OCTOBER 15, 1993 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE

ENTERTAINMENT

Vaudeville techniques lampoon societal structures

The Fall River Follies, or Oh Mrs. Churchill. Do Come Over. Someone Has Killed Father, will be playing at the Cleveland Public Theatre October 22-24. This dance-theater piece, created by John Giffin, is about Lizzie Borden who was tried and acquitted of the murder of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. The story is told using techniques borrowed from the traditions of carnival, circus, and vaudeville.

Giffin, a Columbus based choreographer and teacher, has performed with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre and the New Haven Ballet, and is currently on the faculty of the Department of Dance at OSU.

Fall River Follies was commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus where it enjoyed four sold-out performances in March 1992. It was revived in August for two weekends at the Contemporary American Theatre Company. Giffin calls the piece, "a very, very odd little Victorian morality play." He told Carla Nocera, a reporter for The Edge, that he had spent a year "researching, reading material that dealt with the place of women in Victorian society,

male status versus female status, racism, and, of course, the Borden case itself." To create a stylized movement vocabulary, he worked from Daguerreotype images and the Delsarte system of movement and gesture that was a popular training method for actors in the late 19th century.

The Columbus press responded enthusiastically to the piece. Columbus Guardian critic Scott Phillips called it, “a great whizzing fizz of an entertainment. Daily life in the Borden household, the murders and the subsequent trial are retold by the participants in a series of delightfully absurd vignettes." Lorraine A. Padden of Columbus Art noted that "Although entertaining, the slapstick antics of Giffin's riotous and often pathetic characters composed the backdrop for the examination of much weightier issues. Male-defined societal structures-financial, religious, familial, medical, and legal-constructed norms that to Giffin were repressive forces strong enough to provoke disastrous retaliation."

Performances are at 8 pm at CPT, 6415 Detroit Ave., October 22-24. Tickets are $10 and $6 (students and seniors). For reservations telephone 631-2727.

Heterosexual marriage misery played with a marvel of nuance

The Subject Was Roses

Ensemble Theatre

Reviewed by Barry Daniels

The greatest virtue of Frank D. Gilroy's 1964 Pulitzer Prize winning drama, The Subject Was Roses, is that it can make you glad you're queer. The

depiction of hetero-

of their son's affections as a weapon in their struggle. Fred Gloor, as Timmy, who has overheard their bickering for almost twenty years, matches the Silvers in subtlety of craft. One can see the pain in his eyes and in the tightening of the muscles in his face. Almost twenty years before The Subject

sexual marriage in the It is good to

play is devastating: an endless cycle of recrimination and pain.

Nettie Cleary, the wife,

is cold, bitter and

unforgiving. Her husyears, John, appears to

band of twenty-five

be less mean-spirited, but proves to be manipulative, emotionally

remember that queers have

been

around a long time and have valiantly used

weak, cheap and their art to com-

bat oppression.

thoughtless. They are practiced masters at the art of inflicting pain and blaming everyone but themselves for their misery.

The apparently autobiographical play, set in the Cleary's Bronx apartment in 1946, is viewed from the perspective of their son, Timmy, who has just returned from a three year foreign tour of duty in the Army. Timmy needs to escape from the claustrophobic and emotionally debilitating environment in which he was raised so that he can pursue his dream of becoming a writer.

Lucia Colombi's staging of The Subject Was Roses at the Ensemble Theatre almost makes the play's bathos tolerable. It is a marvel of nuanced details and realistic acting. Colombi has a remarkable sense of the rhythmic potential of Gilroy's naturalistic speech patterns and a sure sense of the shape of each scene.

Dorothy and Reuben Silver give superb performances as Nettie and John Cleary. They act out the pathetic rituals of their daily life with subtle gestures and looks. They savor each petty victory and relish the other's pain. They have used the possession

Was Roses opened on Broadway, another family drama, with a son who is an aspiring writer stifled by parental oppression, launched the career of one of our most distinguished playwrights. The difference between Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie and Gilroy's drama is the difference between art and observation. Gilroy wants us to believe that somehow the pain Timmy has experienced will be transformed by his art. Time has proven that Gilroy was mistaken, and The Subject Was Roses is a depressing example of the kind of writing that more than anything else plays on sympathy and ends up maintaining the status quo. It seems like the last gasp of the kitchen sink dramas that held the stage during the repressive 1950s. Williams takes the pain and the need and creates a delicate poetry of compassion and love, and at the same time manages to question traditional social values. Critics, in reevaluating Williams' work are only now beginning to understand its radical nature. It is good to remember that queers have been around a long time and have valiantly used their art to combat oppres-

sion.

The Subject Was Roses continues through October 24, Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, Sunday at 3:30 pm and 7:30 pm. Tickets are $14 on Friday and Saturday, $12 on Sunday ($12, $10 for students and seniors). For reservations telephone 321-2390. ♡

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