Saturday, 1 April 2006 09:13 pm
The Story of King Hamlet and the Golden Fleece -- sort of
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deckardcanineMuch as I came to enjoy synthing for the play, I'm glad it's over. Yet the very next day, I have been involved in another play -- as an usher. This is the first time I've ushered a matinee (not that it was so different).
The play, N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker, vacillates between mild comedy and mild drama. In this case, "mild" should not be taken as a negative: if it were much further in either direction, I would find the gestalt diminished. True, it could have been too mild one way or the other, but Nash was careful.
The setting is the '30s Midwest, but it wouldn't be hard to transpose to another time and place. What we have is the story of a rural family with a literal drought to illustrate their social problems. They hire a goofy self-described rainmaker, even tho only one of them is simple-minded enough to believe he's not a con artist. What develops is predictable and yet more intriguing than hackneyed as it goes from lies to dreams, from denial to brutal honesty and on to beauty. The element of love takes a somewhat unusual turn, with a redemptive process I'd like to see a lot more often. You can guess well ahead of time what happens right at the end, and it's pretty corny, but that didn't stop me from enjoying its arrival.
I tell you, it's none too fair a world where Julia Roberts gets $30K for a Broadway performance that would get most people fired while the Arena Stage actors remain barely known.
The play, N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker, vacillates between mild comedy and mild drama. In this case, "mild" should not be taken as a negative: if it were much further in either direction, I would find the gestalt diminished. True, it could have been too mild one way or the other, but Nash was careful.
The setting is the '30s Midwest, but it wouldn't be hard to transpose to another time and place. What we have is the story of a rural family with a literal drought to illustrate their social problems. They hire a goofy self-described rainmaker, even tho only one of them is simple-minded enough to believe he's not a con artist. What develops is predictable and yet more intriguing than hackneyed as it goes from lies to dreams, from denial to brutal honesty and on to beauty. The element of love takes a somewhat unusual turn, with a redemptive process I'd like to see a lot more often. You can guess well ahead of time what happens right at the end, and it's pretty corny, but that didn't stop me from enjoying its arrival.
I tell you, it's none too fair a world where Julia Roberts gets $30K for a Broadway performance that would get most people fired while the Arena Stage actors remain barely known.
