Let it Snow!, written by junior Mitch Frank and directed by grad student Leigh Lieberman, played at the Swirnow Theater this past weekend. Produced by Witness Theater, the student-run theater group at Hopkins, the show had remarkably little "student" about it. The cast of five undergrads relentlessly dominated everything for the whole performance, by which I mean there was no missing a beat, no stammering of the voice, and no nonsense like overacting or pandering for the cheap laugh.
The play follows the track of two estranged brothers, Millard and Rutherford (freshman Jack Berger and sophomore Raphael Krut-Landau), their loopy mother (senior Julia Tracey), Rutherford's girlfriend Henrietta (junior Jackie Jennings), and their dead brother Ulysses (junior Tony Chiarito), who appears in flashbacks. In the first scene we learn Ulysses has died in a car accident.
The plot then splits into two threads, past and present. This was ambitious of Mitch Frank, to say the least -- I am slow, and for a while I thought the death was a lie on the mother's part to bring her family together again.
Or perhaps this distrust is intentional; uncertainty heightens suspense, as the trope goes. Either way, the plot's dualistic nature clarifies itself quickly enough. The family's history and hierarchy develop well. Seemingly innocuous scenes, such as Henrietta playfully trying to get Ulysses' permission to cut his hair, take on a subtler meaning. As Faulkner said, "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."
But that's not even the half of it. Later on, Rutherford, the would-be writer doing time as a librarian, encounters the spitting image of dead Ulysses in the form of the ticket collector on the train back home. The muse suddenly smacks him and he begins writing; his girlfriend demands to see what he is writing, and he complies, only to find himself reproved with "That's not how it happened!" Then how did it, asks Rutherford. The ensuing scene exceeds past and present. Rutherford has long been eaten up with jealousy, thinking Henrietta made advances on Ulysses when she asked to cut his hair, and that Ulysses happily indulged her.
The two come to a head; but rather than having a simplistic melodramatic shouting match with tears and quivering voices and such, the scene is shown three times as Rutherford imagines it versus how Henrietta reports it. Explicitly we see that not only is the past never dead, but it is ultimately unknowable if it was not your own experience -- a fine addendum to the earlier quote by Faulkner.
As any Writing Seminars nerd will tell you, writing is what's left to one when he doesn't get invited to the party. So, is it a play about writing, memory, trust, family, brotherhood -- what? The answer is yes. It is a sincere play, and it is a funny play. Make of it what you will. You really can't go wrong.
The performance was duly light-hearted. The play is sort of a comedy, slightly dark but not overbearingly so, and the performers struck an excellent balance between black and whimsical humor.
For this we can thank the director and the actors. It would have been easy at times in the performance to hit the wrong pitch; a line said too sarcastically, angrily or comically would have soured a scene. The funniest stuff was the bizarre, the everyday and the inexplicable.
The initial exchange between Rutherford and his mother speaks to anyone who hates the phone. After saying "Hello?" back and forth a few times, Rutherford identifies the caller as his mother, who continues saying "Hello," although her son has begun asking her where she is, which she doesn't know. He lies about already being on a train, but then hears her speaking aloud nearby, and finds her in the same parking lot as him. Meanwhile he learns that his brother is dead, but it's really no love lost.
Finding his other brother for the funeral then becomes Rutherford's chore. Sequences such as this one move the play right along; there's not much fat to be chewed between plot-oriented scenes.
Sometimes it was hard to place a scene into the larger picture, or perhaps it never did quite fit in. I still can't figure out the exact temporal sequence of the thing, but I know how it beings and ends, which is enough for enjoyment's sake.
The final scene --- the actual funeral and Rutherford's eulogy for his brother -- felt a bit rushed and provided a shaky resolution. I had hoped to hear briefly from the rest of the family, only because I thought that they were important enough to say something of their fallen fellow.
Still, a resolution is a resolution; the play kept a good pace from beginning to end and finished strong. At the close, the audience was led in song to the eponymous Christmas carol, and the fact that they did shows they appreciated the performance.
