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[Book reviews]

Butterfly wings
Community theater flies in The Stuff of Dreams

BY CAROLYN CLAY

The Stuff of Dreams
By Leah Hager Cohen. Viking, 234 pages, $24.95.

A play in the life of the Arlington Friends of the Drama is the subject of Leah Hager Cohen’s The Stuff of Dreams. That and the elusive something that causes normal grown-ups with jobs involving spread sheets and stethoscopes to fill their spare time in the passionate pursuit of the roar of the greasepaint, the smell of the crowd. Cohen, the author of two nonfiction works and a novel, got hooked on theater at the age of 10, when her mother took her out of a New York suburban school for a month to work with Bread and Puppet Theater (how cool is that?) on its production of Wolkenstein. “I don’t know what it was about,” she recalls. “I was ten; it was abstract; it seemed to be about sadness and responsibility and struggle and human nature.”

Flash-forward 20-plus years and Cohen is up to her neck in abstract art again, chronicling the Friends’ 1998 production of M. Butterfly. The 1988 Tony-winning play is not exactly Funny Girl (which preceded it at AFD), and it was hardly Mama Rose’s milk to every member of the venerable community-theater organization west of Cambridge. “All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” says Cohen early on, quoting from Summer and Smoke. Well, as far as some of the AFD old guard were concerned, David Henry Hwang’s drama — an exploration of East-West relations couched in the true-life story of a French diplomat who carries on a long affair with a star of the Peking Opera without realizing his inamorata is a man — was in the gutter and you could forget about the stars.

But the particular production helps to make Cohen’s study of a community immersed in theater the more compelling. She catches the Friends, who had begun life 75 years earlier as a white-gloves-and-tea-party offshoot of the Arlington Women’s Club, at a crisis point. At the same time that the troupe is taking on the most ambitious and controversial production of its history, not to mention dipping its toe into cultures not Yankee, it is embroiled in a debate about changing its membership rules to become less hierarchical and more inclusive. For a one-time black-clad theater-maven-turned-writer looking to get to put her finger on what makes an unpaid arts community tick, Cohen showed up at the right place at the right time. And though The Stuff of Dreams seems padded toward the beginning and is sometimes overwritten, it draws you into a fraught and detailed backstage drama at the core of which is the question “Is this fun, or is this art?”

Cohen, while nodding to some AFD old-timers who miss the clublike atmosphere of earlier times, is drawn to theater — at whatever level — as an answer to a primal need. Here and there she throws in her own story: disillusionment with NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts followed by a stint stilt-walking in Nicaragua, where the phrase “community theater” seemed “ridiculously redundant.” And she captures a diverse and vivid cast that ranges from driven director Celia Couture, a Hewlett-Packard business branch manager not known for her warm fuzzies, to retired bookkeeper Dot Lansil, a volunteer who cleans the theater’s bathrooms every Wednesday.

On stage, the French diplomat René Gallimard is played by community-theater vet Jimmy Grana, a member of the Friends since 1977 and five-time winner of the Eastern Massachusetts Association of Community Theatres Best Actor Award (his license plate reads ACTOR 1). Chinese spy and opera star Song Liling is assayed by Patrick Wang, an MIT grad and analyst for a Cambridge think tank, and a man whose history you couldn’t invent. The child of art-eschewing Taiwanese parents, he discovered performing as a high-school exchange student in Argentina and went on to classical training in voice. A co-founder of the Cambridge-based Pet Brick Productions, he recently directed its staging of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. But this is 1998, and reserved AFD newcomer Wang is finding the demanding Couture “rude and abrasive” while old-hand Grana is undergoing a harrowing crisis of confidence brought on by a seemingly insurmountable inability to remember his lines. Believe me, what’s going on at Arlington Friends of the Drama in the fall of ’98 is closer to Long Day’s Journey into Night than to Waiting for Guffman.

Somehow Cohen manages to be everywhere at once, capturing both the camaraderie and the baptism by fire that go into creating live performance. Right from the get-go, she shoots down the term “amateur” as “a soft, frail, rabbity word.” The folks who people her book are no bunnies but creatures of what the author terms “a theater primeval,” not to mention Boston’s thespian back yard. And The Stuff of Dreams is not a bad map of the territory.

Issue Date: July 12-19, 2001