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Lily Janiak
Published Wednesday, September 5th, 2012
... Large animals
are busting onto stages all over Berkeley. On the other side of
town, at Shotgun Players, another beast — this one gentler
than a rapacious squid, but no less awe-inspiring — features
in Precious Little, by Madeleine George. At curtain rise,
Nancy Carlin lounges on a throne made of fake grass in a pose
better suited to Cleopatra than the gorilla she's playing, except
it's not grapes dangling over her waiting mouth but a stalk of
celery, which she proceeds to munch, millimeter by millimeter.
"I chew," she says. "I swallow." In a play
that's obsessed with language, The Ape is the most straightforward
speaker.
Brodie (Zehra Berkman) is
a linguist, but just because she's an expert in the "vowel
harmony we typically associate with Mongol reindeer herders"
doesn't mean she has the language to break up with her girlfriend
(Rami Margron) or to express her feelings about the high likelihood
that her fetus will have a genetic abnormality. Characters repeatedly
implore one another to use "actual words" rather than
insulate their statements in cant, but the play's truest connection
comes not through language but look and touch (though mediated
by the plexiglass of a zoo enclosure).
In today's theater, it's
become a note of praise to say that a play doesn't resolve all
the conflicts it establishes. Such a work better reflects real
life, the thinking goes, than one that neatly ties up all its
loose ends all at the same time. Precious Little ends even earlier,
just as we've become aware of what those loose ends might be.
Characters have just become rich, complex wholes, a parallel between
two seemingly divergent storylines just suggested, the stakes
of a decision just fully laid out — when the play ends.
But somehow it doesn't feel abrupt or incomplete. Rather, Marissa
Wolf's beautifully directed production shows that telling a very
small part of a story can let you tell a much bigger one —
and a funny, moving one, too.
