THEATER REVIEW: 'After the Revolution' at Williamstown Theatre Festival

Submitted by Chris Newbound on July 26, 2010 - 12:24pm

Theater

Williamstown Theatre Festival
Nikos Stage
After the Revolution

A Williamstown Theatre Production of After the Revolution, a new play by Amy Herzog, directed by Carolyn Cantor

Emma Katharine Powell

Ben Peter Friedman

Morty David Margulies

Vera Lois Smith

Leo Mark Blum

Miguel Elliot Villar

Mel Mare Winningham

Jess Meredith Holzman

Review by Chris Newbound

Mounting new work is always risky business and credit should go to Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF), and artistic director Nicholas Martin in particular, for its emphasis on the development of new plays up in Williamstown in recent years. In the case of Amy Herzog’s extremely accomplished After the Revolution, the gamble of putting up new work clearly pays off—the only real fly in the ointment here is the brevity of the run. After the Revolution, which opened July 22, ends August 1, so theatergoers will have to hurry to the Nikos Stage in order to catch it.

Herzog, only thirty-one, certainly doesn’t lack ambition with this, her most recent work, an outgrowth of WTF’s Fellowship Play 2009. It’s a big, complicated, political story, about blacklisting and communism, told through the more intimate focus of a father and daughter in serious conflict.

Emma (played winningly by Katharine Powell) is the bright, rising star in a family whose left-wing politics are something of an inheritance. She has just graduated from law school and is now ready to take the work of her self-launched charitable fund to the next level—a fund which is named after her blacklisted grandfather and which aims to help support those who stand accused but are less likely to receive a fair trial. The poster boy for the fund is the real-life Mumia Abu-Jamal, accused of shooting a Philadelphia cop, and soon after convicted and continues to await his turn on death row at the time of the play, 1999.

Trouble, however, arrives quickly for Emma and the family with the pending publication of a book that will reveal that Emma’s grandfather was, in fact, spying for the Soviet Union, right around the time the famously accused Rosenbergs were thought to be doing the same and ultimately put to their deaths for the suspected treason.

Upon hearing this news, from both her father, Ben (Peter Friedman) and uncle, Leo (Mark Blum), Emma’s horror is two-fold: one) she is both shocked that her grandfather may, in fact, have been guilty of what he was accused and (two) is worried about how this may compromise the work she’s been so passionately involved in. Equally and arguably more shocking to her is that her father has concealed such news from her all these years, particularly in light of his support of her efforts to start a fund in the name of her grandfather.

The rift between father and daughter is immediate and deep. Emma stops speaking to Ben, refusing to pick up the phone despite long, pleading messages he repeatedly leaves on her answering machine, frequently when she’s there in the apartment listening to them. Additional layers to all this include Emma’s troubled relationship with her older sister, a recovering addict (Meredith Holzman as Jess, who more than capitalizes on her restricted stage time), and a bumpy romance with Miguel (another stellar, subtle performance by Elliot Villar), a fellow graduating law student and now employee of Emma’s, working with her on the fund.

The world and family that Emma inhabits is so fully realized with such nuance and detail that one has the feeling of being swept up in a novel rather than watching a play. Filling out Emma’s world are her interesting stepmother, Mel (played appealingly by Mare Winningham), and grandmother, Vera (theatrical, film, and television veteran Lois Smith, who gives an extraordinarily realistic performance).

While this is a strong, accomplished script to be sure, it’s all enormously enhanced by this ensemble of actors who give performances that feel so natural and so real as to make you forget you’re watching a play. Herzog, as well as her director Carolyn Canter, deserve much of the credit here, but such complete authenticity wouldn’t be possible without the likes of an entire cast working at the top of their collective game; particular kudos go to Peter Friedman as Ben and Mark Blum as Leo whose turns as brothers and fathers is something to marvel.

Given such overall expertise, it’s not all that surprising that the play is moving on in the fall to New York City’s Playwright’s Horizon, where one can only wish for it that its cast will remain exactly the same. What one could, and perhaps should wish for it too, however, is for Herzog to continue recalibrating her fine script.

It’s a bit of a tough sell to believe that someone as smart and as immersed in this particular world as Emma has been her whole life would have such trouble understanding what we the audience have much less trouble with: namely, the moral uncertainty that prevailed at the time of Emma’s grandfather’s actions and therefore how difficult it is for us to now judge them, and certainly to judge them so quickly and so decisively.

The same can also be said of Emma’s response to her father. While Ben may be at fault for having kept some secrets of his own from his daughter about his father’s past, the fact that Emma refuses even to have a follow-up conversation about all this with a father she clearly has adored all her life seems not only unfair, but, more importantly, rings false, even when accounting for her relative youth (she’s twenty-six) and high ideals. With no prior history of such deception, her anger, and certainly her complete coldness, seems misplaced.

It’s fine for Emma to be unsympathetic, at least for a time, and certainly okay for her to be confused, but given that this is clearly Emma’s story, we have to be rooting for her, and as she is written now, she comes dangerously close to being as unworthy of our interest as she ultimately becomes for Miguel, the boyfriend who in the end can’t accept her angry preoccupation with the falsehood of her grandfather’s legacy to the detriment of the work that they’re pursuing.

Nevertheless, this is an accomplished piece of work by an enormously talented playwright. At the talkback after the play, Herzog did say that she would be attending every single performance during its short run in Williamstown, so as to become even more familiar with the play and see what might still need doing. In the case of After the Revolution, I suspect any such adjustments, no doubt minor, will only enhance a work deserving of such careful scrutiny. [July 24, 2010.]

Sets, Clint Ramos; costumes, Kaye Voyce; lighting Ben Stanton; sound/composer, Fitz Patton; production stage manager, Hannah Cohen. Runs through August 1. Running time: approx. 2 hours with one intermission.

[Photos of Katharine Powell and Lois Smith by T. Charles Erickson courtesy WTF]

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