Alicia Grega-Pikul
University of Scranton actor Michael B. Flynn learned a few tricks performing professionally at Millbrook Playhouse near Lock Haven this summer. And he didn’t just bring back stories of his experience to share with his fellow students, he brought the summer stock company’s artistic director. After Flynn convinced theater department head Rich Larsen to check out Mary Catherine Burke’s direction of
Noises Off, he agreed she’d be a good fit for the University’s program.
Burke worked as a freelance director regionally and off-Broadway for 10 years, assisting the directors of several Broadway shows along the way, before accepting a position as the artistic director at Millbrook Playhouse (
www.millbrookplayhouse.com) in Clinton County last year.
This weekend in Scranton audiences will be able to see what she and three student actors, including Flynn, have done with Lanford Wilson’s
Redwood Curtain. The play was selected for its Vietnam focus in cooperation with this year’s Scranton Reads One Book, One City program which focused on Tim O’Brien’s
The Things They Carried. Unlike the book, the play is less about the war itself than the resonance of its aftermath decades later.
The New York Times critic Frank Rich identified the play’s subject upon its premiere in 1993 as “the self-destructive American habit of practicing amnesia about all its past nightmares, not just those of Vietnam.”
“Standing in rootless contrast to the trees around them,” he described, “the people in this play, and by implication their country, cannot find their way out of the woods until they figure out how they got stranded there in the first place.”
Sam Morales portrays a piano prodigy named Geri. The daughter of an American G.I. and a Vietnamese woman, she was adopted by a wealthy family who happens to own several hundred acres of California’s Redwood Forest, Burke explained. It’s while visiting her Aunt Geneva’s (Vanessa Revlas) estate that she begins interviewing Humboldt County veterans in search of her father.
“It’s a true phenomenon that apparently a lot of the G.I.s who came back from Vietnam and couldn’t re-assimilate into standard society became what the Irish call “tinkers.” They became people who would waft in and out of small towns but mostly live in the forest. And there is large population living specifically in the Redwood Forest ... where it’s reminiscent of the experience of Vietnam because it’s kind of the same temperature and it’s always very moist and it’s very isolated. They can live there with close access to society but without having to face society.”
In order to prepare for their roles, the students listened to music of the Vietnam era and watched a lot of movies. Burke brought them outside to rehearse as the play’s scenes tend to pass from a coffee shop setting to the forest in a fluid motion with no traditional delineation. Larsen’s set visually evokes a forest with a huge stump, sculpted to allow seating for what the audience understands as indoor locale.
The play, suggested Burke, is easy enough to relate to even for those of us who didn’t come of age in the grunge years, wondering what their father might be like and if we had inherited any traits of his. Even those not actually on a literal quest to find a parent have likely struggled to make a connection or improve a relationship.
“It’s an interesting kind of love story about two really fractured and fragmented people trying to find completion,” Burke said. “They have a self-defense mechanism that’s super strong, like a wall that’s five feet high that anyone has to scale to get to them. And through each other they manage to break down their walls and reinvest in what they love, and not be afraid to love.”