Memory Ignites in Nora Theater's Spoon

When Edgar Lee Masters' classic novel Spoon River Anthology first appeared in 1915, it had the popular advantage of topicality but was freighted with scandal. Masters had compiled reminiscences portraying all the virtues and vices of small town life during the Civil War and Reconstruction and some of the tales depicted actual people from the town where he grew up.

Charles Aidman's 1963 adaptation succeeded partly because audiences liked the "adult" themes and partly because a political message emerged from the small rural cemetery in which it was set. All classes, races and religions from Spoon River were buried there together indiscriminately, and the equality implied naturally struck Aidman as utopian.

Both versions still have more to offer than poignancy and politics, but not from the tales themselves. Rather the anthology serves as a description of memory and how memory is adapted, treated and socialized. Like Levi-Strauss recording folklore, Masters was preserving in writing an oral history that would have continued to transform itself over the years beyond recognition of its original form or died out altogether had he not interceded. How residents of Spoon River handled memory is the most trenchant aspect of the Nora Theater's current production.

As in Aidman's internationally toured revue, a few actors divide up seventy monologues (Masters' original had two hundred and forty four) and deliver them as souls speaking from the grave. They are complemented by two more players (Will Hines and Regina Wambui Macharia) singing folk ballads and spirituals throughout which compose a thematic matrix for the entire set.

Hines, who doubles as the play's musical director, is the most engaging character as a meandering troubadour, and the most felicitous of the souls. The four main players do their best to hold all the pieces together, but come off looking lost and aimless because the material is only loosely unified. The play itself suffers the fragmented style at first, but, paradoxically, gains coherence gradually as Director Eric Engel forces a kind of passive audience participation.

Engel inserts the audience both physically and dramatically into the action. Physically, the audience is underground with the cast, divided into three sections around the stage, and looking through green diaphanous curtains which hang from the ceiling like death shrouds. Coffin covers, large bones and all manner of trailer trash interlaced through the kudzuesque drapings complete the illusion of depth.

Dramatically Engel treats the audience like another character by addressing it directly. Talking to the audience rather than at it seems to acknowledge as well just how difficult the material is to sit through. All the monologues are autobiographical, so coming from the dead they sound like confessions or complaints, and the tone becomes an issue of stamina.

That's not Engel's fault. Old, stale, dead material is inherent to the play. Engel's solution effectively takes the edge off this problem. It makes the audience more receptive listeners--somewhat like Dante in Hell, bearing witness to final testimonials and recriminations. But unlike Dante, Masters was fond of his kin; no one is damned. The audience is asked not to judge folk for their failings but to pay attention to the actors' performances and deft versatility. Engel makes acting an integral factor in how memory is constructed.

Frequent character transitions are necessary to pull off so many monologues, but this has the added affect of focussing attention on the actor as an actor and calling the character's credibility into question. Richard Mawe, Deena Mazer, Paula Plum and John P. Arnold each play fifteen people or more, many of whom are themselves performing their story. Clearly some characters are coloring the truth. Others are either delusional or simply lying. They want their memory to serve them and to protect them rather than hew to objectivity. The more deeply the actors dig into their characters the more the characters look like actors; resourceful, practiced, and more than mildly disingenuous.

As accounts counter and repair one another, holistic memory emerges. A record of the town history that eludes the wants and needs of particular souls takes shape and begins to take on a sort of independent, convincing veracity. Were it not for witnesses--that is, friends, lovers, and family--audiences would hear the most benign version of events, and dead souls' painful memories would be comfortably elided from their personal histories.

Engel's production works best as a record of how people reconstruct their pasts; the subject itself, which relates a lot of all-too-familiar hardship, has lost its impact. Spoon River is occasionally sad, seldom funny, but not meant to be either. Nor is it meant to be tragic. Rather the mood is elegiac in that it tries to describe the need for people to tell their stories as they would like them to be remembered. History, according to Spoon River, is constructed piecemeal and painstakingly from scraps assembled and melded together.