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Rachel Swan
Published Wednesday, August 22, 2012
If you were fortunate
enough to catch the opening night performance of Precious
Little at Ashby Stage on Monday, then chances are you went
home wondering about the playwright, Madeleine George, receiver
of many awards, founder of an Obie-winning collective, Brooklyn
resident, and assiduous blogger. If you went home that night and
typed her name into Google, the first thing you found was her
blog, which made you realize she's the kind of person who gets
on a city bus and immediately transcribes all the conversations
around her, then reconstructs them as a dialogue in a play. She'll
include characters that many of us wouldn't think of — like,
for example, an anthropomorphized version of your polo shirt.
For anyone who's ever had the conceit of being a writer, it's
an enviable talent.
Not surprisingly, her new
play, produced by Shotgun Players and directed by Marissa Wolf,
is about language. Its protagonist is a linguistics professor
named Brodie (Zehra Berkman) who has decided, at age 42, to have
her first child, via an anonymous sperm donor. Because of her
advanced age, Brodie decides to undergo amniocentesis about twelve
weeks into the pregnancy. Her main concern isn't that they baby
will arrive with physical defects, but that if will falter mentally.
For a woman who privileges verbal communication over all else,
a mute or vacuous baby would be about the worst fate imaginable.
When tests reveal that Brodie's child is, indeed, at risk for
an obscure and complicated genetic disorder, she's faced with
a grave choice.
That's the central conflict
of the play, but strewn around it are several ancillary plots
that all hew to the theme. Brodie is studying an endangered Eastern
European language that requires her to interview survivors of
a distant war. She's started a star-crossed affair with her graduate
assistant. She's become infatuated with a large talking ape at
the local zoo. The different stories precipitate as a series of
interconnected vignettes, all fattened with dialogue, all exposing
the powers and insufficiencies of language.
Three actresses carry the
entire play, and Berkman is the only person responsible for just
one role. Cal Shakes associate artist Nancy Carlin plays the old
Eastern European woman, Cleva, who has agreed to participate in
Brodie's language study. In other scenes she's a genetic counselor
named Dorothy who advises Brodie on her "difficult"
situation. She's also the talking ape, and the specter of Brodie's
unborn fetus, curled up in a dark cubby of the stage that evidently
represents a womb. Rami Margron takes on five roles, including
that of a no-nonsense obstetrics technician and Brodie's grad
student love interest. She also provides all the voices of the
spectators at the zoo, a role that requires her to play six characters
at once, merely by altering her vocal intonation.
Lesser actors might balk
at the demands of this script, but Carlin and Margron are both
endlessly transmutable. Carlin hunches her spine and curls her
limbs to be the giant ape, while maintaining the glacial elegance
of a woman trapped in a cage — she is, after all, the Sylvia
Plath of gorillas. Margron shifts the register of her voice on
a dime, acquiring a high, girly falsetto for Dorothy's younger
assistant, Rhiannon, and a sultry baritone for the androgynous
butch grad student, Dre. Since Precious Little is nearly
void of exposition, the characters unravel each other's backstories
within lines of dialogue. Thus, each conversation is a series
of reveals. We find out Brodie is a lesbian when she is cross-examined
at the obstetrics clinic; we find out about her line of research
by witnessing conversations with Dre. Wolf stages each of these
scenes to make the audience member feel like an eavesdropper,
often isolating the actors in a small corner to make the space
seem either more intimate or more confined. Martin Flynn's tall,
capacious set, with its paneled walls and small cubicles, helps
amplify that notion.
Like Brodie, playwright
George clearly believes in the primacy of language — it's
her artistic muse, after all. But she's also fascinated by humans'
ability to manipulate it. Rhiannon lards her speech with euphemisms
in a way that appears condescending; Brodie and Dre code-switch
to academic jargon when they want to create the illusion of distance
in their relationship. Characters cherry-pick their words in order
to obfuscate meaning, and yet at times, they're overcome by the
vessel — reciting numbers in her native language of Kari
(which George apparently made up), Cleva is suddenly wracked by
painful memories of childhood. It's no wonder George makes a living
transcribing other people's vernacular prose. She's keenly aware
of its power.
