudding with sentimentality, pretension, or
ostentation. From the gut-wrenching opening through the believable
verbal sparring, canoodling, and soothing of the long-married,
long-suffering couple, Falling: A Wake is fascinating
theater, a play that easily could descend into mawkishness,
but instead keeps its honesty from beginning to end. Its
80 minutes of plot twists and turns, its humor, its questioning
of God, faith, and despair, and its redemptive ending, which
is not only plausible but sincere—and all the more powerful
for it—make Falling: A Wake a rare play, which earns
its standing ovation, not out of habit, but out of merit.
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