DISTORTED VOICES: Steve Kidd and Tony Estrella. |
This is the Age of Information, so of course we’re all ignorant. With so much to know, why not throw up our hands and resort to a guru for spiritual knowledge, a charlatan for medical advice, and so on? In this atmosphere, a radio talk show host with the self-confidence of an Old Testament prophet could be king of the airwaves.
The Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre is staging the world premiere of Paul Grellong’s Radio Free Emerson (through June 17), and it’s a remarkably compelling take on the perils of our far-too credulous culture.
With the invulnerability of being a rich kid who’s never had to pay for his actions, Al Gregory (Tony Estrella) has come home to Providence. He’s been away in Maine, for unfortunate reasons we eventually discover, where he experienced the chest-thumping joy of being a fishing boat captain, teaching his receptive crews the wisdom of Emersonian independence.
He’s back for the funeral of his locally legendary father, who for 20 years was the avuncular host of a top-rated talk show on the radio station he owned, WRIT. The old man was gentle on the air but fierce at home, where he pumped up young Al with the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson when he should have been, we are told, putting him to sleep with Goodnight, Moon.
Al latched onto the 15 pages of “Self-Reliance” in particular. Giving what was to be a brief on-the-air salute to his father, he ends up taking over the hour, dispensing advice on being independent to callers and lighting up the switchboard with both eager and angered listeners. “Life is not a hairshirt,” he quotes, and “The only right is that which is after your constitution.” Easy words to focus on with tunnel vision. All business bets are off. His bossy mother Marilyn (Alyn Carlson) was going to sell the station, but wealthy backer James Bentham (Richard Donelly) points out that she can boost the value of the station considerably if she gives her son his own show.
The broadcast episodes are great, annoying fun, but what makes this entertaining play brilliant is that Grellong gives Emerson (and nascent America’s soul) an additional distorted voice through a second key character. Henry Dale (Steve Kidd), a fallen away friend of Al’s from high school, exemplifies the open-hearted optimism that has caused such trouble for this country, and the world, when it has ignored reality. (The last interaction of the play knocked my socks off as it rendered that abstraction trenchantly concrete.)
With the backing of Al’s father, Henry became a contractor, though an ineffectual one, who can’t even negotiate the permits for building his first house. At first we think this is his play: the opening conversation has him naïvely admitting something harmless but upsetting to his wife Gina (Tanya Anderson), to relieve his conscience. She is a producer at the radio station.
If Estrella’s confident creation of the go-for-it Al gets across the mind of this play, Kidd’s bits-and-pieces mosaic of Henry portrays its spirit. Henry assembles into a walking, talking balancing act of contradictions, and Kidd locks our attention onto the character from the first moment. By turns enthusiastic and self-loathing, everything Henry says becomes ironic, so the opening-night audience was laughing loudly at lines as simple as “Hard work is the key to success!”
As a character, the self-impressed Al Gregory could use some of that internal tension of Henry Dale. On the air he says that self-reliance “is not about hurting people,” but he quickly shows himself, to us, as not at all reluctant to blackmail somebody to get what he wants. So he is a common hypocrite instead of someone more interesting, in the sway of Ayn Rand and her solipsistic Libertarians more than Ralph Waldo and his idealistic Transcendentalists.
