“For me, the star of the two plays, but especially the second, was the language – sparse, muscular, poetic, evocative, and tightly packed with ideas, emotions and world views in conflict.“ – Garreth Cruikshank
“Borderlands” – two short plays, written & directed by Tommy James Green.
#1 – “Kindling”: night, a forest in a foreign land, the distant past. An old crone wanders through the trees collecting kindling for a fire. Suddenly a young woman into the scene – dirty, scratched, bleeding and desperate. “What have you done with my daughter”, she screams at the old woman, accusing her of being a witch, an accusation she doesn’t deny. What follows is a fight for the life, or the soul, of the child Isabel. But does Isabel really exist, or is she the product of this ‘mother’s’ disturbed fantasy? And is she looking for her child, or fleeing from the memory of a failed marriage to a cruel & brutal husband, who has died of … something unspecified? Is the old woman actually a witch, or just another victim of male prejudice and their need to forcefully control women, demonising all those who break the rules?
As the accusations and threats fly back & forth, “Kindling” is revealed to be a play owing less to the Brothers Grimm, and more to Germaine Greer, or Angela Carter, exploring ideas of myth and society’s negative attitudes towards women.
Katherine Poulsen as the crone is quietly menacing, with moments of mischief, humour, wisdom and violence scattered, like bread crumbs, through her performance. Danielle Clements, I felt, struggled to maintain a strong, consistent through line as the grief-stricken, terrified mother, trying to deal with forces beyond her resources.
#2 – “Broken Promise Land” is based on the poetry of James Provenshire, and is set in El Paso, Texas, on the banks of the Rio Grande, the border between Mexico & the USA. It is a city surrounded by desert and struggling to deal with drug cartels, waves of desperate immigrants, and the disapproval of “bleeding heart liberals from the north”.
Into this cauldron of resentment and paranoia stumbles Walter, a 70 something teacher, poet, photographer & Vietnam vet from Maine, who represents everything that the two arresting border guards, Nate and Diego, despise. His existence challenges & threatens their existence, and they waste no time in making their feelings apparent. Much of the play is spent unpacking the opposing political and cultural positions of the two antagonists, Walter and Nate, with Diego moving with nervous energy and frustration between the two. Though initially the more physically aggressive, it is Diego who is the first to detect something attractive in the world view embodied by Walter and expressed through his poetry. By the end of the play these “redneck” officers have shifted from their opening positions, both in relation to this northern intruder and each other. Walter is still Walter, the eternal seeker of enlightenment, but he has wrought a change in them with his cockamaimy poetry and flakey philosophy.
For me, the star of the two plays, but especially the second, was the language – sparse, muscular, poetic, evocative, and tightly packed with ideas, emotions and world views in conflict. Those actors who best handled the demands of the language, like musicians playing their instruments, made the strongest impact and most effectively conveyed the richness and power of the scripts. Some of the actors needed to be more conscious of their projection and the speed of their delivery, which at times made it hard to understand what they were saying, and in scripts with such economical use of language, every word counts. Jack N. Berry’s brooding Southern Gothic border guard, Nate, was the stand out in this play, with a performance that was as lapidary as his speech.
Borderlands is played at Erskineville Town Hall till Saturday 3rd September as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival.
Garreth Cruikshank, Theatre Now
