Note: The Wake is on stage at the Kirk Douglas Theatre until Sunday, April 18. See www.centertheatregroup.org to purchase tickets.
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Playwright Lisa Kron, left, with Heidi Schreck
Ellen is the sort of angry liberal who provides conservatives with straw for stuffing stereotypes: relentlessly focused on politics, enraged by social injustice, unabashedly partisan and rather humourless. But in Lisa Kron’s hands Ellen is the complex fulcrum in the portrait of heartbreak, both intensely personal and political, a character at once tolerated, ridiculed, ignored or embraced with some bemusement by those around her. Ellen comes to represent the balloon of bourgeois liberals’ self-deception – at least, Kron’s interpretation of it. The Wake, then, is the pin that pops the balloon and attempts to expose the insecurities and blind spots of what one could broadly call the American Left. As drama, it’s terrific. As political commentary, it doesn’t entirely live up to its ambitions. Yet thanks to Kron’s charged writing and one of the strongest casts and crews since The Paris Letter, The Wake manages to transcend its shortcomings to be one of the best productions put on by the Kirk Douglas Theatre.
In a masterful example of structural storytelling, the personal and the political mirror each other in Ellen’s character, while reflecting, in turn, on Ellen’s privileged position. In her relationships, this translates to a love triangle that sees her on top. One corner is her good-humoured, tolerant and completely smitten boyfriend. Another is a woman, once a high-school classmate, who loves her with such passion it hurts the audience as much as it does the character. Ellen’s choice between the two, when it is made, is inevitably and poignantly tragic.
Affected by the same blind spot that influences her personal choices, Ellen argues her politics in a well-intentioned but self-gratifying way that doesn’t tend to go over well with others; not with her politically sympathetic sister who comes to feel burdened by judgments and expectations, nor with her sister’s wife who hates political talk in general. As The Wake moves from the sore spot of the 2000 election, past Sept. 11, to culminate in 2007, the dynamics that emerge from Ellen’s political outrage result not in hopeful change but in a distance between characters that skirts the fringes of alienation.
Yet when Kron throws a sucker punch whose only surprise to readers of Howard Zinn is that it didn’t come sooner and with more deliberation, The Wake creates stress points in its otherwise meticulous structure. What begins as a study of a mainstream Democrat partisan who apparently never read any Zinn turns to a strange self-indulgence that the play earlier resists. It’s entirely legitimate to raise the issue of the latte liberal or, as they apparently say in Poland, the “coffee shop revolutionary” – people who talk about revolutions without a realistic and practical understanding of the issues. The conflict of comfort vs. risk stabs the very heart of political activism, raising the paradox (some would say hypocrisy) of attacking a privileged position while simultaneously occupying that very same position.
Unfair, however, is confronting the problem of an ivory tower intellectualism whose blind spots evade self-reflection, but not risking a solution, even one that might eventually be proven wrong. Kron chooses the wake as her metaphor, as in the wake of a boat as the only sign of its turbulent passing. But how about the analogy from astronomy: hunting for black holes, from which light cannot escape, by deliberately examining the behaviour of objects around it. That last-minute sucker punch can just as easily signal the beginning of a new journey as it does the end of an all-too-familiar one; a spark instead of a snuff. Whatever solution there is to finding our blind spots, The Wake has the trailhead in sight but closes it eyes.
As it plays out, The Wake frustrates by amounting to a dismantling that feels incomplete. There is, of course, the argument for leaving audiences wanting more. In this, The Wake succeeds in leaving audiences with the question of what happens next for an enormously fascinating character whose self-inflicted wounds are the natural consequence of her choices. Yet slimming down the 2-hour, 45-minute running time, pruning the redundancies and expositions, would have offered the opportunity to take on the theme of blind spots and bourgeois liberals with an eye towards creativity instead of mere destruction. Credit Kron’s writing and the KDT’s superb production quality that, despite all that, The Wake is wondrously eloquent, moving, funny and heartbreaking – a memorable start to further reflection.
The Wake. Written by Lisa Kron. Directed by Leigh Silverman. Starring Emily Donahoe, Carson Elrod, Andrea Frankle, Miriam F. Glover, Deirdre O’Connell, Heidi Schreck, Danielle Skraastad. On stage at the Kirk Douglas Theatre until Sunday, April 18. Visit http://www.centertheatregroup.org/tickets/productiondetail.aspx?id=11166 for information.