A play with no oomph

It's been a theater-rich week. We saw New Rep's "A House with No Walls" last night (preceded, as usual, by an excellent dinner at Casa de Pedro next door--try the bacalao cod). I was less than impressed with that one, sadly--it was competent, but lacked spirit.

(One of the things I love about New Rep is that they never do anything that is less than competent. They tackle good, substantive plays, classic and modern, and stage them with excellent production values and intense dedication to the script. There is never anything sloppy or second-rate or overly conceptual or too-clever-by-half about their productions. This sounds vaguely patronizing, I know--who's a good little theater company? You are! Yes you are!--but I don't mean it that way at all. I mean they pick good scripts and they trust their scripts, as opposed to using the script as a jumping-off point for all kinds of directorial excess. This is, sadly, rare in serious theater today.)

"House," by Thomas Gibbons, is set in the colonial period and the modern era. Ona Judge, a slave belonging to George Washington, finally makes her bid for freedom when she realizes that her master does not intend to free his slaves upon becoming president; more than 200 years later, politicians and academics clash over the building of a monument to American liberty--and Washington's slaves. Gibbon's also wrote "Permanent Collection," which New Rep produced in 2004 to greater success. Both plays feature thoughtful people, black and white, conservative and liberal, enmeshed in difficult conversations about whose stories get told, and when, and how.

Watching this production felt like reading a thoughtful, spirited back-and-forth debate between authors on a good webzine--Slate, say, or TPM Cafe Book Club. Theater should give us more than that. I never got a sense that the actors were connecting, that they truly felt threatened, invigorated, humiliated, aroused, amused by each other's arguments. Mr. Improbable and I hosted a small dinner party last weekend, and an argument broke out about bilingualism and immigration--that argument (which ended peaceably) had the sense of danger and investment about it that "House" was lacking.

Perhaps because of that lack of connection, the play's gender dynamics remained oddly, and frustratingly, muted. The main character was Cadence Lane, a black woman whose career had taken her from liberal graduate student to conservative star professor to "public intellectual" and, eventually, political heavy-hitter. Her sparring partners were all male, and each at one point or another used male privilege against her--the black agitator's implicit-yet-not-subtle threat of mob violence; the liberal white professor's insistence that she stop saying things he disagrees with and come back to bed, already; the white Republican politician's dangling promises of access to power in front of her. And Dr. Lane, who calls them all on white guilt, white entitlement, black victimhood, black resentment, never seems to notice that they are all men, and she is a woman, and that that might affect things. It's primarily a weakness in the script that gender and sex aren't addressed; Gibbons should have either dealt with it, or simply made Cadence's character male. (The sexual aspects of the relationship between Dr. Lane and the other professor weren't integral to the script--fundamentally, their relationship was one of grad-school buddies, one of whom rose to intellectual stardom and the other of whom did not.) But a production with more oomph in it, more sense of connection, would have made those dynamics clear to the audience even in the absence of the playwright's words.