Hush: An Interview With America: Many Questions, Few Answers
Brockett Theater, through March 23
Running Time: 1 hr, 15 min
Every young artist needs a safe venue in which to experiment. In the world of theatre, this cannot happen in isolation; an audience’s energy is needed to complete the circuit. In the program for Hush: An Interview With America, the chair of the UT Department of Theatre and Dance, Richard M. Isackes, likens the department’s campus productions to laboratory experiences in which students can learn with the participation of a live audience. Watching Hush, I found the laboratory to be an apt metaphor for the production. But this raises questions for a critic. In such a setting, what is a reviewer’s role? Is it to encourage risk-taking or to champion only the risks that yield successful results? Is it to laud the learning efforts of all the young artists involved or to pinpoint the performers who may be stronger than the others at this stage of the learning curve? And, more importantly, what new knowledge and insight is the audience to take from such an experiment? In short, I found I was left with many more questions than answers in the wake of this production.
The cast and director of Hush are faced with immediate challenges in the form of James Still’s script. In the play, Maggie Parks, an imaginative blind girl on the edge of puberty, senses an unexplained presence in her backyard apple tree. Her “vision” captures the imagination of a national news personality, who labels it an angel and orchestrates a media blitz that terrorizes the small family. The problem is, the play never makes a commitment to the rules of the world it presents; amid naturalistic dialogue and statistical reports of real-world depravity, characters break through theatrical settings with maddening inconsistency and lack of explanation. A lion and lamb enter and exit, sometimes invisible to other characters, sometimes not. People enter the house through appliances, sometimes greeted with surprise, sometimes not. Part of my confusion may have been due to directorial decisions. I had many questions: Why does Maggie appear blind only in one scene of the play? Why does the FBI agent (a character about whose purpose I was unclear) directly address the audience in his short appearance, when no other character does? And who is this woman in the gypsylike costume that keeps dancing on and offstage?
Through the confusion, however, the cast is strong, each actor remaining remarkably consistent throughout the piece (no small task in this mishmash of changing theatrical rules). Jessica Robertson is fun to watch as the passionate newswoman hungering to bring hope to Middle America and higher ratings to her station; Ron Weisberg and Julie Wright, as lion and lamb, are respectively charming and sultry. The set by scenic designer Nick Rastenis is inspired, complete with a two-dimensional backdrop with appliance façades from which characters could physically invade the family home. The cast and crew should be proud of their steady handling of the complexities of Hush: An Interview With America. However, the value to the audience of participating in this experiment will depend upon the viewer. If one’s goal is to support the development of talented young artists, Hush fills the bill. Otherwise, the play, with its inconsistencies and confusion, may be a disappointment.
This article appears in March 21 • 2003.