HEROES by the Ross Valley Players Reviewed
HEROES
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle
To the immense pleasure of audiences, the Ross Valley Players are currently staging HEROES.
With respect to superannuation, Nature is in some regards kind.
While she or her or it will not stay the hand of fate, we are provided with sufficient warning shots.
But, while we are young, we unconsciously tune out such niggling perturbations.
As we age our defenses eventually weaken, denial gives way to petitioning: "Oh God, if you spare my hairline, waistline and buttline, I promise to be a faithful husband."
Or, "Oh God, if I become a vegetarian, will you please not let me end up looking like my parents?"
HEROES is a great opportunity for a reconciliation with an impending reality: a chance to drop the draw bridge so truth can stride proudly, as a welcome visitor, into your castle rather than living as an outcast beyond the ramparts of self-deception.
The denial mechanism of callow youth screens out foreboding auguries; therefore we can live our lives with blithe insouciance; we can throw all the wood on the fire and pander to the dictates of our pheromones, hormones and atavistic strands of DNA.
Denial gives us the power to shuttle blissfully between blind ambition and reckless abandon.
Regrettably, we do not need a Ouija board, tea leaves, palm readers or the entrails of birds to know the defining characteristics of our final years.
Unless worse things happen to us, there will come a day when the gold from our golden years will transmute into iron pyrite and the flickering thoughts that attempt to dimly illuminate our deteriorating consciousness will sputter into befuddled nescience.
Then too, what will be the point of packaging a thought into an audible coherent sentence?
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?
If a fond recollection is blurted out in a rest home and no one—other than a mercenary nurse—is there to pay attention to it or to successfully process it, does it make a noise?
Though denial insulates us from such a lurking verity, there may come a day when every sentence we utter to indifferent, preoccupied ears will be framed in past perfect, pluperfect, past absolute, past subjunctive or preterit tenses.
Present tense will be limited to responses to such questions as, "How are you today?"
Future tense will be completely boxed up and shelved until our next incarnation.
Be kind to your children, remember, it is they who will select your assisted living quarters and they who will appoint your day care provider or dominatrix.
On the other hand, HEROES presents a pleasant vision of the final years: a romp in Valhalla when compared to some possibilities.
The grateful nation of France, gives three World War I veterans: Henri, Gustave and Philippe, the chance to live out their final years with grace and dignity in an old soldiers' home situated in a provincial village.
Rather than remaining perpetually garbed in pajamas, bathrobes and slippers, these gallant veterans dress nattily for their days of reflection.
In a temperate French climate, they spend their days admiring the vista from a terrace.
From their deck chairs they see poplars, on a knoll in the distance, taunting them like their futile dreams of one day visiting Indochina.
The caretakers at their home allow the veterans to go for constitutional walks without the escape claxon sounding and without a bevy of bovine nurses herding them back into the octogenarian television room.
Like the rest of us, the limits to their freedom come only from themselves.
HEROES was written, in French, by Gerald Sibleyras.
Although it has the feel of a classic, it first hit the stage in Paris as recently as 2002.
Considering that Sibleyras was born in 1961, it is obviously not mere time that gives this play its matt patina and rich feel, it is the psychological depth to which Sibleyras masterfully crafts his characters.
Tom Stoppard has also lent a not so invisible hand to this play: he wrote the authorized English translation and we strongly suspect that he both sharpened and augmented the play's wit.
Alex Ross, Wood Lockhart and Russell Edmund Lessig superbly play the three veterans.
In all of Marin nor all of Northern California will you catch three gentlemen with such a commitment to the stage and with such dedicated talent assembled in one production: three mature veterans of the stage playing three mature veterans of the Great War: a winning combination.
For tickets to tempered truth and a most enjoyable show, call 415-456-9555 or visit http://www.rossvalleyplayers.com.