#1
Posted: 9/13/06 at 12:23am
Just saw Warrior, a musical with music, book and lyrics by Marcus Hummon, about oldtime athlete Jim Thorpe (in the NYMTF) at the Theater at St. Clement's and have a few thoughts to offer.
This is a showcase production with minimal production values and I was expecting the piece to be at advanced workshop level, which it was. There is a three piece band accompanying.
I think this show is worth seeing. The cast is devoted and focused. The music is good though it still needs work and there are too many slow songs.
If you don't know the story, Jim Thorpe was a Native American (Indian) and an impoverished kid from Oklahoma, who early in the 1900s won all kind of Olympic medals but it turned out he had been paid a small amount to play some minor league ball and therefore was not technically able to compete as an amateur. Great runner and football player. Superb natural athlete. His Olympic medals got taken away so it was a big scandal.
Deven May portrays Thorpe in the cast and he is very good. You may remember him from Bat Boy. He even does a little touch of Indian dancing, a nice short segment of it especially near the end of the play. Marla Schaffel plays his seducing weakness, the liquor Whiskey, embodied in the play as the character of a woman.
This setup has been done before in Eli's Comin', a musical story using the songs of Laura Nyro which you may have caught at the Vineyard. Sexes reversed, Wilson Jermaine Heredia portrayed "Captain Jack" or heroin as a male seducer to the female addict lead, and he was wonderful in the nonspeaking role, portraying his character purely through dance. I found the dance mime technique more effective than the narrative Whiskey character in Warrior. Though Ms. Schaffel is very talented, I found the existence of her character in the piece a distraction, more artifice than help in telling the story. (Particulary I wish she would not wear the red dress with extremely low cleavage as it put me at concern that she was about to expose herself by accident any second and it was distracting from Thorpe, who is the play's center; there were two other dresses which seemed too modern and out of period as well though the one for his wife worked fine.) Perhaps it can work to have Whiskey as a character, but it has to slip down to a much lower prominance or the story becomes about alcohol instead of Thorpe.
And there is a big story about Thorpe to tell but it isn't all there yet. It's hard to take a downer life story where the guy goes to drink and ruin and try to meld it into a story structure. It can be done. The key to this tragedy is not really the man's weakness to alcohol. It's his dissociation from his tribe and his culture. Thus I'd have the alcohol as only a bottle in the play and let his haunting be the call of his tribe, religion and culture that's been waylaid instead.
The play has elements of this in germination stage throughout. It is this sense of loss and longing, however, that is not being shown or explored which could chuck out some of the exposition and sink you into the pathos of this inarticulate, tortured soul. This is a man who ran twenty-some miles away from school one day to get back home. He may not be able to vocalize it, may not even be able to put his finger on what the sense of loss and alienation that he lives with is, but it can bleed through into the play with echoing sound of real Indian chants coming from unseen spirits of his tribe who have passed over, but who keep spiritual tabs on one of their own.
That kind of loss, alienation and pangs are what give Thorpe his true dimensions, his tragic flaw and the pathos that is needed to be able to draw an audience in with empathy to bring them to tears in emotional recognition of the intense loneliness of this athletically gifted outsider.
You could do a lot of suggestive things in a fully realized production. Dramatic lighting. Fewer people onstage rather than keeping all the cast out there almost all the time. For example, if you wanted to remind the audience of his Indian heritage you could have a silent scene of his preparation, his concentration for performing in the Olympic games and have one eagle feather float down from the ceiling. There, you've said it. Here is an Indian about to go into battle. The audience would get it. Same as offstage indian drum and chant or even battle cry would give an intense presence of the historic and lost culture.
Right now the play begins and ends on an Indian theme, and has a seating arrangement as if around a campfire. I think it would be more effective to break the play out of the campfire circle and use the whole stage to convey the sense of the Indian view of the universe. The unseen and the minimal can be more powerful in evoking imagination.
I also think the play's cast could possibly be cut from twelve to as few as seven or eight. If you are going to have twelve, I think they should actually all, or almost all, perform Indian dance for the effect, and at a serious level of dance. Again, that would be for a full production budget.
