coming and going
by
Douglas Messerli
Stephen
Sachs Arrival and Departure (based
on David Lean’s Brief Encounter) / directed by Stephen Sachs at Los
Angeles, The Fountain Theatre / the production I saw was the matinee on Sunday,
July 15, 2018
Anyone
who has read my review of the Noel Coward / David Lean movie of 1945, Brief Encounter (in My Year 2012: Center’s Collapse) will know that am no fan of that melodrama
about a young, rather unhappy British housewife who accidentally encounters a
handsome and suave man (Trevor Howard), also married and with children, at a train station, which
begins a series of “brief encounters” in which they increasingly begin to
realize that they might have made the perfect couple as opposed to the flawed
relationships in which they now live.
Coward and Lean finally wake up their
dreaming characters, forcing them apart and back into the snug corners of their
provincial isolationism. It is, in fact, the almost perfect work for these
Trump years, as we are all asked to stop seeking anything out of the ordinary
and to return to a time that never was.
Still, I like to be fair to things,
particularly to such a much-loved film which has been adulated by most of the
British public and admired in the US as well--where several variations of it,
in film and on the stage, have recently occurred--and, accordingly, agreed to see this new production.
Fortunately, Stephen Sachs, working in
careful tandem with the Deaf married couple, actors Deanne Bray and Troy Kotsur,
using the Coward work as an vague outline, transforms the work into a
completely American drama which includes a zealously religious husband, Doug
(Brian Robert Burns); a racially-mixed romance between a Dunkin’ Donuts Pilipino
shop girl, Mya (Jessica Jade Andres) and a handsome black policeman, Russell
(Shon Fuller); a confused, cellphone-tapping teenager, Jule (in the production
I saw performed by Aurelia Myers); and most importantly, two Deaf people who
sign instead of speaking, although Emily apparently has the ability, with the
use of special hearing devices to speak in English, the man she meets in
the New York subway, Sam, who works as a American Sign Language instructor,
only signs.
While Coward’s work on stage was titled Still Life, Sachs' version of this work
is almost in constant motion, the various patrons of Mya’s donut stand are almost always on the move, marching with the play’s few cast members into patterned
maneuvers to represent the busy streets of New York City; Emily’s and Sam’s encounters are presented
in ASL as passionately expressed conversations with an ever-constant use of hands,
arms, and eyes, and an emotionality that simply cannot be expressed in the simple
home-bound conversations of Emily’s religious and hard-working husband.
In fact, Bray and Kotsur, emanate love
from the first second they meet, falling naturally into a relationship that, in this
case, cannot be unspoken, and is witnessed by all around them in their vibrant
movements. Even though she is in her last weeks of Bible study, ready to be
baptized into what is clearly a “born-again” sect, anyone with two eyes can see
that this is a completely wrong decision. Sachs doesn’t even try to bother to
gather a linguistic debate about the issue; having worked for 30 years with the
now nationally famous Deaf West actors, beginning at the very theater in which
I witnessed this play, the writer/director instinctually knows that these issues
are better played out visually than voiced, even though a chorus of fellow
commuters played by Adam Burch and Stasha Surdyke do translate the ASL gestures
into language for those of us who, I might argue, are hard of seeing.
Sachs' work, accordingly, redeems the quiet
repressions of Lean’s film by setting everything into the tumult of American
life, with all its endless comings and goings, its constant sense of motion. The couple at its center fall increasingly in love in the midst of those
greasy, sugar-coated tables serving donuts and coffee, not in a slightly
steam-and-smoke filled cottage serving up English tea and other edibles. What
was polite in the British version is here gritty, even somewhat violent,
particularly when Emily dares to visit Sam on his own territory, in the
classroom in which he appears to live. And even that visit terribly excites
her, the halls filled with signing young men and women which reveal the truth of her now repressed homelife of devotion and faith.
Emily, Sam, Jule (Julia) remind one of primary
and secondary characters in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, all figures who seek a world outside of their provincial lives,
a play in which Kotsur starred in a major Pasadena Playhouse production. Is it any wonder that this play’s Emily, after
what she knows will be Sam's and her last meeting, is ready to throw herself into
the subway tracks? The gentle Russell, the strange romanticist of this play, saves
her, so that she might return home to a place she now must realize is not open
to her own being.
She returns for the sake of her daughter,
Jule, who has just found out that she has been tricked by a girl pretending to
be a young boy about whom she has fantasized and to whom she has poured out her love for on her
Twitter or Facebook account. More than ever, this girl needs a strong mother
who Emily has now become. But even Doug, who in fear of losing his wife
forever had signed up for ASL training, now asks her to be his teacher, a
loving act that, no matter how simple it may seem, cannot be ignored as a
pleading for her to stay within the flock.
Yes, like the major character of Lean’s film,
she does return to the fold, the small town provincialism she knows is wrong
for her; but here, at least, she is no longer just a housewife. She has become
a powerful mother and a teacher, perhaps now to even stand up against Doug’s
religiosity in order to seek out another version of an American Dream, a dream
that is always coming and going in American thought and, perhaps, maybe should
even be laid to rest. Dreams are dreams, but life is living out who we are and
who we have become.
Los Angeles, July
16, 2018
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