"where I first / fell in love / with unreality" -Ferlinghetti

CLAYMONT

by Kevin Brofsky

directed by Derek Jamison

Emerging Artists Theatre production, through Feb 22

Paul Adams, artistic director

review by Louis Lopardi, Feb. 18, 2004

With the "Tet Offensive" of early 1968 the Vietnam War took a serious turn for the worse, generating a need for ever more American bodies. This is the engine which provides the driving pressure on the young men of the play. In this bizarre world, so accurately depicted in the play, the Dupont Company (manufacturer of Napalm - used with such horrific ineffectualness in the war) is touted as a kind of Utopia within whose folds even draft-aged men might be safe.

The misunderstood teen, the crippled father, the old-world grandmother . . . it is a family very familiar to followers of Brofsky's plays, but here they are handled with a lighter, surer, more deft touch than ever. Aided by an all-star cast and the smooth Direction of Derek Jamison, the play grabs our attention and makes us believe in the characters and their place in the world. But to paraphrase the late Quentin Crisp: Claymont is not so much a place, as a deranged state of mind. (Crisp said it of Poland.) It exemplifies the national malaise that gripped this country for so long after the murder of JFK - and, arguably, is with us still. In Brofsky's Claymont, a high-school Senior must escape from the unreality of a repressive and warrior society to the "reality" he is to forge for himself: one in which art has just as much credence as athletics, where love needn't smother to be supportive, where it is okay to have a crush on the boy next door.

Jason Hare, superb and consistent, played Neil, the nerdy, artsy, nascent (if not budding) homosexual teen. Through force of acting he made the momentary choice of jealous self-interest over logic and selfless love quite believable in the play's finale. The object of that love - the collegiate and athletic son of the military household next door - was played with powerful inner fire by Stephen Sherman. A personal choice: At times I would have preferred to see the workings of that fire; Sherman plays it all mostly inside - a technique which works easier on film but makes a much harder job for the actor on stage.

Supporting roles were perfectly cast. As the would-be girlfriend, Aimee Howard played with a quick kaleidoscope of emotions, working hard to make her lines sound like something other than from period romances. Even the overused impotence gloss line "it happens to everyone" rang true (but still got a laugh). Jason O'Connell seemed too young to be "the" art department at the high school, but he brought a full character to the fore instantly, and visibly adapted the character as events changed in his very brief cameo scene.

The mothers of the two young men had heavy workloads. Neil's mother was played by Glory Gallo, giving a deep, moving, well rounded performance. She resisted the temptation to overact as the pressures of the play built, and convinced us with her "I'm stronger than I look." The neighbor Dolores is a period piece of diet-pill manic energy - a brilliantly funny take by Wynne Anders. Jacqueline Barsh was perfect as the grandmother, who, while she was a butt of much humor in the play, grew into the fount of prophetic wisdom she was meant to be. "When did you stop dreaming?" she asks her daughter, and, by extension, all of us.

Eric Chase created a Lighting Design which solved many of the problems of a split stage with low ceilings. Director and Lighting Designer were both almost foiled by an ever increasing number of rapid scene changes, but prevailed, thanks in large measure to the solution provided by Carter Inskeep's split-level unit set design. Use of such sets do require careful script editing - Neil is referred to as "at the kitchen table doing homework" when we see the table brightly lit and untenanted. Set pieces evoked an end-of-the-decade weariness, and Ellen Reilly's costuming firmly caught not just the period but the social strata as well. Desmond Dutcher's perfectly timed Sound Design cleverly avoided the best-known music of the era, forcing one to focus on the mood. (But the use of a Kennedy speech clip, amidst other more period clips, was a distracting anachronism.)

The play nudged but didn't answer the question as to why the artist creates: What drives the visionary to labor, at great pain (and usually for little or no profit) to create a metaphor for that vision? Literature sometimes explores the question (Germans were obsessed with it, and oddly enough, the Opera world tackled the question often.) There is an interesting point at which the questioning itself becomes the artwork. In the fifties and sixties, the poet Ferlinghetti exposed us to some of that in his visionary "Coney Island of the mind" - a fantasy place made real by power of our collective memory. This Claymont is such a place, working, as Brofsky plays often do, on the collective memory of the audience, and that memory is far more important than the reality. Even the protagonist reminds us at one point "it doesn't really exist." Yet this drama, undoubtedly scene for scene, was played out in many thousands of American households in the sixties. It's about time we started seeing more than the History Channel version of the way things were.