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Doing it all in 'Darkfall'
A playwright's determination to stage his parable has him working triple time.
By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 16, 2001
[Times photo: Jamie Francis]
Luke, played by David Davalos, is subdued by God’s enforcer Mike, played by Stephen Ivester, in American Stage’s production of Darkfall.
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ST. PETERSBURG -- In the beginning, David Davalos was the playwright, submitting his script to the New Visions series at American Stage. Next he agreed to direct the play. Finally, when an actor dropped out of the production, he joined the cast.
Now the Texan turned New Yorker is a triple threat.
Darkfall, written and directed by Davalos, who also has a principal role, opens Friday at the St. Petersburg theater.
"It was never my intention to come down here and pull an Orson Welles, but that's sort of how it's ending up," he said.
Davalos replaced Ken Mitchell, the artistic director of American Stage, in the part of Luke. Mitchell decided he didn't have time to be in the play while also preparing to direct the theater's next show, Spunk, which opens in September. He helped Davalos with the staging and designed the set.
"Ken will watch the scenes I am in," Davalos said last week. "I feel comfortable in that we're in agreement on the big questions of the play. My only disappointment is that I was really looking forward to watching it happen. Now I have to split the difference between that and making sure my own performance is up to the standard I set for myself."
Darkfall is about an old man handing over a sizable family business to one of two people, either his adoptive son Luke, with whom he had a falling out, or his biological son, Josh (Brian Shea). The play is something of a religious parable, borrowing from the Bible and Milton's Paradise Lost, among other sources, with Josh meant to suggest Jesus and Luke, Lucifer.
Davalos, 35, got the idea when he was riding the New York subway, reading an article in the New York Times Magazine on children's letters to God.
"One of the questions in the article had to do about death," he said. "For some reason, I had this image of God as an old man in a hospital room, dying, with the archangels sitting in death watch. The idea in my head was, when God dies, where does he go? If God dies, and he's running things, who runs things then? Who takes over?"
Though the play deals in Christian themes, Davalos hopes people don't get the wrong idea.
"I don't want this to be a sermon," he said. "For a showcase in New York, we actually had a rabbi and a priest both sitting in the front row, and they laughed louder than anyone else. I think the more you know about the Christian tradition, the more references you'll get. Hopefully, you don't need to know them, but just have a kind of general awareness."
Darkfall is receiving only its second full production as part of New Visions, in which a series of eight plays were presented in staged readings this past season. Davalos' play was selected by audiences and theater management as the one to be produced.
"I kind of backed into writing," said Davalos, trained as an actor at the University of Texas and Ohio University. His first literary effort was a spoof he concocted while performing at the Utah Shakespearean Festival.
"It was a sequel to Death of a Salesman using the plot of Hamlet," he said. He went on to write a Watergate Richard III; an Othello modeled on the OJ Simpson trial; and The Tragedy of Johnnius Caerson, which depicted the struggle to succeed Johnny Carson as ruler of late-night TV.
"Jay Leno was the Brutus character, David Letterman was Marc Antony, and the 'friends, Romans, countrymen' speech was a top 10 list," he said. "In a weird way, I feel like I've kind of done my apprenticeship with Shakespeare."
Theater preview
Darkfall by David Davalos opens Friday and runs through Sept. 2 at American Stage, 211 Third St. S, St. Petersburg. Tickets: $15. (727) 823-7529.
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