Forward Theater Begins Its Season with a Quiet, Contemplative Work
Forward Theater welcomed audiences back to live performances at Overture Center on September 9, and for some viewers it felt like breathing again. Yes, there were vaccination card checks at will-call, and everyone seated in The Playhouse was masked. But for anyone connected to the performing arts — either as creators or consumers — it was a return to something essential, and there is much to celebrate in that.
Theaters and ticket buyers have had a lot to think about during the forced intermission of the past 18 months; what should theater experiences look like going forward? How can they be more inclusive? How does theater address the calls for social justice and racial equality that have arisen during this same period of the shutdown? Will cash-strapped theaters choose to mount small productions to get back on their feet? Or will they wow audiences with over-the-top evenings that truly demonstrate how live performances can never be the same as those seen on a screen?
With Mom, How Did You Meet the Beatles? Forward has answered those questions by undertaking a small production of a little-known play by Adrienne Kennedy and her son Adam P. Kennedy. It chronicles Ms. Kennedy’s two year sojourn to England in the late 1960s, and her failed efforts to adapt a book of John Lennon’s poetry into a play for the National Theatre in London. In recounting the story to the audience years later she remains confounded by the episode: how could she, a Black woman of great accomplishment, be so easily discarded by the white male establishment of the celebrated London theater?
As the program notes explain, Ms. Kennedy was one of the most famous playwrights of the 20th century who you’ve probably never heard of. Making her playwriting debut in the 1960s, she readily embraced new, non-linear forms which were challenging for audiences. Eschewing realism, her plays are characterized as poetic, lyrical, and frequently autobiographical, focusing on issues of race, class, gender, and injustice.
While this play seems to be the direct opposite of those creative exercises, in some ways it is also an experimentation with form. Similar to the play Dana H. by Lucas Hnath, it is literally a transcription of an interview that Adrienne’s son conducted, and feels very much like an unedited conversation. As such, it does not follow a typical dramatic arc. There’s no hero’s quest, instead the play sounds like a series of diary entries. The climax of the story focuses on bitter disappointment viewed by the softening lens of decades past.
Simply put, it is not a play where a lot happens. It’s also not a play that actively draws you in. Instead it’s an exercise in listening, which is perhaps what Ms. Kennedy desired most of all: an audience who would consider the events of her early career carefully and come to the same conclusion — that she was wronged.
Under the competent direction of Baron Kelly, Marti Gobel plays Adrienne Kennedy with quiet strength and controlled poise. Gobel has established herself on stages across the state as an actress of incredible range. In particular, she has given virtuosic performances in one-woman shows, such as No Child with Theatre LILA and Neat with Renaissance Theaterworks in Milwaukee. In this production of Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles? she is once again effectively in a one-woman show, with only a few interruptions from the actor who plays her son, Gobel’s real-life child Jamaica. While she has demonstrated her chameleon-like ability to tell stories from many points of view, easily inhabiting a multitude of characters with extraordinary skill, this role demands something different from her. It is an introspective meditation on a moment when Kennedy’s career, artistry, work as a playwright and her perspective as a Black woman was undermined by the establishment, until she was completely removed from her own creative work. With careful articulation and an extremely composed detachment from the disturbing actions of the past, Gobel is steely and precise in her recitation of Kennedy’s memories. She speaks slowly and with clipped syllables, the diction and accent of an elegant and cultured woman.
Although the show's title is the initial question in the script, the story Adrienne tells is anything but direct. As she sips her wine, staring out into the distance, she mines her memory for tangible, irrefutable details, as if grounding herself in very specific places will help give her story weight and credibility. In her recollections she draws a map of her every move in London, signposted by all the people she met; those who introduced her to new contacts in the theater and publishing worlds, made her feel comfortable, and opened certain doors for her.
It is frequently noted that if the city of Dublin was erased from the earth, it could be completely reconstructed using James Joyce’s Ulysses as a guide. Similarly, this play could be used as a map to recreate parts of London in the late 1960s. Indeed, Adrienne gives every address where she visited a friend, moved into a flat, or set out on a new adventure, almost relentlessly bombarding us with proof of exactly where she was and the fact that her memory is trustworthy — if not infallible.
Like Adrienne’s son, the audience waits and waits for any actual details about her meetings with the legendary lads from Liverpool, but they are spare and come late in the narrative. In general, they are also really unremarkable stories, including Paul McCartney playing casually with her young son, a lunch with Ringo, and an encounter with the painfully shy George Harrison at a party that he was reluctant to attend. It turns out the playwright is much more starstruck by Laurence Olivier, who was heading the National Theatre at the time. She admits repeatedly to flighty, fan-girl conversations with the stage and screen icon. Overwhelmed by meeting her theatrical hero, it’s even more painful that she is later betrayed by that same hero and that her naivete practically makes her complicit in her own erasure.
Because there is no action to speak of onstage, the production has enlisted lighting and projection designer Kevim Gawley to illustrate the stories on screens behind Gobel throughout the 80-minute piece. Sometimes the simple line drawings are amusing, other times they provide some motion onstage for the listeners to focus on, as the story slowly plods forward. There are also many, many sound cues woven through the monologue, such as the Beatles classics “A Hard Day’s Night,” and “Here Comes the Sun,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black.” As often as they provide an aural touchpoint for the progress of the story, they are also sometimes intrusive and interfere with the storytelling itself.
For his part, Jamaica Gobel’s Adam Kennedy sits upstage throughout the play, patiently listening and taking notes on his legal pad. Halfway through the monologue he turns over a cassette tape to let us know that he is recording the conversation. His very few lines sound like a cross between questions from a biographer and momentary inquisitiveness from an adult child who is beginning to see his mother in a new light, but his objective and point of view is never clear.
As the first play in Forward’s 2021-22 season, the company has made a conservative but thoughtful choice. It’s a small cast, so it was easily rehearsed under COVID protocols. It is also written, performed, directed, and dramaturged by an entirely Black artistic team, which is a noteworthy acknowledgment of the call for greater diversity in the theater — a plea that is underlined by the text itself. But it is also a very quiet play and requires a great deal of patience from the audience. Although the last moment of the show is overtly theatrical, it feels disconnected from the rest of the play and doesn’t make up for the somewhat leaden pace of a circuitous tale that explicitly states that it has no moral. It is simply “the way” the author remembered it happening, which doesn’t feel like enough.