Lorca's Grave

Our Saturday and Sunday were nice.

On Saturday, Andrew and I went over to Andrew’s parents’ house. We did yard work in the morning and washed the cars in the afternoon. Needless to say, we played with the dog all day and kept him amused (and he kept us amused, too).

Andrew’s mother gave us a lunch of sesame chicken and a salad that was one-quarter diced tomato, one-quarter diced cucumber, one-quarter diced green onion and one-quarter diced hard-boiled egg.

In the afternoon, in addition to washing the cars, Andrew and I ran some errands for his Mom and Dad, making a trip to the local garden center and making a trip to the local home-improvement center. We picked up a few items for some work we have planned for next weekend.

Andrew’s mother gave us steak for dinner Saturday night. She served the steak with baked potato and steamed broccoli, before which she gave us one of her most elaborate garden salads. For dessert, she gave us pineapple cheesecake, homemade.

Andrew and I have been working on our Southern England itinerary for the last couple of weeks. We are exactly halfway through our upcoming trip. On Saturday night, we worked on day nine, which will be spent in Plymouth.

We have been talking on the phone and exchanging email messages and exchanging IM messages every night with my sister and Andrew’s brother, selecting adventures that will be of interest to everyone.

Much of Saturday night was spent choosing which particular boat cruise of Plymouth Harbor to take (we settled upon one that includes Plymouth Sound and the Plymouth Naval Dockyard), deciding how much attention to devote to Plymouth Hoe (an entire afternoon), trying to figure out whether there is any possible way to finagle a tour of The Royal Citadel (there isn’t, short of joining The Royal Marines), and trying to find something to do in Plymouth in the evening (we chose a new play to be performed by an experimental theater troupe).

Andrew and I are having a wonderful time organizing our itinerary, and everyone is getting very excited. I think ours will be a marvelous trip.

Yesterday, after church, Andrew’s parents, our landlady and Andrew and I spent the afternoon and evening out. We attended a matinee performance of William Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure” and an evening performance of Thomas Kilroy’s “The Secret Fall Of Constance Wilde”. Between performances, we ate Shepherd’s Pie for dinner at a British restaurant downtown.

The Sherlock Holmes play was sort of fun. Park Square Theater, wisely, offered a modern adaptation that tightened the text and quickened the pace of the original drama, surely too creaky for present-day audiences. It was an engaging production and an engaging afternoon, although I doubt that any of us would ever want to see this play a second time.

“The Secret Fall Of Constance Wilde” at the Guthrie Theater, on the other hand, was a major disappointment, if not an out-and-out disaster.

There may or may not be a decent play lurking in Kilroy’s material, but no one could possibly make a judgment about that question based upon this production, given that it was so severely misguided.

There are only three speaking parts in “The Secret Fall Of Constance Wilde”—Lord Alfred Douglas, plus Oscar and Constance Wilde—but the three speaking actors were completely overwhelmed by four puppet characters that engaged in an onstage pantomime throughout the performance. This dumb show was inane, if not offensive, and it destroyed whatever credibility and rhythm the play and the performance managed to build now and again.

Andrew said that the puppet device had been borrowed from English National Opera’s production of “Madame Butterfly”, unveiled in London in 2005, which used puppeteers to portray the child of Cio-Cio San. However, the puppeteers in “Madame Butterfly” were onstage only for a small portion of that London production. By contrast, in Minneapolis, the puppeteers were a constant, never-ending (and irritating) presence. Whoever came up with such a dumb idea?

The answer to that question is Marcela Lorca, the director of the production. Lorca is a choreographer, not a stage director, and her stage skills—such as they are—are restricted to movement and the visual aspects of a production. In terms of illuminating a text and developing a theme, she is totally at sea, and it showed, in spades, throughout the performance.

“The Secret Fall Of Constance Wilde” is a text-driven play. Further, it is a very site-specific play (late-Victorian London and its literary world) and very time-specific (the 1890’s). At the Guthrie, we were served up “Contact” with dialogue, given an ambience that was pure Los Angeles and Oh-So-Very-2008. This made utter hash of the play’s text and themes.

It was a major and obvious mistake for the Guthrie to have offered this assignment to Lorca (whose native language is Spanish; she is Chilean), and it was a major and obvious mistake not to have scrapped the puppeteers. “Constance Wilde” was the worst rot I have ever seen on the stage of the Guthrie.

The production was also miscast. The actor portraying Oscar Wilde should have been replaced, because he never for a moment suggested that he was in possession of a brain, let alone great wit. The actress portraying Mrs. Wilde was not quite such a cipher, but a competent director would surely have worked with her on the character (and the text), and would have helped her expand upon what is merely a one-note portrayal.

Apparently there was a lot of behind-the-scenes controversy during the rehearsal period for this production, and many people at the Guthrie strongly believed that Lorca should have been replaced very early in the rehearsal process. Lorca was never able to come to terms with the subtlety of the text and she was never able to evoke the time and place in which the drama is set.

For some reason, Joe Dowling, Artistic Director of the Guthrie, decided to stick with Lorca, and the sad result is there for everyone to see onstage. Coming from America’s leading theater company, “Constance Wilde” is an embarrassment.

This production should have been buried.