InterAct Theatre's "Silverhill'

The year is 1891, and it’s apple-picking time at Silverhill, the self-styled Christian communist community somewhere in upstate New York. The rules are simple: patriarch Alden Prescott makes them, as he has since the long-ago day when the Lord vouchsafed him his vision of a purified, holy communion of souls. Everyone works, and everyone loves— loves everybody else, at least of the opposite sex.

There is no money, but a common storehouse. Discipline is enforced by group meetings in which errant members are gently corrected by the community. Silverhill makes its own goods, and what it can’t produce on its own it buys with the proceeds of its quilt-making. There’s actually a tidy profit that no one knows about but Alden and the bank. No sense tempting the Devil.

The Devil, alas, is already there, as we perceive in the play’s opening scene, when Alden’s wife Kate playfully offers him a newly picked apple. Part of the scene’s undercurrent is the couple’s awareness of the Biblical story they’re reenacting. Yes, Silverhill is a latter-day Eden, and the apple is dangerous fruit. But to the pure in heart, all things are pure—no?

Virility problem

The trouble is that Alden no longer approaches his wife sexually, but monopolizes the reluctantly granted affections of pretty young Tirzah. This preference violates Alden’s own cardinal rule against exclusivity— the possession of anything or anyone not enjoyed in common.

Alden’s excuse, when he is challenged, is that his loins now respond only to Tirzah. Surely the patriarch must remain virile in body as well as gifted in spirit? The situation is complicated by young Frank Taylor, the community’s selling agent, with whom Tirzah has fallen in love. Frank is a closet capitalist who not only wants to expand the quilting trade but to have his lady fair. Monogamy is of course the perfect paradigm of a property regime, in which each partner contractually owns the other. Frank’s insistence on opening Silverhill’s books, coupled with his suggestion that the community incorporate as a joint-stock enterprise, constitute a declaration of war with Alden.

Who’s the Devil?

Thomas Gibbons, whose previous works include 6221, his account of Philadelphia’s MOVE tragedy, and Permanent Collection, about the debacle of the Barnes Foundation, is no stranger to controversial themes. Anyone who can give Richard Glanton’s fictional persona plausible lines can certainly give the Devil his due. The question, in Silverhill, is who the Devil is.

Alden has insensibly turned into a despot, but he’s not merely that; Frank sniffs out Alden’s hypocrisy ruthlessly, but doesn’t reckon with his own lust for power. On one level, their struggle is the classic rivalry between youth and age, but real issues of value, liberty and community are at stake here as well.

The conclusion is foreordained, but because youth will be served doesn’t necessarily put it in the right. Silverhill, as one character expresses it, represents “the hopeful poetry of utopia,” the ever-renewed dream of being better than we are, and perhaps can be.

Jim Jones vs. Gordon Gekko

Frank, his youthful ardors aside, speaks the prose of commerce: not shared lives, but shared stock. Gibbons acknowledges both commodities as perdurable, and history’s deeper structures as an oscillation between the two. If Alden Prescott risks becoming a Jim Jones or a David Koresh, Frank dead-ends in Gordon Gekko.

Seth Rozin’s direction assembles the pieces of Gibbons’s moral puzzle astutely. Christopher Coucill is a commanding figure in every respect as Alden, and Dan Hodge is able as his antagonist. Nancy Boykin is fine as the rejected but still loving Kate, and Jessica DalCanton brings freshness to Tirzah. As Alden’s loyal confederate Erastus, Tim Moyer is customarily excellent. The end of the play belongs in some sense to him, as the one character whose uncorrupted if naïve idealism is betrayed. Nick Embree’s set is strong, and lighting, costumes, and sound all contribute to an integrated whole.

Political theater, InterAct’s specialty, always runs the risk of didacticism, oversimplification or special pleading. There’s all the more reason for satisfaction when a nuanced play about perennial social conflicts receives a robust and sensitive production.♦

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