In the Wake, and: The Little Foxes (review)

After a decade of troubling proceedings that were impossible to fathom in the moment—September 11th, George W. Bush's War on Terror, and the collapse of America's financial giants, to name only a few—it makes sense that theatres across the nation are mining the historical past for clues through which to understand contemporary problems. New York's 2010 season featured two productions that used distinctive theatrical methods in order to explore the blind spots we failed to see during the decade known as the "aughts." Lisa Kron's In the Wake at the Public Theater employed conventional realism and authentic media footage from that period to transport audiences back to the contested presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. Meanwhile, director Ivo van Hove took a far more surreal and anachronistic approach to characters, costumes, and sets in his revival of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) for the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW).

An interesting preface to these performances is the word "aught" itself, which can be defined as "anything at all," or as the opposite—"a cipher; zero." From anything at all to nothing is the basic trajectory of both plays. In the Wake begins near the start of the new millennium, on Thanksgiving 2000, whereas NYTW's program attributes its decision to revisit Hellman's melodrama about an entrepreneurial Southern family destroyed by greed to the deepening global financial crisis of 2008-10. As their characters slowly plummet from a world of seemingly infinite options to the brink of disorder and ruin, Kron and van Hove ask us to consider who gets hit the hardest (and who gets away with taking more) when the American system as we know it cannot hold itself together anymore.

The opening scene of Kron's In the Wake set up a subtle yet ongoing tension between the domestic and political realms. On the one hand, the play's protagonist, Ellen (played by Marin Ireland), had an abundance of relational blessings for which to give thanks: her devoted boyfriend Danny (Michael Chernus), her friends Kayla and Laurie (Susan Pourfar and Danielle Skraastad), and even the tiny New York apartment she shared with Danny (designed with meticulous realism by David Korins). On the other hand, however, Ellen's own rise as a public intellectual was beginning to cause rifts in her family circle. Thanksgiving unfolded festively until Ellen ignored Laurie's well-known aversion to political talk and insisted on debating the Florida recount, until a disgusted Laurie walked out. Kayla (Laurie's female partner) sided with her upset girlfriend and left before dinner as well. This early conflict revealed a fundamental tension between Ellen's commitment to analyzing the bigger picture and her improvised family's desire to keep intrusions out; speaking one's expansive mind was pitted against keeping the household peace.

The play's central question was whether or not Ellen wanted too much. Throughout act 1 we witnessed her burgeoning success, as well as the widening gyre of her desire. At a high-status conference in Boston Ellen abruptly became intimate with a filmmaker named Amy (Jenny Bacon). Director Leigh Silverman staged this blossoming romance downstage, symbolically removed from Ellen's upstage life with Danny, yet not so far away as to allow us to forget that prior and seemingly satisfying relationship. Ellen and Danny were rooted in a common past, realized onstage by their cozy yet cluttered tenement; by contrast, whenever Ellen got

Marin Ireland (Ellen) and Michael Chernus (Danny) in In the Wake. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

together with Amy, the props that surrounded them were minimal: two chairs or a bed. This lack of baggage suggested the freedom Ellen found with Amy, at the same time as it implied their lack of history. Like Kayla and Laurie, Danny disapproved of Ellen's infidelity...