Just some thoughts, not really a review here...
© 2006 nomdeplume by pseudonym All rights reserved.
This is a showcase production with minimal production values and I was expecting the piece to be at advanced workshop level, which it was. There is a three piece band accompanying.
I think this show is worth seeing. The cast is devoted and focused. The music is good though it still needs work and there are too many slow songs.
If you don't know the story, Jim Thorpe was a Native American (Indian) and an impoverished kid from Oklahoma, who early in the 1900s won all kind of Olympic medals but it turned out he had been paid a small amount to play some minor league ball and therefore was not technically able to compete as an amateur. Great runner and football player. Superb natural athlete. His Olympic medals got taken away so it was a big scandal.
Deven May portrays Thorpe in the cast and he is very good. You may remember him from Bat Boy. He even does a little touch of Indian dancing, a nice short segment of it especially near the end of the play. Marla Schaffel plays his seducing weakness, the liquor Whiskey, embodied in the play as the character of a woman.
This setup has been done before in Eli's Comin', a musical story using the songs of Laura Nyro which you may have caught at the Vineyard. Sexes reversed, Wilson Jermaine Heredia portrayed "Captain Jack" or heroin as a male seducer to the female addict lead, and he was wonderful in the nonspeaking role, portraying his character purely through dance. I found the dance mime technique more effective than the narrative Whiskey character in Warrior. Though Ms. Schaffel is very talented, I found the existence of her character in the piece a distraction, more artifice than help in telling the story. (Particulary I wish she would not wear the red dress with extremely low cleavage as it put me at concern that she was about to expose herself by accident any second and it was distracting from Thorpe, who is the play's center; there were two other dresses which seemed too modern and out of period as well though the one for his wife worked fine.) Perhaps it can work to have Whiskey as a character, but it has to slip down to a much lower prominance or the story becomes about alcohol instead of Thorpe.
And there is a big story about Thorpe to tell but it isn't all there yet. It's hard to take a downer life story where the guy goes to drink and ruin and try to meld it into a story structure. It can be done. The key to this tragedy is not really the man's weakness to alcohol. It's his dissociation from his tribe and his culture. Thus I'd have the alcohol as only a bottle in the play and let his haunting be the call of his tribe, religion and culture that's been waylaid instead.
The play has elements of this in germination stage throughout. It is this sense of loss and longing, however, that is not being shown or explored which could chuck out some of the exposition and sink you into the pathos of this inarticulate, tortured soul. This is a man who ran twenty-some miles away from school one day to get back home. He may not be able to vocalize it, may not even be able to put his finger on what the sense of loss and alienation that he lives with is, but it can bleed through into the play with echoing sound of real Indian chants coming from unseen spirits of his tribe who have passed over, but who keep spiritual tabs on one of their own.
That kind of loss, alienation and pangs are what give Thorpe his true dimensions, his tragic flaw and the pathos that is needed to be able to draw an audience in with empathy to bring them to tears in emotional recognition of the intense loneliness of this athletically gifted outsider.
You could do a lot of suggestive things in a fully realized production. Dramatic lighting. Fewer people onstage rather than keeping all the cast out there almost all the time. For example, if you wanted to remind the audience of his Indian heritage you could have a silent scene of his preparation, his concentration for performing in the Olympic games and have one eagle feather float down from the ceiling. There, you've said it. Here is an Indian about to go into battle. The audience would get it. Same as offstage indian drum and chant or even battle cry would give an intense presence of the historic and lost culture.
Right now the play begins and ends on an Indian theme, and has a seating arrangement as if around a campfire. I think it would be more effective to break the play out of the campfire circle and use the whole stage to convey the sense of the Indian view of the universe. The unseen and the minimal can be more powerful in evoking imagination.
I also think the play's cast could possibly be cut from twelve to as few as seven or eight. If you are going to have twelve, I think they should actually all, or almost all, perform Indian dance for the effect, and at a serious level of dance. Again, that would be for a full production budget.
Just some thoughts, not really a review here...
© 2006 nomdeplume by pseudonym All rights reserved.
Updated On: 9/13/06 at 12:23 AM
