by Hadley Hury
Through March 2nd at Theatre Memphis' Little Theatre is Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh. The title refers to the Hindu deity Ganesha, an antic but benevolent god, who in the course of the play comes to the aid of two women from Connecticut who are on a pilgrimage through India.
McNally, who developed a small but passionate theatregoing public with his early dark comedies more than 20 years ago, followed by works such as The Lisbon Traviata and Frankie and Johnnie in the Claire de Lune, has recently moved to the front ranks of the American theatre. With 1991's Lips Together, Teeth Apart, he began to garner a wider audience and more critical acclaim. Few living American playwrights have shown such imagination in grounding large, complex, contemporary themes believably in specific characters, and he is possessed of a seismographic ear for comic dialogue that ruefully traces the stresses in human relationships and the fault lines across which we try to communicate. Two years ago, McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! swept the Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Circle, and New York Drama Critics' Circle awards for Best Play.
A Perfect Ganesh engages the playwright's characteristic concern about society's unrelenting attempts to fracture the wholeness of human life -- to separate our spiritual, intellectual, social, political, sexual dimensions and encourage war among the parts. Like all his works, Ganesh is very serious; also like all his works, it roils with humor. Even when McNally embraces the bleakest aspects of the human condition and he has proven fearless in doing so he never fails to gather in, too, an inseparable sense of redemptive joy. Even his direst subject matter, his most acrid and ironic dialogue, reveal a generosity of spirit.
The Little Theatre production is directed by John Rone, and the cast includes Martha Graber and Jo Lynne Palmer as the traveling companions, Gregory K. Krosnes as The Man, and Brian Mott as the Ganesha. Costumes are by Nora Boone and the set design by Michael Walker. Call 682-8323 for tickets.
A WORLD PREMIERE UNFOLDS ON the Main Theatre stage at the University of Memphis Thursday evening, February 20th. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, has been adapted by Gloria Baxter from the autobiography of American Western writer Terry Tempest Williams. The U of M's Baxter known here and in Europe for her expertise in narrative theatre, including adaptations of works by Eudora Welty and William Faulkner also directs.
Williams might best be described as a poetic-naturalist writer. She is Naturalist-in-Residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History in Salt Lake City and has published both fiction and non-fiction. Her preternatural engagement with the Western landscape has at times been perceived as approaching eroticism. Of her 1995 book Desert Quartet, Williams herself has said: "There's always been the fusion of the physical, the spiritual, the emotional. By opening yourself to the nature of the landscape, you're engaging the sacred in a physical way."
Williams knows powerfully and uniquely of what she speaks when it comes to our human connection to place. Refuge chronicles the ovarian-cancer death of her mother, who, along with the entire Williams family and hundreds of other Utahns, had been exposed to radiation fallout from atomic-bomb testing in the Nevada and Utah deserts in the 1950s and '60s. While her mother was dying, in the mid-1980s, the progressive rise in the level of the Great Salt Lake threatened to decimate bird populations at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. The fragile wetlands had been a source of inspiration and peace for the author. Refuge interweaves these cosmically coincidental meditations on human grief and the search for solace through our reciprocity with landscape and other creatures.
Wallace Stegner has written of Williams' poetic autobiography: "The wonderful thing about Refuge is that Terry Williams is too full of life herself, and too fascinated by all its manifestations, to write a gloomy book. There isn't a page here that doesn't whistle with the sound of wings."
In her staging of Refuge, Baxter has collaborated with fellow U of M faculty member Susan Chrietzberg (movement) and guest artist Jerre Dye (stage scenario). Scenic designer is Pam Goss, sound design is by John J. McFadden, lighting by Marc Sherrell, and costumes by Amy Sherwood.
Performance dates are February 20th through 22nd and February 25th through March 1st at 7:30 p.m., with a 2:30 matinee on Sunday, March 2nd. As a Guest Artist in Residence for this premiere production, Williams will give a free public reading from her work followed by discussion on February 27th at 1 p.m. in Room 137 of the Theatre and Communication Building. A public reception for the author will be held after the evening performance on February 28th.
Call 678-3975 for tickets, or 678-2576 or 678-2523 for more information.