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Book of Days serves Joan with cheese
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Book of Days
By Lanford Wilson. Directed by Spiro Veloudos. Original music by Steven Bergman. Set by Janie E. Howland. Costumes by Rita Sclavunos. Lighting by Karen Perlow. With Steven Barkhimer, Doug Bowen-Flynn, Lea Contarino, Stacy Fischer, Kippy Goldfarb, Beth Gotha, Jessica Healy, Sam Hurlbut, Michael Kaye, Ray McDavitt, Floyd Richardson, and Kevin Steinberg. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through November 22.
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Joan of Arc gets crossed with Nancy Drew in Book of Days, Lanford Wilson’s 1999 mix of community-theater zeal and Bible Belt skullduggery that’s in its Boston premiere at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston. The play is clever but a bit stiff and, ultimately, not very good. Included in Signature Theatre’s Wilson season last year, it’s closer in ambition to the large-cast Balm in Gilead and Hot l Baltimore than to the Pulitzer-winning Talley’s Folly; yet it lacks the latter’s sweet simplicity — though not its distinctive sense of place. And Spiro Veloudos’s Lyric production, despite a few performances that could do with some liniment, copes with Wilson’s elaborate play-within-a-play-rehearsal conceit and offers in Stacy Fischer’s Ozark St. Joan stand-in a performance with real spark, though one ignited more by "Missourah" flint than by Shavian fire. Book of Days, which flips back and forth in a calendar characterized by such Biblical-sounding descriptions as "Day of Reckoning" and "Day of Discovery," is set in Dublin, Missouri, a fictitious county seat in the playwright’s home state — which here takes its "show me" label straight into show business. The play begins, after a lyrical evocation of everyday small-town Missouri life, with auditions for a community-theater production of St. Joan. (It’s an odd community theater, however, that appears to rehearse during day-job time, runs its productions for five-week spans, and has brought in a two-time Tony nominee, albeit one who’s had problems with the law, to direct.) Although she turns up thinking that Shaw’s play is a musical by the guy who wrote My Fair Lady, Shavian neophyte Ruth Hoch, in real life the bookkeeper at the Dublin Cheese Plant (big cheese, as it were, of the local economy), wins the role of the fanatical, 17-year-old Maid of Orleans. When Walt Bates, owner of the cheese plant, dies in an apparent accident involving a shotgun and a tornado (!), Ruth, fired up by her character, turns into a regular enemy of the people, refusing to back off her contention that the death was no accident. Ruth’s husband, Len, is manager of the cheese plant and has some big ideas for taking it out of the slough of rubbery-Kraft despond and into the realm of gourmet cheesemaking. Walt, waxing nostalgic for a provolone he had on his honeymoon in "Florence . . , Italy," is all for it so long as the bottom line isn’t affected. But something nefarious is up with Walt’s profligate son James, a former high-school sports hero and newly minted lawyer (he took seven tries to pass the Bar), and his working-class flunky, Earl Hill, who wants Len’s job. Snaking through all of this is the Baptist church led by youthful but brimstone preacher Bobby Groves, who’s every bit as two-faced and tyrannical as the Church that persecutes Joan in Shaw’s play. Veloudos’s production has a courtroom–meets–Under Milk Wood feel, with most of the cast coming forward to speak expository monologues to the audience or offer confidences. There is a long, rumbling evocation of the twister during which Walt’s $50,000 English shotgun ostensibly misfires. And the performances range from the awkward (Kevin Steinberg’s hapless Earl; Michael Kaye’s pinched James) to the accomplished (Beth Gotha’s freewheeling Martha, Len’s once-hippie mom, now a disenchanted dean at a Christian junior college; Kippy Goldfarb’s masterfully poised, graciously repressed Sharon, the town beauty who married Walt and then ossified). There are whiffs of Our Town in the choral sections of Book of Days. The playwright was born in 1937 in Lebanon, Missouri, and though this play purports to be contemporary (one adult character was conceived at Woodstock), it has a period feel. Wilson employs some interesting devises: using the townies as a sort of Greek chorus to observe the action; having the entire drama-outside-the-drama presented like a play in rehearsal. Janie E. Howland’s set has the feel of one under construction; at one point, the church-going widow of the deceased refuses to rehearse the scene of her breakdown, claiming she’d never use the swear words therein, and the director’s assistant, local tough girl Ginger Reed, has to take over. But there’s something wooden about the melodrama Wilson has concocted around St. Joan. The play means, I think, to be about the way in which art infiltrates and expands the focus or our lives. Between the detective work and the cheese, it too often just seems to be about how to build a better mousetrap.
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