And Packer mines the wonder of the yet-to-be-written The Winter’s Tale for the restoration of Helena, who, without a co-conspirator, brings herself back from the dead to forgive a flawed spouse. Despite my mistrust of Bertram’s about-face, the scene, played against a guitar-backed ballad of redemption, brought tears to my eyes. Packer does not do things by halves, and at this moment neither does Asprey, who dissolves into a childlike display of raw emotion that may, paradoxically, signal maturity.
“The web of our life,” comments a character in the play, “is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” You might say the same of the play. Yet in Packer’s production, the mingled yarns are knit, both by resident composer Bill Barclay’s rock music, which runs from tough to sweet, and by the director’s characteristic embrace of her main man, even when he’s not in top form.
If Lee Blessing were to paint Guernica, it might be on a napkin. The playwright’s canvases are small but his concerns are global — as his best-known work attests, the 1988 Tony-nominated A Walk in the Woods, in which a pair of US/Soviet arms negotiators take time away from the table for the cordial perambulation of the title. In the 1996 Going to St. Ives, which was presented Off Broadway in 2005 and is now being given a compelling read at Gloucester Stage (through August 3), the two characters from disparate walks of life are women. It’s as if Blessing had provided A Walk in the Woods with the equivalent of Neil Simon’s female Odd Couple, except that the concerns are weightier than who’s sloppy and who’s not.
African empress May N’Kame, played by Elliot Norton Award winner Jacqui Parker, has come to St. Ives (the one near Cambridge in England) to be operated on by eminent ophthalmologist Cora Gage, who’s portrayed by Oscar-nominated stage, film, and TV vet Lindsay Crouse. In the opening scene, Gage has invited her patient to tea. Both characters, however, have more on their minds than N’Kame’s endangered vision and the Willow Pattern china from which they’re sipping. The dignified N’Kame, turban-topped and resplendent in bright African colors, is the mother of an unbalanced dictator who rules his post-colonial African nation more like a butcher than like the emperor god he’s declared himself to be. Gage hopes her patient will use her influence to secure the release of four physicians imprisoned by her son for the crime of refusing to revive prisoners so they could be further tortured. What N’Kame wants from the doctor, other than a better shot at the eye chart, comes as a surprise.
The first act is a cat-and-mouse game, with the imperious N’Kame winning the most rounds. The second is an equally highly charged tea party set six months later in Africa, where the loneliness of the traveler to St. Ives (borrowed from the nursery rhyme) is brought home. The synchronicity is a bit neat, and so is the bond forged between the characters by shared, secreted maternal heartbreak. But if Blessing’s carefully contrived arrangement of the personal, the political, and the metaphorical is reminiscent more of Athol Fugard’s studied works than of Tony Kushner’s passionate sprawls, his writing is intelligent and often droll. And the issues he raises, especially with regard to knee-jerk ethics and the West’s polite, spineless condemnation of the doings of an Idi Amin or a Robert Mugabe, are urgent. Moreover, the Gloucester Stage production supplies enough ferocity of heart to counter the whiff of paint-by-numbers.
