A light Breeze

Clark's rare John Guare revival blows hot and cold

by Steve Vineberg

LYDIE BREEZE. By John Guare. Directed by Andrew Utter. Set designed by Christine Weinrobe. Costumes by Catherine Quick Spingler. Lighting by Jeremy M. Goodman and Michael Lagrotteria. Original music by Al Kryszak. With Malik McMullen, Erin Scanlon, Tricia Yang, Travis Murray, John Pattavina, Helen Pettigrew, and Richard Arum. At Clark University's Little Center, through April 17.

The two Nantucket-set dramas John Guare wrote in 1982, Gardenia and Lydie Breeze, are halves of the same story, and they may be the greatest American plays that almost no one has ever heard of. In Gardenia, three Civil War veterans and Lydie Breeze, the woman who nursed them in an army hospital, live on a commune, striving to attain the ideals articulated by Emerson and Whitman.

Their spectacular failure is characterized by a single dramatic event that occurs offstage between the first and second acts: Lydie's husband, Joshua Hickman, beats her lover, Dan Grady -- who is Joshua's best friend -- to death and is sent to prison. The third veteran, Amos Mason, becomes an influential lawyer. Joshua is released through his offices, but only under the condition that he destroy the book he's written chronicling their life on Aipotu (Utopia spelled backwards), because Amos fears it will cast a shadow over his own political hopes.

Lydie Breeze, which is currently receiving a rare production at Clark University, takes place in 1895, 11 years after act two of Gardenia. Lydie is dead (by her own hand); Amos is a senatorial candidate, backed by William Randolph Hearst; Joshua is still living on Nantucket, a virtual recluse, with his younger daughter, Lydie. It's a ghost play -- and indeed, Ibsen's Ghosts is its most obvious inspiration. In the course of a couple of September days, Joshua is revisited by specters of his past: his estranged elder daughter, Gussie, now Amos's secretary (and mistress), appears on the island, ferried there with her boss on Hearst's yacht; and Dan Grady's son, Jeremiah, now a London actor celebrated for playing the monster in Frankenstein, shows up, evidently for revenge on Joshua.

As for Lydie Breeze herself, her ghost never seems to be far away. In the opening moments of the play, young Lydie and Beaty, the nursemaid who raised her, make a feeble (and comic) effort to conjure it up, but they needn't bother, since it's clear that those characters who remember Lydie best -- Joshua and Jeremiah -- have carried her with them for years.

The play, like Ibsen's, is partly about the sins of the fathers being visited on their children. All of the children of Aipotu -- Gussie, Jeremiah, and Lydie -- have been damaged in some way by their parents' delusion that they could create a community that was above the usual corruptions of humankind. And it's partly about surviving a great period of idealism -- about how you rebuild your life after your dreams have been torn apart. It's a dense, poetic play, and also a very funny one. The critic Lloyd Rose, one of the few people who has written about it at all, dubbed it, appropriately, a "screwball epic." The plot is convoluted: the structure of the Lydie Breeze story -- the one that circles around Dan Grady's death and Jeremiah's exile and Beaty's private romantic obsession -- isn't revealed entirely until midway through the second act. Guare adores preposterous, lopsided layer-cake narratives as well as absurd, Shakespearean coincidences, and this is one of his most audacious works, inspired as it is by Ibsen (there are portions of The Wild Duck in it, too), Mary Shelley (Jeremiah's own story parallels the monster's), and Edgar Allan Poe.

The beauties of this neglected masterwork are sufficient reason to see it -- even in a flawed production like director Andrew Utter's at Clark. There are other reasons, too, like Christine Weinrobe's set and the costumes by Catherine Quick Spingler -- and especially Erin Scanlon, who plays Lydie Hickman. Scanlon has an imaginative grasp on this vivid, haunted girl teetering on the edge of adolescence, too young to remember the events that have cast her family into the shadows but struggling to comprehend them and to negotiate their consequences. Her scenes with John Pattavina as Jude Emerson, the Christian Scientist bird bander who tumbles for her, are very sweet, and she has a wonderful exchange with Travis Murray's Jeremiah Grady, who encounters her on the beach, charms her with a fairy tale, and terrifies her by seeing in her the image of her mother. It's Murray's best scene; he makes a strong first impression as Jeremiah but doesn't enhance it enough in his subsequent appearances. And I enjoyed Richard Arum's one-scene performance as the nervous inventor Lucian Rock, who comes courting one Hickman sister and leaves with the other one on his arm.

Malik McMullen has the most formidable challenge in the role of Joshua, the fallen communard whose bitter, sardonic wit can't entirely conceal the romantic idealism that even prison and the loss of Lydie Breeze couldn't bleed out of him. McMullen looks splendid, and he gets much of the humor in his character's lines, but he doesn't convey either Joshua's age or his moral and experiential weight. And, like Travis Murray, he tends to read too many of his lines in the same way. These two have a mammoth encounter just before intermission that requires very careful shaping and calls for a wide emotional spectrum, but neither Utter nor the two actors suggest how much is going on in the scene. Helen Pettigrew has the correct drawn, transported look for Beaty (though not the right brogue: this woman is Irish, not Scots), but a tendency to stick to one note. And though she looks lovely in Gussie's dresses, Tricia Yang races through her lines at a breakneck speed that renders some of them indecipherable. On the whole, this Lydie Breeze needs more in-depth character work. These are, after all, some of the most fascinating characters you'll find in any modern American play.