Blogger Mary Ginn

I am three months behind on my promised blog.  I apologize, but when the garden calls I must answer.  Somehow the warm weather and the smell of the soil pull me outside until the last light of  day.  Fortunately, it gives me time to think and for the last few days has led me to musing on my two favorite things, gardens and plays. 

How often has the setting of many of the Hamilton-Gibson plays been absolutely essential to the atmosphere of the play?  My first thought today, as I was pinching snails from my peas, was to remember “The Chalk Garden.”  You may remember the movie from the ‘60s starring Hayley Mills?  In the 1996 H-G production, Miss Madrigal, whose past is shaded in mystery, is hired as a governess for an unruly teen.  Madrigal dares to chide her employer, the child’s grandmother, about her indulgence toward the child comparing it to the grandmother’s failed attempts to raise beautiful flowers in barren soil. In this play, the chalky garden beyond the French doors becomes a metaphoric explanation for the child’s aberrant behavior and draws the audience into an intimate understanding of the peculiar Madrigal and the shocking revelation about her past.

“The Secret Garden” of several summers ago is another example of a musical in which the setting commands and directs the movement of the story, from the horror of the cholera epidemic in India to the dreary English manor set in the moors of Yorkshire.  Colin, an invalid, is virtually imprisoned by his father.  In this play the secret garden of his deceased mother becomes a kind of mystical place of physical healing and emotional reconciliation between father and son.  

Likewise, in this season’s “The Miracle Worker,“ Annie Sullivan begs Captain Keller to be allowed to remove Helen from the family home.  She takes the child to the potting cottage.  It is only in that isolation, removed from the well-meaning indulgence of Helen’s parents, that Miss Sullivan is able to make the miracle, the breakthrough that gives Helen her first true mutual communication with the sighted and hearing world.

On the lighter side, what about that spooky bayou of “The Sugar Bean Sisters”?  Can the audience SEE the swamp and the dripping Spanish moss and believe in the possibility of a lost sister swallowed by an alligator and a happily anticipated alien abduction?  You bet!  The setting makes the macabre believable. We take in stride, the appearance of the Cajun bird woman and the bizarre happenings of the play, thanks to the creepy crawly atmosphere created by the set designer, playwright, and the imagination of the audience.

And speaking of the imagination of the audience, there was 2009’s “Our Town”. The title alone conjures images for everyone.  Does the “Our Town” of Thornton Wilder fit with your sense of home? Though we weren’t, any of us, raised in Grover’s Corners at the beginning of the 20^th century, are there some universals about everyday life: growing up, courtship, committing to marriage, the cycles of birth and death?.  No doubt Wilder was entirely intentional in his minimalist approach to staging.  I suspect that‘s the very reason “Our Town” has lived on a century later. 

Contrast this to “The Laramie Project.”  Indeed the brutality of the story could occur in any age or any country. But the specific circumstances seem to be particular to 20^th century, rural, conservative America.  By naming the actual town in its title, it directs us to a“There”.  The documentary style of the “project” takes us painfully to the real site of the torture of Matthew Shephard, “The Fence”, above the sparkling lights of Laramie.  Nevertheless, we are left ill-at-ease. The “There” of Laramie is slippery and uncertain. At the heart of the play the question nags, “Could this happen in MY town?”

For me, the most successful plays are those in which the locale becomes a character in itself; those in which the setting serves to isolate the players physically, psychologically, or spiritually.  I recall “The View from Here” a quirky comedy in which an agoraphobic woman anxiously watches the world from her window, daring to venture beyond only when she wins a TV set  from her local grocery store.  Contrast this to the terror and isolation of the Jewish family in hiding in “And Then They Came for Me,“  and against this season’s “Seven Stories,“ a goofy microcosm of urban America, in which the characters dwell in cubicles and the protagonist eventually flies away from it all when he leaps from the ledge. Perhaps my personal favorite for its pathos and power was, “The Elephant Man,” in which John Merrick is confined to a hospital room as a grotesque. There, within the four walls of his confinement and the prison of his wasting body, he painstakingly builds an intricate model of a soaring cathedral as he approaches his inevitable death.

What constitutes setting?  It may be as large as the heavens, or small as the human mind.  Often it capitalizes on a charming corner of the world.  Could “Steel Magnolias” be set anywhere but Chinquapin Parish?  Could “Quilters” story be told anywhere but on the isolated prairie of the 19^th century homesteads of Midwest? The geography of these plays are so intricately woven into the human fiber of the characters that to separate the setting  from their stories would be impossible.

Sometimes the “setting” is embodied in a world as limited as a prop. In “Walk Right Up,” Lily and her children confront the issues of aging and disability in a vacation cabin away from their workaday worlds.  But Millar’s wheelchair is the defining image of the play.. Millar’s eventually defiance of its confines, becomes the fulcrum that lifts him from pity to dignity .Who would have thought that a few season’s later H-G would stage that crazy “Flight of  the Lawn Chair Man?”  In counterpoint, this title character’s chair becomes his ticket to freedom.

One of my favorite H-G events is the Tales of Tioga Playwriting Contest. What a challenge to these developing playwrights. We all connect to place, specifically to this place. Tales of Tioga contestants must find the integral bond between their story and this place. If they find a story that could only happen here, they have truly hit the mark.

When you reflect about the 20 years of H-G plays, you find a wealth of settings informing us about the world in which we live.  From India to Delancey Street, the bayou to Almost, Maine, thanks H-G for telling the tales and taking us away.  What a way to travel!

MARY GINN lives in Wellsboro and has been actively involved with HG in many ways for many years. She has appeared in major roles in THE CHALK GARDEN, THE ELEPHANT MAN, STEEL MAGNOLIAS, the United States premier of WALK RIGHT UP, and most recently ANCESTRAL VOICES to name a few. She served on the HG board and currently serves on the Artistic Planning Committee.

 

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