Smokefall by
Noah Haidle at Goodman Theatre Production October, 2014 was a visual, emotional, and
intellectual treat. The scenery was evocative, the sound design rumbled, and
when the house and the family’s world came apart at the end of Act I, it made
for a splendidly theatrical unity of
thematic statement and staging expertise. Couple this with a universally excellent
acting company and you have a show that hit on all cylinders for me.
Certainly the Colonel/Tommy,
played to the hilt by the remarkable Mike Nussbaum, walks away with the
most kudos, but this was a strong cast all the way through. I do have doubts on whether it was necessary
to burden the play with the blatantly derivative “Our Townish” footnotes. I
suspect the narrative could have been conveyed and the necessary points made
without a “stage manager” to hammer them home.
I did want to
know a bit more about the play, but it has not been published yet. In lieu of that I did do some additional research.
The title appears to come from a passage in Four
Quartets 1: "Burnt Norton" (1935) [1] by T.S. Eliot. “The moment in the draughty
church at smokefall.” A bit more of the poem shows Eliot zeroing in on time
and the defining natural moments of remembrance,
which almost always floats just out of reach in the gauzy past. Seldom do we
manage to perceive clarifying memories at the moment they happen. In that
sense Smokefall depicts the efforts to search for them and describes the
search as occurring over and over in succeeding generations. I
still remember my mother admonishing me with “We get too soon oldt and too late
smart.”
Meditate a bit on this.
“Time past and time future
Allow but a little
consciousness.
To be conscious is not
to be in time
But only in time
can the moment in the
rose-garden
The moment in the arbour
where the rain beat.
The moment in the
draughty church at
smokefall
Be remembered; involved
with past and future.
Only through time
time is conquered.”
This gauzy time
warp of memory and regret and frustration is enhanced by the doubling
characters and their generational jumps.
Although the time frame appears to be kind of pre-9-11 middle class late
twentieth century, Haidle has excised most references to specific historical
events. The Colonel and wife have
traveled the world in the military, but
no particular war is mentioned. No racial events, electoral decisions, or
religious controversies rear up to tip
the emotional playing field into an Arthur Miller type socio/moral dilemma. The deserter father (Daniel) works,
but no specific profession is mentioned.
Beauty, Daniel and Violet’s daughter, have been schooled, but I do not remember if we
were told where. Two generations of stay-at-home wives are present, but women’s
issues are not directly raised. For me
the play seemed like a meditation on Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. Time passes and we ache to establish some
kind of connection between what happened
then, what we wanted it to be, and what it is now. Chasing those connections takes a lifetime until
senility turns you back once again into a dependent child. “sans everything. ”
The
visualization of this feeling begins
with the stage design itself. No curtain
was used and we were offered plenty of time to take in a large apple tree
hovering over the stage. Just below the tree was a canted slice of house
featuring wide siding and a lighted window.
Below that, two levels, a 2nd floor bathroom and sitting
room, an exit leading up that may lead
to that lighted window, which seems to be Beauty’s room. Stairs on the right then led down to the main
floor containing a middle class kitchen
on the left, a semblance of living area in center, and the front door of the
house on the right. The main impression
is of a zig zag, off kilter world done in predominantly muted colors.
The stage design is echoed by the front cover
of the program that was pictured at the start of this entry. In that illustration
a man and woman are touching hands
silhouetted against a golden sunset. They are next to a house with a lit window
overshadowed by a spreading apple tree. Even before the first line is uttered we
are thinking tree of life, original sin, etc. The tree’s roots spread out below
into a shadowy, foggy environment with moon that leads you back to the title of
the play and the T.S. Eliot passage.
What did I get
out of the play? Violet, sad and winsome and outside of it all, is
played with a sad intensity by Katherine Keberlein. Her daughter, Beauty, has stopped speaking
and is now eating dirt and paint as she tries to somehow compensate for her
feelings of helplessness at not being able to influence the deteriorating
relationship of her parents. Beauty’s father,
Daniel, disappears by running off at the
end of Act I like the father in Glass
Menagerie, who was a lineman who fell in
love with long distance. The apple tree takes over. Was this the
original sin and betrayal of Adam? Beauty spends a life searching without aging
for that lost father. When she does find him he is senile and in a nursing home. She carries his ashes back to the old family
home where her brother is still living. She
spills part of them on the floor and makes the double helix DNA sign in them
before they are carried out to the yard for burial. You can seemingly go home again, but the unchangeable
DNA in your bones seems to doom the generations to repeat and repeat their
searching for answers out there when the answers have always been in there.
In a spooky
remembrance for me, we planted an apple tree in our yard when we moved into our
new house in Milwaukee. I was about
eight. That tree grew up and literally
took over the area between the house and the garage. It shaded and nourished us for many years.
And it was gone when we drove by some years ago. Even the apple trees die.
