"You know what I don't like about you, Dalton Chance?" asks a Southern girl in a flour-sack dress. "You're a good boy. A very good boy."
David Allen
Like Charlie Brown and Lucy: Ian Jurcso and Jennifer
Wagner as the bumbling teen and his mischievous
muse.
David Allen
Like Charlie Brown and Lucy: Ian Jurcso and Jennifer
Wagner as the bumbling teen and his mischievous
muse.
David Allen
Like Charlie Brown and Lucy: Ian Jurcso and Jennifer
Wagner as the bumbling teen and his mischievous
muse.
Details
Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison (at
Shattuck), Berkeley, (510)
843-4822
Related Content
More About
"So what's that mean?"
"It means someone, before it's too late, has got to break you in half. I guess it'll hafta be me."
The girl, Pace Creagan, means to break Dalton by convincing him to play chicken with a freight train roaring across a narrow bridge. They live in a Depression-era mill town, close to a railway trestle built 100 feet above a dry creek bed. "Cold, lip-smackin' steel," muses Pace. "Imagine a kiss like that. Just imagine it."
Subtextually, of course, she also wants to fuck Dalton. But Pace is a tomboy; she lacks the looks or popularity to compete with girls like Mary Ellen Berry, and has too much pride to flirt, so she leads the milk-faced and malleable Dalton Chance through a masculine gantlet of foot races and silly dares. The suspense in Naomi Wallace's Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, premiering locally at the Aurora Theatre, derives from an age-old double entendre. "Will they or won't they?" becomes the operative question.
This material is enough to propel a good play. With characters as strong as Dalton and Pace, a skillful playwright shouldn't need more than a romance and a death-defying dare to spin a solid evening of theater. But Trestle is by Naomi Wallace, which implies a minimum added dosage of class politics and mysticism. Another play of hers, One Flea Spare, tells a tale about class and mortality in London during the Great Plague. Slaughter City is the blood-spattered story of butchers on strike in an American slaughterhouse. All of them deal, mystically as well as realistically, with gender roles and labor politics in a tradition descended from Brecht.
The first, un-Brechtian half of Trestle is beautifully simple. Pace and Dalton idle in the dry creek bed and talk about crossing the bridge, which Jon Retsky, the lighting designer, has rendered with just a few crisscrossed shadows. Spare dialogue paints their relationship in quick but lively strokes; in less than a minute we recognize Pace as a sort of seductive Lucy to Dalton's Charlie Brown. She teases him about his "puny chest" and mentions that Mary Ellen Berry once took off her clothes in her presence.
"You had a look at her?" says Dalton. "Naked? What's she like?"
"I'd say she's on the menu. Front, back, and in-reverse. You'd like her."
Jennifer Wagner delivered these lines with so much saucy conviction that I hardly recognized her. Normally she's a composed presence onstage, thoughtful and tall, but as Pace Creagan she looks shorter, somehow, and snaps at Dalton in a coiled accent like a scrappy urchin. The young Ian Scott McGregor Jurcso, in his first professional role, also does brilliant work as Dalton. He has cornflower-blue eyes set under a straight, hard brow -- meaning he looks the part -- and he alternates nicely between slumping his shoulders like a mama's boy and straightening up with some reserve of burgeoning manhood.
There's enough energy between these characters to drive a powerful coming-of-age play, but Trestle has higher ambitions. Wallace wants to suggest that the only reason a healthy boy or girl would run across a bridge at an oncoming train is that the American dream is a fraud, capitalism's unfair, and teenagers in a mill town have so few material prospects they'll do extremely crazy shit. "I think sometimes when there's not much for us in the future, we can feel like the present moment is all there is," she said in a recent interview. This take on the game of chicken -- based on a real accident in Kentucky during the 1970s -- accounts for a watery subplot about Dalton's parents, Gin and Dray. Both are worn-out laborers, and Dalton sees his own life hemmed in by their wearisome fates.
The concept has possibilities, but the parents are tintypes, and Jessica Powell and Don Reeves Hiatt (as Gin and Dray, respectively) fail to put much conviction into their roles. Jack Powell does better as Chas Weaver, the ornery old jailer who chats with Dalton in certain scenes. His role has dimension, and Weaver can be funny when he imitates a turtle or a plane.
Playing with the concept of freedom leads Wallace to a metaphysical final scene. Things between Pace and Dalton turn very strange in the end, and their ghostly, role-reversed conversation would be stronger if Wallace had left Dalton with no other escape from his depressing hometown. But the kid's only 17; who knows what's in him? He wouldn't be the first country boy to make good, to skip out of the way of a burdensome, barreling fate.
foam order.com
