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And all is always now
by Amanda Baker-Vande Brake
The Eliots reviewed April 30, 2004
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| (Foreground) Lethia Nall, (background t. to r.) Nate Schenkkan, Julie Kline, Ryan West |
| Photo Credit:Gregory King |
| “Then we should not be transported into an artificial world; on the contrary, our own sordid, dreary, daily world would be suddenly illuminated and transfigured.”
—from Poetry and Drama by T.S. Eliot, 1951
Illuminating and transfiguring the world on the fourth floor of a Chelsea office building, the Stillpoint Productions group is engaged in a performance of elegiac beauty that will, no doubt, increase the group’s present exposure and future success. The Eliots’s director Lear deBessonet’s stunning conception resuscitates the long-overlooked life of Vivienne Eliot and her troubled union with the eminent poet T.S. Eliot in a poetic performance piece that devastates as it invigorates.
The world premiere of The Eliots runs at Center Stage only until May 9 and every effort must be made to attend this spectacular showing of collaborative excellence, if only to renew one’s faith in the provocative power of theater. The production takes its cue from the recent biography Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, written by Carole Seymour Jones, and initiates a space and time where the clashes between Vivienne and T.S. Eliot are all but credited with initiating some of T.S. Eliot’s most celebrated works including “The Waste Land” and Four Quartets.
The Eliots appropriately celebrates Eliot’s poetry by adopting his linguistic scope and cadence as its stylistic impulse. Just as T.S. used his relationship with Vivienne as source material for a number of his fictionalized poetic and prose accounts, the lines between fact and fiction as well as past and present are blissfully blurred. The performers unhesitatingly surrender themselves to this new world, lending their highly attuned voices and bodies to the service of the performance.
The role of Vivienne, or Viv, is taken on in two parts by Lethia Nall (Viv 1) and Julie Kline (Viv 2). Both Nall and Kline succeed by negotiating Vivienne’s historical complexity without allowing this tragic yet resilient character to be written off as merely hysterical. The role of T.S., or Tom, is taken on in three parts by Nate Schenkkan (Tom 1), Ryan West (Tom 2), and Christopher Logan Healy (Tom 3).
It is difficult to write of Nall, Kline, Schenkkan, West, or Healy individually because of the seamlessness of their performance of Viv and Tom which inextricably blurs the distinctions between one actor and another. Their performances don’t have a beginning or an end in that each performance works in tandem with the others in stunning cirularity—an appropriate accomplishment, considering T.S. Eliot’s own words:
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| Nate Schenkkan and Ryan West |
| Photo Credit:Gregory King |
| “. . . Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. . . “
—from “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets, 1943
The production’s design helps to realize the evocative capacity of the life and lives of the Eliots. Beth Turomsha’s lighting subtly yet confidently illuminates the dynamic and lyrical staging while sustaining a constant haunting aura within the deceptively unexceptional three walls of the set. Donyale Werle’s set design aptly gives shape to the physical world inhabited by the players while Mark Huang’s sound design establishes a stunning sonic palette for the performance's text while never once overpowering it. Costume designer Kirche Leigh Zeile also establishes a stable visual world in which the madly unstable action of the performance can find grounding in Zeile's limited use of color and detail.
Gregory King’s projection design brilliantly incorporating T.S. Eliot’s actual stint as a paranoid WWII bomb and fire watchman into of the world of the performance. King projects his evocative images of fighter planes, uniformed troops, and battle scenes to further blur past and present. Also, his silent-film shorts adeptly further the performance’s narrative development without acknowledging that any sort of linear plot actually exists.
Ultimately, this is the most gratifying production I have seen in a long time. Its richness extends beyond the limits of language, so to understand this production you must do whatever you can to get into the world of The Eliots.
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Center Stage
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Category: Experimental
Written by: Lear deBessonet
Directed by: Lear deBessonet
Produced by: Stillpoint Productions
Opened: December 31, 2004
Closed: May 9, 2004
Running Time: 1 hr. 35 min.
Theater: Center Stage
Address: 48 West 21st Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10010
Yahoo! Maps Directions
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Tickets: $15.00
$10 for Students
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Creative Team
Directed by: Lear deBessonet
Callaborating Writer: Caridad Svich
Produced by: Lear deBessonet, Di Johnston, Julie Kline, Paula Orr, Nate Schenkkan
Light Designer: Beth Turomsha
Sound Designer: Mark Huang
Set Designer: Donyale Werle
Costume Designer: Kirche Leigh Zeile
Choreographer: Nate Schenkkan
Projection Designer: Gregory King
Props Designer: Donyale Werle
Ballroom Dance Choreographer: Kate Enright
Cast
Christopher Logan Healy as Tom 3
Julie Kline as Viv 2
Lethia Nall as Viv 1
Nate Schenkkan as Tom 1
Ryan West as Tom 2
Crew
Production Stage Manager: Jen Stamey
Technical Director & Master Builder: Derek Dickinson
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