- The Howling Miller
Once the butt of an unflattering joke, Pittsburgh has emerged as a model twenty-first-century postindustrial city, with a stable economy based on healthcare and universities and a thriving arts and theatre scene. The city boasts two LORT companies (Pittsburgh Public Theater and City Theatre), two university conservatory programs (Carnegie Mellon University and Point Park University), and a burgeoning experimental scene, which all regularly produce and attract multitalented theatre artists. These artists are lured by the low cost of living, affordable space, and supportive community. Moreover, situated among the Appalachian Mountains and surrounded by three rivers, Pittsburgh offers a striking and aesthetically pleasing topography that entices many film-production companies.
None of these praises, however, are new to Quantum Theatre, which has been producing site-specific work in the Pittsburgh area for twenty years. Building on the environmental theatre of Grotowski and Schechner, Quantum produces a mixture of classic, new, and obscure works in found spaces that break down the barrier between performer and spectator. To date, some of its adventurous productions include Zola's Thérèse Raquin in an abandoned swimming pool, Stoppard's Indian Ink in a cemetery, and the Metcalf/Morris opera Kafka's Chimp at the Pittsburgh Zoo. For its twentieth anniversary season, artistic director Karla Boos, with director Peter Duschenes, chose to adapt The Howling Miller, a 1981 novel by Finnish writer Arto Paasilinna. The burned-out remains of the defunct Frick Park Environmental Center in Pittsburgh's largest city park became the stage for the mischievous title character, Gunnar Huttunen, to run, jump, prank, and howl his way through post-World War II anxiety. With a unique setting, innovative staging, and an obscure text, Quantum succeeded in convincingly portraying [End Page 276] the mental and social after-effects of war without losing delicious theatricality.
Click for larger view
View full resolution
Set in a small village in Lapland—a remote province in northern Finland—the production traced the conflict between the iconoclastic Huttunen and his conventional neighbors. Through a fable-like episodic structure, Huttunen disrupts the sleepy old town when he arrives one day to buy and restore an old mill. At first, his energy and seemingly humorous animal impersonations impress the villagers; yet as Huttunen's eccentricities become more bizarre and threatening, especially his tendency to howl all night long, the villagers, still reeling from the shock of war, quickly incite their own war on the misfit neighbor. When the defiant Huttunen challenges the capitalist greed and bourgeois apathy of the villagers, they respond by forcing him into a mental hospital.
The story becomes somewhat clichéd and melodramatic as the mob becomes crazier than the committed. Moreover, the love story between Huttunen and a local 4-H worker, who convinces him to plant a vegetable garden, is never fully developed. Yet in the Quantum production, the plot was less important than the physical and psychological journey of Huttunen. Duschenes successfully echoed the novel by moving beyond the typical pastoral scenario of humans reconnecting with nature to show the connection between humans and animals and the potential for natural harmony. Huttunen (Tristan Farmer) did not simply impersonate wolves, foxes, and bears—he became them. Returning from the chaos and inhumanity of war, Huttunen seems fed up with the human world and literally wants to live among the animals. The fact that he can embody all of these animals shows the ability of humanity to coexist with nature. For the villagers, who are on the cusp of postwar capitalism, his world is wild and dangerous; for Huttunen, it is peaceful and harmless. Only when the villagers disrupt his bucolic tranquility does Huttunen begin to unravel.
In addition to a faithful adapter, Paasilinna's ideas require a great actor to be made intelligible. Luckily, Quantum had at its disposal the skills of Tristan Farmer. A Carnegie Mellon graduate, Farmer is a natural...