EgoPo Classic Theater presents John Guare's 'Lydie Breeze Part 3: Madaket Road'

Separately, they’re fascinating plays about America during and after the Civil War. Together, they’re ambitious works — and moving triumphs for the celebrated playwright of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation. They’re also successes for EgoPo, now finishing its 25th season (the past 14 in Philadelphia, after being stranded here by Hurricane Katrina).

Madaket Road picks up 20 years after Aipotu (Utopia spelled backward). That Nantucket commune, formed by Lydie Breeze (Melanie Julian) and her friends, has collapsed. Lydie appears primarily as a ghost; husband Joshua (Charlie DelMarcelle) hangs on, drinking away his remorse. Daughter Lydie (Kylie Westerbeck) and servant Beatty (Hannah Gold) imbue the mother’s suicide with supernatural powers.

Sinking sands

No one is on firm ground, as Markéta Fantová’s scenic design suggests. The stage, with audience on three sides, is all sand, though much action occurs indoors. Mike Inwood’s lighting skillfully suggests twilight and isolation.

Characters we followed in the first two parts are ghosts (like David Girard’s Dan) or offstage (Ed Swidey’s Amos). Gussie (Kristie Ecke), Lydie Breeze’s older daughter, comes ashore from John Randolph Hearst’s yacht, where she is secretary and mistress to Amos, now a senator and potential presidential candidate.

Gussie tells of super-rich Hearst plotting with ambitious Amos to start a convenient war. When she explains that “the only power is the power that comes from being around power,” we see how Madaket Road echoes present-day concerns. Ultimately, the play looks back more intimately at the incident that led Joshua to kill Dan and at the horrific legacy passed on from Dan to Lydie, and later, to several innocents.

One of their victims is Dan’s son Jeremiah (Grant Struble), a London actor famous for playing Frankenstein’s monster, who returns to Nantucket seeking revenge, or perhaps closure. Characters connect and the past rears up to punish them in ways that recall Henrik Ibsen’s dramas. “We all casually ruined each other’s lives,” Joshua realizes.

Love hurts

Madaket Road is often eerily spiritual and dreamlike — aided by Jay Ansill and Cynthia Hopkins’s music and performed from a balcony by Victoria Goins, Jahzeer Terrell, Hannah Van Sciver, and Philip Wilson. However, its events are staggeringly grim and real. Love, particularly the physical act, destroys nearly everyone. Yet some hope remains.

Director Lane Savadove, who brilliantly staged all three dramas, continues to work magic with rope (which forms the upstage wall of Fantova’s set) and with dance-like movement. Westebeck soars as Young Lydie, who teeters on madness’s cliff edge, and Ecke is superb as her opportunistic sister. Dane Eissler plays Jude, a Christian Scientist so smitten with Young Lydie he goes against his religious instruction to bring her medicine.

Madaket Road haunts on several levels. It contains delicate design and stirring stage images. The personal tragedies of its young characters and the ghostly presence of the trilogy’s elders are finely wrought. Its imposing foreshadowing of the 20th century, the bold and violent “American century,” looms large. We already know it’s going to be a rough one.