An encouraging trend: Theater for grownups

Until very recently, Philadelphia's theater community seemed largely mired in an aesthetic consisting of plays dark in content, with edgy writing spoken by rough yet sympathetic characters. The works of Adam Rapp, Noah Haidle, Itamar Moses, and the early works of Tracy Letts— among many other young writers— fall into this category, which has usually been favored by scrappy young organizations like Theatre Exile, Flashpoint, Luna and a few others.

Their subject matter leans heavily toward mental health issues, poverty and the general everyday struggle to survive in contemporary America. Mostly, these plays aim for our hearts rather than our heads. A favorite subject seems to be awkward relationships between quirky 20-somethings and childless early 30-somethings.

But a spate of recent productions suggests a new direction. Terms like "intelligent," "challenging," profound" and— dare I say?— "elitist" clearly apply to the Lantern's New Jerusalem, the Wilma's Our Class, Philadelphia Theatre Company's production of Red, and InterAct's The How and the Why. Each of these productions presented intellectually sharp dialogue that challenged the audience not just to feel and respond, but also to think and engage.

Artists and scientists

In Red, the painter Mark Rothko prowls before a canvas, fighting a battle with artistic tradition as well as the public's indifference to his works. The theme concerned nothing less than the place of art and an artist in society. InterAct's The How and the Why pitted two competing theories of evolutionary biology in a fight for academic spoils. Playwright Sarah Treem infused these ideas into the larger milieu of the challenges confronted by women in science who try to balance family lives with the pressures of male-centric academia.

Our Class pulled the scab off a deep wound that few people other than historians knew existed. The Wilma's production showed the pre-Holocaust horror of a small Polish village that turned against its Jewish residents in the wake of a Nazi invasion and revealed how the legacy of their actions still reverberates today.

The Lantern offered the best of these entries in New Jerusalem, a high-stakes battle of ideas between one of history's most revolutionary thinkers and the potentially anti-Semitic local official looking for excuses to shutter his synagogue. This quasi-courtroom drama portrayed 23-year old Baruch Spinoza defending his ideas and the freedom to espouse them even when doing so endangered the precarious protection afforded the Jewish community in 17th-Century Amsterdam. Shaw or Ibsen would have written this play if the former was a better dramatist or the latter a better thinker.

All these works appealed to educated audiences that look to theater for something beyond entertainment.

Spinoza's comic side

To be sure, the stellar acting in all these productions ensured emotional richness and deep human connection beyond the ideas. To single out just two performances, Sam Henderson as Spinoza took a real-life philosopher who wrote in dense, overly analytic circumlocutions and transformed Spinoza into a vulnerable, likeable hybrid of poet and a stand-up comedian. Victoria Frings in The How and the Why gave a memorable portrayal of a confused, yet brilliant young woman who can't separate her scientific theories from her personal ideology and identity.

In character, these plays also reflected the educational demographic that attends theater in Philadelphia (and, I suspect, in other cities). Each of these recent, intelligent productions concerned challenges that reflected on more mature themes of artistic and scientific ambition, intellectual and personal freedom and the accompanying ethical questions of civic duty and individual responsibility.

Yes, the sluggish slacker stew of grown children hanging out in an alley behind a record store surely satisfies a theater company's need to appear hip, cool and connected to the young. But at 23, Spinoza was already influencing contemporary thought throughout Europe. So who, really, led the life worth dramatizing?

Do these four works herald a new trend in staging? As an educated audience member, I can only hope.♦


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