Sleep-away Paradise

THE SMART MONEY (whoever that is) would have you buy a piece of Mark O'Donnell instead of, say, Douglas Aircraft or Gulf Oil. During the time he went to school at Harvard, O'Donnell was known as the best and certainly cleverest of student playwrights. The last play he wrote here was his senior thesis, called Summer Work. The Harvard Premiere Society decided to put it on the stage, mounted it in Dunster House Dining Room, and a sweet work it is.

O'Donnell pays attention to the way people talk. His play takes place at a summer camp run by Otis Demarest. This middle-aged booster's Camp Edgewater is his idea of paradise, the kind of paradise sunny types have tried to pass off on campers since pullman cars first began to take troops of babies to synthetic Shangri-Las in the Berkshires and Poconos. Otis speaks exclusively in smiley cliches, trying to convince both his counselors and his campers of a dream of innocence that only he sees. Like almost everyone else in the play, he can never say just what he means.

Otis's senior counselors, Brad and Lester, have more realistic grips on reality, but are indulgent enough never to pop their employer's fantasy bubble. They watch but they do not touch. The junior counselor, Tyler, in his first year at Edgewater, is downy, gangly and innocent. One would think that his fall would be the main tension of the play and one would be wrong.

Tyler falls in love with Otis's daughter Missy, who peels potatoes, molds jello and otherwise cooks for the camp. She like her father seeks to insulate herself from the outside world--at one point she says in trying on a potholder-mitten, "They're super super comfy. I wish I had a potholder for my whole body. You know, one that you could pull over your head..." Tyler, aggressive with her, has a surprisingly easy time breaking through her lining and they sleep together.

Tyler also takes on a sensitive little boy named Sam. Sam embodies the innocence Otis the owner blusters to simulate. He does things like collect toads and has fantasies of flying which he communicates to Tyler through a silver airplane ring which he calls Sky-Pilot.

Camp Edgewater is of course on a lake and in it Sam sees the silvery fish he wants to touch. He's told he can't have them. Otis, who had sailed on the lake as a young man with his wife, looks at it on the Fourth of July to see the sunlight reflected and tells his counselors, "There's your fireworks. Right there."

Little Sam seals his fate by handing his Sky-Pilot ring to Tyler as a gift. Like the guy in World War II movies who shows wallet photos of his wife to a buddy, he's finished as soon as he gives them something to remember him by. Crawling out of bed while Tyler's involved with Missy, he goes in search of the silvery fish and drowns.

EVERYONE DEALS with the death the way they have to, the camp workers trying to hide it from the kids to whom the absence of the sappy punk Sam means nothing. Nobody understands it very well; worse yet, no one can communicate what they do feel. "It's hard," says Tyler to his more weathered colleague Brad, "feeling like opera in here, like high mass, and everything coming out cartoons."

The play slows down in the second act as it fragments more and more. This is usually called "Second Act Trouble," and O'Donnell has it--his play and his plot stop moving and his characters stare at their feet and examine themselves. Tyler desperately grapples for Missy and she, not wanting to deal with new-realized realities of existence, squirms away from him. Otis finds his campers rebellious, and as vandals invade his property and ruin his rowboats this pathetic non-Prospero finds his dream dissolved, his charms overthrown; "what strength I have's mine own" is not very much.

O'Donnell forces strong themes in and out of his work: faith and delusion, guilt and innocence, words and meaning. His characters miss being drawn to proper proportions--they are unevenly constructed, sometimes deep and sometimes shallow to the point of being like the cartoons Tyler complains he comes out with. Especially fuzzy is his ill-defined creation of Missy, a thin, shadowy portrait of a girl.

The actors do the kind of work that student actors do, but since their characters don't breathe and move quite like real people, they're on their own. Glyn Vincent as Tyler often seems as confused as his character, but he has moments of real charm and passion, bringing his gawk to life. David Thomas's Lester makes it clear that his cynic had a past and is not simply sewn together of one-liners. Peter Fisher's Brad is mature, intelligent and, most difficult of all, a good Listener. Caroline Jones's Missy knows just how O'Donnell wanted his girl to talk, like a furry-slippered guest at a pajama party: "My dad would have a cow if he caught me," she says, and means it. Andy Birsh as Otis Demarest has the best part in the play and in it he is a wonder. His is an affecting, piercing job of acting, loving and grounded with an evident compassion.

Hampered by physical limitations, the staging is not as good as it could have been. Although director Douglas Hughes obviously had a tender touch on the play and brought out dimensions which a less perceptive director would not have, the characterizations still were lumpy.

HUGHES'S MOST IMPRESSIVE work and O'Donnell's greatest luck came with the children who played the campers. Their performances were natural, warm, restrained. Sam (Christopher Stewart), Stewart (Max Levine), and Roger (Michael Sloane) were all terrific. David M. Thomas as J.T. deserves some sort of long-distance half-pint Tony Award.

The tension in Summer Work has something to do with the characters' grappling with their recognition of their place in nature. The lushness and order of nature should be more evident in, the production than they are. The fall from innocence in O'Donnell's Camp Edgewater is a fall into a very thick, green bed of leaves, twigs, gentle fears and sadness. It is not a threatening world or a horrifying one, but a world of fears more perceived than existent (and more internalized than devouring). The camp is a sort of sad paradise, but a paradise just the same. Referring to the play in program notes, the writer chose a quote from George Eliot's Middlemarch:

Some discouragement at the new real future which replaces the imaginary is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grown and the squirrel's heart beat and we should die of that which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

In Summer Work, O'Donnell tries to softly shuck away at the wadded stupidity for us. He does it with a certain inefficiency and no one's going to thank him for that static present. The work is full of problems, but an original play by a young writer (this by a sage) is supposed to be full of problems. His vision, which aspires to the peripheral and occasionally epiphanal, is sometimes just blurry, but then no one expected Ah, Wilderness! from someone not even out of the forest. O'Donnell's gift is what sticks, and it is some gift indeed: funny, touching and distinctive. This dividend is the one you frame because it's the first.