A lot of people are taught that radicalism, in its various forms, is meant to make people take a step back and reassess the issues, to point them towards the extremes and maybe start them moving towards one of them. Communists, vegans, free-lovers: They all just want you to take a look at the most extreme form of living and perhaps take something away from it. Radicals don't necessarily want to instantaneously convert lots of people to a new and shocking doctrine.
Ben Kingsland's new play, Whitehill, which premiered this past weekend at Witness Theatre, is a half-farcical, half-serious meditation on an extreme lifestyle: in this case that of two suburban hunter-gatherers, Toby (sophomore Mitch Frank) and Bridget (sophomore Julie Sihilling), who live in a public park, wear Flintstones-like animal skin togas and have completely removed themselves from the high-tech, capitalist, user-friendly world around them.
When Toby runs into his once-radical college buddy Gary (sophomore Raffi Wartanian), who is now a cog in the corporate machine, he tries to convert his old friend and his daughter Mimi (freshman Christen Cromwell) to the enlightened, independent life of foraging and stalking geese, or as Toby puts it, "the self-reliance, the freedom, the mental challenge of staying fit and fed under your own power."
The play starts with their unconventional reunion, but turns eventually into a serious discussion about the merits of two radical ways of life: the daily grind at a nameless, sterile office job versus the organic, hardy life in the outdoors. Both Gary and Toby each turn out to be quasi-frauds, and both have doubts about the paths they have chosen. By the end, each has grown and learned from the otherr.
The first act opens with Mimi distressed about tomatoes that have been stolen from her backyard garden. She complains to her father, who responds sardonically by suggesting that perhaps a gopher ate them ("They're omnivores.") and then printing out computer data from the office about gophers. Mimi's slacker boyfriend Clint is equally disinterested ("You grew some vegetables, something ate them. I mean, that's what happens to vegetables. They get eaten. It's not, like, `News Flash!'"). All the while, Kingsland develops his characters with crisply-written, funny dialogue and only a very few awkward moments.
When it becomes clear that the hunter-gatherers are responsible for the purloined tomatoes, Gary is first mad, because when we first meet Bridget, she is caught attempting to club the family dog Jasper, presumably to eat as meat. Soon, however, he becomes simply shocked to find his old college buddy living such a bizarre life. Toby refuses to accept that the former college anarchist Gary has given in to the oppression of convention and tries to convince him to give the forest life a try.
Toby ends up convincing Mimi instead, to the chagrin of her father, that the hunter-gatherer thing is a favorable way to live. But several mishaps, including a practical joke played by Toby on Gary that almost gets him fired, and a nightshade-poisoning incident involving Mimi, completely sour the relationship between the two old friends. The second act contains several very serious scenes of yelling-matches, played rather straight by the Witness cast, and everyone goes their separate ways in the end.
While Kingsland's effort is no doubt highly impressive -- he undertook the writing of a full-length, coherent work for the stage, produced as the third annual Witness Theatre Intersession production -- his play flags and gets a bit tiresome as it goes on. The problem is that he starts with an irresistible premise: two ridiculous suburban hunter-gatherers, raiding vegetable gardens and cooking stolen house pets. But, eventually he lets his work get too contemplative.
At the end of the first act, it looks like we're in for a clever satire, but by the final curtain, we're left with a moralizing message: no one can be sure that they're happy with their lives, don't trust your idealistic whims, but also don't let your idealistic whims die off.
Another problem was that the production could have been so much funnier. In the sixth scene, when Bridget and Toby come back to apologize for putting Jasper in the veterinary hospital, they bring a tiny carved wooden dog, a "totem" for healing wishes, and perform a silly, sort of druidic ritual for Jasper's speedy recovery.
But Sihilling delivers lines like, "Jasper, brother canine, may our ministrations ease your bodily pain and mental anguish," in a flat, vacuous voice that sucks the very comedy out of them. For most of the play, Frank and Sihilling, who play the two funniest characters, move slowly and talk in dreamy monotones, as if trying to replace the absurdity of their actions with a sense of normalcy. Cromwell, probably because she's playing the part of a high school student and wants to appear childish, shouts all of her lines, which is funny for a while, but ultimately hard on the nerves.
Wartanian does a great job as the high-strung yet witty father figure, delivering his punchlines calmly and his screams at Toby passionately, and freshman Kevin Uy is a highlight as Arthur, Gary's blabber-mouthed, nutrition-obsessed co-worker. Director Eric Jabart, a graduate student, also does a great job with a minimal set and, save a few cramped-looking scenes in Gary's living room, everything is beautifully staged.
In the end, the production of Whitehill may have bitten off a bit more than Witness could chew, but like most of the student-run company's plays, it was consistently entertaining and admirable in scope. It shows tremendous potential in Kingsland and in Witness as a whole to produce works for the theater that are funny, off-beat and maybe even make us do some thinking.
