Sowelu Theater
Portland, OR
503.730.9066
What Others Say About Us
 |
| Brian Russell, Lucas Biespiel, |
| Susan Boyd and Jordy Oakland |
Reviews: Fen by Caryl Churchill, 2001
The Oregonian says: "When Sowelu Theatre takes on playwright Caryl Churchill, it's a case of tiger vs. tiger.
Portland's Sowelu is known for its vivid physical approach to theater. England's Churchill is known for her ravishing spare language and sharp political bent. Put the two in the same small cage — the tiny Back Door Theatre — and you can expect some fur to fly.
In Sowelu's new production of Churchill's 1983 drama Fen, it does. The match of company to playwright is sometimes ideal and sometimes at odds. But give them this: Neither gives an inch. And that makes for a ferocious, if not always full or balanced, evening.
Fen is a ghost story, a love story, a story about intrusive government policies, a story of the land. To fully understand it you need grounding in English environmental history and bureaucratic politics, but a quick recap can bring you up to speed.
The fens of eastern England are a low-lying swampland similar to a bog, but with vastly richer wildlife — at least, in the old days. Beginning in 1630, a succession of governments has drained the fens, creating extraordinarily rich farmland. The reclamation projects severely damaged wildlife populations and also eradicated the traditional commons, with their community hunting and fishing rights, in favor of privately held land.
There are moves now to return some of the fenland to its original swampy state. But in the 1980s, when Fen takes place, it's an agricultural community in crisis: Workers are trapped in low-paying hard labor, and the landlord farm owners aren't much better off, losing their holdings to the banks and the trusts.
Hopelessness pervades Fen, yet it's also a story of organic cycles — of the way the land and the people on it belong to each other, and how the past of both is part of the present. At the play's core is the story of the ill-fated love affair of Val, a married mother (Jordy Oakland), and Frank, an embittered farmhand (Brian Russell). Their story is like a tragic ballad of crossed purposes and bad decisions.
Sowelu is so committed to physical theater that Fen has both a director (Lorraine Bahr) and a movement director (Heidi Carlson). The company's physically active style, abetted by the extreme intimacy of the space, brings the characters' despair and muted rage into sharp focus.
Unlike so many sensually inert couples on Portland stages, Oakland and Russell generate some actual heat: You can sense the physical pull that holds them helpless. Frustration also rises like a fever from the supporting characters as they fight to reconcile themselves to the land that holds them like a loamy prison.
At times Sowelu's Fen moves too much: There are moments that cry for stillness and the primacy of words. And for all the company's fluidity and assured body language, spoken language doesn't always get the same care. That's too bad because Churchill has given the actors some beautiful words to speak.
The low-ceilinged, cramped Back Door space accentuates the production's physical hyper reality: It's like putting a play in your living room and then stepping back out of the actors' way. Elicia Beebe's simple set, a snaking coil of stitched-together furrowed rows in a field, works like a charm: Sometimes the actors bend down to pluck a potato or an onion out of hidden pockets, sometimes they scramble tortuously down or across the rows.
The extreme intimacy, however, works against some of the play's epic aspects, particularly the scenes with the ghost, which is meant to be a moody background apparition but is so close to the action that you keep expecting it to say or do something.
Still, it's a catfight — and in this production, you can feel the mud between the tigers' toes."
—Bob Hicks