Resurrection Blues, and: Good Boys (review)

Resurrection Blues, Arthur Miller's take on sensationalism in the media, premiered at the Guthrie Theatre on August 9, 2002. Across town at the Guthrie Lab, the premiere of Good Boys, Jane Martin's consideration of school violence opened on August 23. The overlap of these productions provided a snapshot of American theatre: ambitious, eclectic, socially conscious, at once beholden to tradition and dedicated to innovation, capable of brilliant perspective but prone to cliché sentimentalism.

Resurrection Blues confirms that Arthur Miller remains an astute social critic while revealing a biting wit not always apparent in his early work. However, the play becomes burdened by stylistic contradictions. Blunt satire collides with strained melodrama. An impulse toward situational comedy conflicts with aspiration toward classical poetry, thereby making the play too unwieldy even for a first-rate cast and a skilled director like David Esbjornson, whose credits include productions of Tony Kushner's Millenium Approaches and Perestroika.

Like Angels inAmerica, Miller's play requires both specific locales and a larger-than-life quality. The plot proceeds from the premise that a television network has bought exclusive rights to televise the execution of a political prisoner. There is an element of the Passion Play because the prisoner is to be crucified. The "far away place" of the setting seems to be south of the US border where a military regime thrives and the masses live in poverty. They find hope in the person condemned to die on the cross—a character we never see but one whose reputed mysterious powers complete the play's religious reference.

Esbjornson's design team included Christine Jones (set), Elizabeth Hope Clancy (costumes), Marcus Dilliard (lighting), and Scott W. Edwards (sound), with whom Esbjornson created an opening sequence that foreshadowed the multiple images interwoven throughout the ensuing action. When the audience entered, the stage was bare. As the house lights went down, rhythms evocative of Latin culture filled the theatre before shifting to music suggesting an ethereal world. Spare lighting illuminated a human figure that was flown onto the stage and descended into a stage trap. The movements and sounds of people fleeing gunfire disrupted the calm of the spiritual descent. A massive desk then arose out of the stage floor as a huge portrait of a military officer was flown in; General Felix Barriaux (John Bedford Lloyd) entered. The contradiction between the picture and his stance created visual humor and complemented the scene's movement between the general's blustering talk of state and his preoccupation with erectile dysfunction.

Cast doubling and design accentuated multiple layers of meaning that balanced the play's setting and its religious symbolism. Actors who first appeared as guards became waiters standing at rapt attention in a dinner scene. Natural linens in solid colors and rope sandals invoked contemporary conditions in southern climes as well as the play's biblical imagery. A trap in the stage floor initially served as the prison cell containing the man condemned to die. At the end of the play, light flooded from this opening and actors, assuming postures of adulation, surrounded it to evoke the image of Jesus' tomb after the stone has been rolled away.

When the television production crew descended upon the countryside, the staging bristled with the energies of military occupation and those of an upbeat television commercial. The crew assaulted the stage from downstage entrances, their cell phones keeping them tethered to their New York neurosis. At one point, the television producer Skip L. Cheeseboro (David Chandler) darted around the space trying to get the best cellular connection in a pattern clearly inspired by the familiar TV commercial's "can you hear me now" sequence. When the director (Emily Shapiro) realized the nature of the event she was to film, the energies on stage shifted from frenzied pageant to philosophical musing. Within this shift, the characters' significance receded, and they seemed overwhelmed by the depth...