A few of my friends have insinuated that I have a rough time being "mean" on my blog. I do tend to give people the benefit of the doubt and even when unimpressed by certain restaurants, activities, or performances I tend to sugarcoat it a bit. Maybe they were having a bad day. Maybe they were sleepy. Maybe my opinion was influenced by the rainy weather. Maybe the band just needed more time to warm up.
That tendency noted, you must know how vehemently I disliked Appomattox, now playing at the
Guthrie, in order to state as much on this blog. I really, really disliked it. I wanted to like it. I was inspired by the concept (juxtaposing Lee's surrender at Appomattox in 1865 with the explosion of the Civil Rights Movement in 1965). But the show left me feeling annoyed and wishing I'd seen Looper with my boyfriend instead of dragging him to the play. And now, my willing audience, I shall tell you why.
1. Southern accents: Or shall I say, the lack thereof. I realize I am biased. I realize, as a native Southerner, I'm picky. And I realize that I'm even more picky than your average Arkansan because I also spent four years in Virginia, the state in which the first half of the play was set, and so can note pretty acutely the difference between a smooth Virginia drawl and a clumsy attempt at one. The only character with a believable Virginia lilt was Robert E. Lee (a blessing, I guess, since Lee without a hint of drawl would be very, very sad). The rest of the characters laid their accents on so thick I was tempted to roll my eyes. It sounded like half of them had marbles in their mouths.
2. Lincoln as Savior. You're kidding, right? At the outset of the war Lincoln was not a man bent on becoming the Great Emancipator. He would have kept slavery in the South had it been a viable option and a way to maintain the Union. Siding with the abolitionist movement was a political tactic, not one stemming from any gut reaction to the evil of slavery. While it seems that he slowly changed his mind, began to see the moral darkness encompassing half the country, that didn't inspire him by any means to encourage the equality of black people. He would have rather seen them shipped back to Africa (and that's what he tried to do with the creation of Liberia). Lincoln did many brave things and we're right to respect some of his choices, but you belittle the difficulty of his position by encouraging a fanciful image of his Goodness. It would have been
far more engaging, in my mind, to transpose the very real quasi-worship of Lincoln by the freed slaves over the equally real internal conflict Lincoln had over whether slavery was
really evil. To see that played out onstage would have been interesting and would have raised powerful questions. As is, none of the Lincoln scenes seemed remotely engaging or authentic.
3. Dialogue. Aside from the Lyndon B. Johnson scenes (played expertly by Harry Groener, who couldn't give half as much life to his portrayal of Lincoln), the vast majority of the dialogue seemed stunted and forced. I have a theory about this. I noted in the program that Hampton first crafted Appomattox as an opera and that this play is an adaptation of that opera. This, to me, explains a lot. Opera, by its nature, requires characters that are dramatic and vividly recognizable as good/evil or some such stereotype. The vibrancy of characters with socially defined expectations is captured well by the operatic medium. But translating from opera onto Hampton's stage left characters that couldn't have a conversation. I stopped counting the number of times actors answered each other with phrases that didn't seem to have any cohesion to the momentum or emotion just preceding the line. It's as if the characters weren't listening to each other.
4. Caricatures. This parallels my frustration with the dialogue. The only character who seemed lifelike was LBJ. With all his crass humor, loud-mouthing, and cursing, Groener was able to deftly show a man exhausted by a war and desperate to do as much good as he could in a limited amount of time. He had his own unique perspectives, his own prejudices, but he was brave enough to fight the prejudices of others and fight hard against the failures that loomed behind and before him. If only Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., could have been so engaging. Instead, they came across as flat portraitures of actual men. Barely even snapshots. With all King's blustering and rhetoric, you never felt the heat of his anger or the heart-wrenching exactitude of his statements on America's equality failure. I honestly don't even know what any of Lincoln's scenes were supposed to accomplish. He raised his voice at times that seemed unnatural and joked at moments that never seemed authentic.
5. The ladies. Greta Oglesby and Sally Wingert are fantastic actresses. Fantastic. I've seen both several times and they are Twin Cities treasures. The fact that Wingert was unable to rescue the Lincoln scenes, despite the occasional laugh drawn by her nutty Mary Todd Lincoln, and that Oglesby was left with a Coretta Scott King that came across as a cold, almost petulant companion for the King caricature just goes even further to prove my disappointment in this show. But if the script gives an actor nothing, what can the actor give in return?
6. The ending. What the heck was that? To show two aging men (somewhat) paying for their crimes (finally) of murder in a jail likely not far from the scenes of the rest of the second act was an interesting decision. But it's only interesting for about 3 minutes. What is that scene supposed to prove? Are we supposed to be surprised that these racist SOBs (who also make a point of holding steadfastly to their version of Christianity) still find no fault in their actions? I don't know why that would be shocking. Evil exists. And if that evil was strong enough to drive men to murder strictly based on skin color 50 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if they maintained those beliefs until their dying day. What would have been truly disgusting, disheartening, and thought-provoking would have been to view young people today falling prey to the same racial prejudices as their fathers and grandfathers. Just as Act 2 questions how far we, as a country, had come in the 100 years after the end of the Civil War, I would have welcomed a scene that called into question how far we've come in 150 years. But we didn't get that. We got stupid old men, evil really, men it's easy to dismiss as abnormal by today's social intelligence. But perhaps their prejudices still exist. Perhaps they're just under the surface. Perhaps we should shine a light on such thoughts and not dismiss racism as That Problem Our Parents Dealt With. The last scene, to me, dismissed the rest of the play. It gave the impression that The Good Ole Boys who caused all those problems were aging fast, that their friends were aging, and that soon they'd soon all be gone. We should be so lucky.
And now, the saving graces:
1. Groener really did crack me up as LBJ. There were poignant moments as the President, but Groener really shone in LBJ's wicked exchange with George Wallace. That piece was the highlight of the show for me.
2. The JFK video (and some of the other effects). The staging was interesting and, at times, powerful. I loved the shadowing in LBJ's office. I also found the use of civil rights-era footage to be powerful.
3. They played Nina Simone before the opening of Act 2. I love Nina Simone.
Nobody can write a brilliant script every time, right? Hampton's
Tales from Hollywood was very interesting and the characters were deftly written. I simply cannot say the same for Appomattox.
Follow me on Twitter @TheMinneapolite
