ROSS VALLEY PLAYERS PERFORMS SHADOWLANDS
SHADOWLANDS
Reviewed by Jeffrey R Smith
The Ross Valley Players are currently performing SHADOWLANDS—written by William Nicholson and directed by Linda Dunn—at the Barn in the Marin Garden Center.
Consistent with the RVP tradition, the superb quality of this production is in its details.
When professionals are called to perform on stage, the audience gets professional theater; when artists, such as the entire Ross Valley staff and cast, are called upon to provide a play, the results are truly superlative.
Before the first word is pronounced or an actor appears on stage, the set—designed by Patrick Kroboth and constructed by Ian Swift and David Smith—has already whisked the audience back to the stodgy halls of Oxford of the 1950s.
While RVP is not awash in grant money, costume designer Michael Berg, applying the credo "less is more" is able to capture this recuperative era in British history with a few defining brush strokes from the RVP sartorial archives.
The play opens with a lecture by C.S. Lewis; his lecture is a feeble apologia for God's manifest indifference to human suffering.
By their own hand, the British, via a historical penchant for colonialism, demonstrated no reluctance to meting out suffering; yet they failed to incur either the resistance or the wrath a of putatively omniscient, omnipotent and just god.
Then, at the hands the Germans, during both world wars, the British became receptacles of suffering when caught in the throes of a conflict, the magnitude of which was hitherto unknown to civilization.
Had the British been paying attention, they would have noticed also the colossal suffering sustained by European Jewry.
Who could watch the film footage of liberated concentration camps—purposely recorded at the order of General Eisenhower—and not wondered where and when and for whom, would God's merciful intervention ever be evidenced?
The play is set in the wake of this global human suffering and theologians such as Lewis had a lot of explaining to do if they were to ever convince anyone, even themselves, of the God's plan to perfect humans by sculpting them with the hammers and chisels of physical and psychological torments.
Ironically, the very people who extolled suffering, the conceited anemic academics of Oxford seemed to have performed a double retreat to escape from opportunities to achieve perfection via suffering: they donned tweed and side-stepped the reconstruction efforts which the rest of England labored under, and they escaped yet further by scurrying in to the safe womb of contrived abstraction, desiccated academia and abstruse intellectualism.
Lewis created fantasylands like Narnia and Tolkien spun tales of hobbits, each thrusting the pyrrhic struggles of good and evil into worlds that only existed on paper and in puerile imaginations.
In the play, when befriended by the poetess Joy, Lewis strives to protect himself from the perils of commitment and emotional involvement and to insulate himself from the possibility of suffering: he keeps Joy at arm's length.
Ultimately circumstances lay siege to his barriers and Lewis finds himself—almost unwittingly—vulnerable due to love.
Strange, that a philosopher who literally saw suffering as a tool of religious redemption for others, resisted that same regenerative suffering for his own sake.
It is not until Joy briefly steps back from the waiting grave and she and Lewis are vacationing in Greece—during her remission from cancer—that Lewis surrenders.
It is at this eleventh hour, when Lewis allows himself to experience love and reconciles himself to the price he will inevitably pay for that joy.
Whether Lewis allows himself to experience love by an act of faith or by capitulation to temptation is a judgment call.
Chuck Isen (Clive Staples "Jack" Lewis) gives a marvelous performance portraying a man who is intellectually strong yet emotionally weak: a man who crabs himself away from the kinds of meaningful human encumbrances and engagements which ultimately give life its meaning.
Jennifer Reimer (Joy) more than lives up to the challenges implicit to her role of a woman who not only penetrates the inner circle of Oxford male chauvinists i.e. the "Inklings" but the also the protective fortress within which C.S. Lewis crouches.
Alex Ross (Warnie: brother to C.S. Lewis) captures both the military bearing and deportment of a retired British major and the respectful protective spirit of a brother.
Philip Bohlman (Douglas) has stage presence well beyond his years: while he is only a seventh grader at Marin Primary and Middle School, RVP stalwarts can expect to be upstaged soon by this bold young upstart.
For tickets to a thoroughly enjoyable evening, get on the internet and Google rossvalleyplayers.com/raw or pick-up the phone and call 415-456-9555; but hurry: the show runs through April 20 th.
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