It was the combo of playwright Lanford Wilson and director Matt LaChiusa--and the intriguing promise of that "epilogue by Stephen Hawking"--that got me to College Street Gallery on Thursday night. I didn't know the script in question, and I arrived late, which meant I missed the Hawking part (actually a prologue, as it turns out), but I was up for anything.
The play--which is far shorter than the hour-long running time the brochure had me expecting--reminds me a lot of other short pieces by Wilson's Off-Off-Broadway contemporaries from the mid-to-late-60s, writers like Robert Coover and John Guare back before they all went on to win National Book Awards and Tony Awards and such. The structure is simple: seventeen (or so) lightning-fast vignettes performed by three actors, each scene incorporating the word "wandering." The language is conscciously poetic and repetitive and the staging is remarkably efficient--perfect for the tiny playing space of the gallery. I sat on the floor close enough to rub elbows with the cast, and felt just like I was in some teeny Greenwich Village cafe watching the original production, say around 1967.
It's easy to imagine why LaChiusa picked this play at this time: the Vietnam-era saga of a young man confronting the military-industrial complex is (sadly) every bit as relevant in 2007 as it was 40 years ago. While the general aesthetic is High Sixties Experimental Theater, there's not a single line that sounds dated today. I don't know if that's a sign of how progressive Wilson was back then, or how backward our country is today, but either way, this short piece is well worth a visit.
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