A tale of two plays

Whether you like plays neatly tied up with a bow or ricocheting around your brain for hours, Broadway has winners.

By JOHN FLEMING

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 27, 2001

NEW YORK -- What do you want out of a play? A smart -- and smartly paced -- entertainment that more or less resembles your own life? Or a long, messy meditation on God, the meaning of existence and how the world works that could be taking place on another planet?

Well, it depends, but lately the arbiters of taste in American theater, as well as the overwhelmingly white, affluent audience that goes to the theater, have been opting for the former, honoring plays such as Art, Dinner With Friends and this season's Broadway hit and Pulitzer Prize winner, Proof.

Yet, at the same time as these drawing room comedy-dramas have been hauling in awards and keeping box offices humming, a body of work that is coming to rival that of masters such as Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams just keeps on keepin' on.

I'm referring, of course, to August Wilson's decade-by-decade cycle of plays on African-American culture in the 20th century. The latest installment, King Hedley II, is now on Broadway.

Seeing Proof and King Hedley II alongside each other, a theatrical full immersion allowed by taking in matinee and nighttime performances on the same day, I was fascinated by the contrasts in sensibility and intention and technique of these two plays. I'm not really thinking about subject matter, though obviously there is a tremendous difference between a play whose characters are academics in Chicago's comfortable Hyde Park neighborhood and another about an ex-con and his family in the downtrodden Hill District of Pittsburgh.

In Proof, David Auburn tells the tale of Catherine, the 25-year-old daughter of a mathematics genius who went "bughouse." She dropped out of her own math studies at Northwestern to stay home and take care of her father in his last years while he filled up notebooks with gibberish and sought to interpret the communications of aliens through the Dewey Decimal numbers on library books. Still, there was always the hope that he might regain his creative gifts, and in the days after his death, one of his proteges comes across a complex proof among his papers that could change the course of mathematical thinking.

The proof sets off a puzzle that keeps audience members on the edge of their seats.

The Broadway production benefits from a luminous performance by Mary-Louise Parker as Catherine, who fears she may have inherited not only her father's intellectual talent but also his mental instability. At the same time as Catherine wrestles with her inner demons, as well as with her sister, a financial analyst who wants to sell the family home, she also is falling in love with the young mathematician who discovered the proof.

Higher mathematics, mental illness, the death of a parent, sibling conflict -- Proof sounds grim, but it's actually funny. Though Auburn studied calculus at the University of Chicago, his play deftly suggests knowledge of its arcane subject without needing to explain anything more complicated than a wisecrack about prime numbers. Rather, it uses the subculture of mathematicians -- geeky neurotics who worry about burning out at 25 -- as fresh background for a conventional romance, played out on the back porch of old brick house.

Witty lines come in the regular intervals of a sitcom, and everything gets wrapped up in two hours exactly. Proof is a remarkably efficient affair, moving the plot along almost exclusively through fast-paced dialogue. In fact, about the only speech that lasts as much as a minute is a reverie by Catherine's father, in a flashback, about the pleasure of killing a September afternoon browsing in a bookstore.

King Hedley II couldn't be more long-winded, running about three hours and feeling even longer because of the effort it takes to work through the elaborate, word-drunk speeches, ranging from flights of biblical prophecy to poetic riffs on people, places and things that don't figure in the story. Wilson's six characters, all of whom have their say at great length, talk like real people, going off on loopy tangents and sometimes not making much sense.

Brian Stokes Mitchell, known for singing in Kiss Me, Kate and Ragtime, makes his bid to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor in the title role. With shaved head and an air of dangerous intensity, he plays a man who served seven years in prison for killing someone who slashed his face with a razor. Now King lives with his strong-willed wife, Tonya (a brilliant performance by Viola Davis), and his mother, Ruby, a onetime band singer played by Leslie Uggams.

Along with a crony, King is engaged in a scam involving refrigerators, and he robs a jeweler to get money to open a video store. Presumably, the point is that these sorts of hardscrabble schemes were all that were available to many black men in the 1980s, the decade in which the play is set, but except for rap on the sound system and a snippet from a Reagan speech ("It's time to put America back to work"), it doesn't feel especially time specific. Ominously, four of the characters are packing pistols.

One striking aspect of King Hedley II is its similarity, even in some particulars, to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Like Willy Loman, King cultivates a garden in his unpromising patch of urban turf, eventually fencing it in with razor wire. Both Willy and King make speeches about money and business that are shot through with religious fervor.

Miller and Wilson both create next-door neighbors to bear witness to the tragic protagonists. In Death of a Salesman, it's Willy's only friend, Charley, a successful businessman. In King Hedley II, it's Stool Pigeon, a Scripture-spouting, headline-chanting elder whose house is stuffed from floor to ceiling with old newspapers. Played by Stephen McKinley Henderson, he is John the Baptist to King's Messiah, an evangelical voice in the wilderness who appears crazy.

In a lot of ways, King Hedley II is inconvenient when compared to a play like Proof, which goes down so easy. Even in a posh Broadway staging, Wilson's rough-hewn drama is unsettling and hard to understand.

But it's not the slickness of Proof that has stuck with me. Instead, I keep mulling the speeches of Stool Pigeon, who opens and closes King Hedley II with mad soliloquies that turn all the sorrows of the Hill District over to God.

"Bring down the fire," he rants. "In the land of plenty, the storm rages. . . . We give you our glory."

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