saw some genuine theatrical magic last night at the Multi Ethnic Theater’s
production of Mark Medoff’s 1974 play, When You Comin Back, Red Ryder ?
At the very end of the play, Angel—a woman described in Medoff’s
script as “obese” and played last night by A.J. Davenport—is
alone on the stage, the only inhabitant left in the dreary café in which
she works. Much has happened throughout the play, and the stage has been filled
with people, but now there is no one except her. “Red Ryder,” the
only man she has ever loved, and whom she hoped might have feelings for her,
has left to make his fortune elsewhere. One feels that he might well be back—that
his fortune-making scheme will turn out to be a disaster—but for the moment
he has certainly abandoned Angel. In any case, she now understands that he does
not return her love and that, even if he comes back, he will never return her
love. Angel sits at the counter of the café. She picks up Red’s
half-eaten doughnut and begins to eat it. There is no sound: no dialogue, no
music. Just a fat girl who now knows that she will never be loved and for whom
sweets (even half-eaten ones) may be the best substitute she can find for a
lover. She says nothing; she just sits there for a moment and eats. It is utterly
magical. All of the loneliness of the world seems to gather at that moment and
be present at this down-and-out, battered, loser’s café. Ms. Davenport
is simply wonderful. There is no one but us to love her—and we do.
We know of course that the actress has played this part in many performances and that there is no café—only bits and pieces of more-or-less convincing scenery. It is all fake, rehearsed. Angel has not even been the central character of the play—though she is an extremely important character. Yet at this moment she is the play. The deep loneliness which is at the heart of everyone in this play is suddenly—and somewhat surprisingly—centered in her. She is the epiphany of the café, the violence, the revelations, the wonderful dialogue—everything. It is the magic of theater to be able to transform its fakery into an image that finds its way into the collective psyche of the audience and rouses them not to action but to emotion, self-reflection. In her epiphanic moment, “Angel”—who doesn’t exist—is us. It is a triumph of both the playwright and Ms. Davenport.
It is just such a moment that I missed when I went to see the much-touted The Black Rider : The Casting of the Magic Bullets at A.C.T.'s Geary Theater. When You Comin Back, Red Ryder has not been reviewed by anyone; MET Productions are rarely reviewed by anyone. The San Francisco Chronicle gave The Black Rider a rave review and then published a follow-up article praising the person who played the Marianne Faithfull role. (Faithfull doesn’t do matinees.) The Black Rider is a huge, complex, Phantom-of-the-Opera kind of show with German expressionist set design from Robert Wilson, one of the world's most famous opera directors. I admit that the production had some good moments and Tom Waits’ songs were excellent, but everything moved extremely slowly: the show made its points sluggishly and without much in the way of surprise. In addition, I had difficulty hearing William Burroughs’ dialogue. There was one marvelous moment when a tape of Burroughs speaking the text was inserted into the production. Suddenly everything was clear. Burroughs sounded great, and the doggerel text sounded much better in his mouth than it did in the mouths of the actors. Unfortunately, that was just a moment. About midway through The Black Rider , I found myself dozing. After a theatrical performance you ought to leave the theater thinking how wonderful live theater is, how it is different from film or television. I came out of this production wondering whether it wouldn't have been better to have gone to a movie.
Yet The Black Rider received wonderful reviews: one critic wrote, “Go see it—and expect to have strange dreams afterward.” No reviewer has made it over to Gough Street to catch When You Comin Back, Red Ryder ? Is it star power: Marianne Faithfull, Tom Waits, William Burroughs? Is it the state of culture in San Francisco? Is it the fact that Medoff’s play is thirty years old? Am I wrong about all this? Should I join the chorus of happy theater-goers who thought The Black Rider —inflated, over-blown, too long, technically impressive—was something to see? Ok, go ahead, like The Black Rider . But why don’t you go and see something real, something of the sort that Lewis Campbell has been doing for years on a budget the size of a candy bar?
There is no doggerel in When You Comin Back, Red Ryder ?, but there is some wonderful dialogue. The setting is “a diner on the desert in southern New Mexico at the end of the sixties.” A boy of nineteen, “Stephen/Red, sits at the far end of the counter reading a newspaper.” In the “last of the sixties,” he is “an unconscious parody in his dress of the mid-fifties.” Angel enters. “She is obese, her white uniform stretched across the rolls of her body.”
ANGEL: Stephen, that’s a paper cup you got your coffee in.
STEPHEN: Clark can afford it, believe me.
ANGEL. That’s not the point, Stephen.
STEPHEN: Oh no? You’re gonna tell me the
point though, right? Hold it—lemme get a pencil.
ANGEL: The point is that if you’re drinking
your coffee here, you’re supposed to use a glass cup, and if it’s
to go, you’re supposed to get charged fifteen instead of ten and ya get
one of those five cent paper cups to take it with you with. That’s the
point, Stephen…
STEPHEN: How many times I gotta tell ya to don’t call me Stephen.
ANGEL. I don’t like callin ya Red. It’s
stupid—callin somebody with brown hair Red.
STEPHEN: It’s my name, ain’t it?
I don’t like Stephen. I like Red. When I was a kid I had red hair.
ANGEL: But ya don’t now. Now ya got brown hair.
STEPHEN: But then I did, and then’s when counts.
ANGEL: Who says then’s when counts?
STEPHEN: The person that’s doin the countin! Namely yours truly!
I have singled out A. J. Davenport for praise, but in fact the entire ensemble was wonderful. In the central role of Teddy, Mark Williams was a wonder of insanity, perceptiveness, hostility, gentleness, and (always) possible violence. He stalked the stage and was constantly in motion; others were able to sit, but he whirled around like the “God of plague and pyre” the play’s quotation from Sophocles suggests he is. (The playwright describes Teddy as “30-35, wears an army fatigue jacket and has long hair”—the gift of the Vietnam years.) As his girl friend Cheryl, Lily Tung was a little old for the role, but her performance was fine and understated: we were constantly aware of her concern that this new sexually-appealing boy friend was too much to handle. And she was sexy in a way that Cheryl has to be sexy: “She is bra-less, a fact which generates helpless interest in Stephen, an interest which he tries all too obviously to hide. Lyle, too, is drawn to her breasts.” As the gentle, disabled Lyle, Omar M’Sai gave us a sense of a life lived with grace amid many difficulties—including the heart attack which caused him to depend upon a crutch. There was a slight sexual charge between him and Angel, but she clearly prefers the much younger Stephen, played with alert sensitivity by Eric Johnson. Gary Pettinger and Kara Hughes were also fine as Richard and Clarisse, a “successful” couple with much tension beneath their surfaces. When You Comin Back, Red Ryder is one of those theater pieces in which the playwright traps a group of people in a place—an inn or a café—and then introduces some character, some principle of disorder which affects everything and everyone and forces them into an unwilling revelation of their deepest secrets. A central question of this Vietnam-era play is the nature of heroism, of what makes for “manliness”: “But that was yesteryear and this is today…Don’t you understand there have been landmark discoveries in the fields of apology and psychology suggesting that there is more to manliness and husbandry than pretending willingness to do battle with men you cannot compete with.” The play is full of longing for the past—for childhood, for the fifties with its cowboy heroes—but its central issue is the loneliness of characters who have nothing but a madman to bind them together. No one in the play finally connects with anyone else:
The rust consumes the buds and fruits of the earth;
The herds are sick; children die unborn;
And labor is vain. The God of plague and pyre
Raids like detestable lightning….
Lewis Campbell’s MET production catches all this, and more. It is a vivid reminder of what live theater can be.
Go to http://www.wehavemet.org/
for more information.