Apparently no one told playwright Anne Galjour that socio-economic class officially disappeared from America circa 1947. How fortunate. Had she known, she might never have written her new one-woman show “You Can’t Get There from Here,” which opened Thursday night at the new Z Space at Theater Artaud. And we would not have had the pleasure of poking around northern New Hampshire, searching for something other than antiques.
Maybe because she’s a playwright, a San Francisco playwright, endowed with a sharp eye and a sensitive ear, Galjour found characters in those New England hills, exquisitely engaging characters, caught up in the sludge that continues to flow from this country’s 30-year fling with Reaganomics.
No one is a stereotype and no one is particularly happy about their situation: not the new or the old, the workers or the professionals, the sellers or the buyers. If you’re looking for an idyllic “Our Town,” the 20th century Thornton Wilder drama set in New Hampshire, this ain’t it. Despite the American pastoral effect created by staging and lights, the grim ironies of the 21st century pervade both life and stage.
To survive, Regina, who might be considered the central character, though certainly not the protagonist, must be an indomitable mom: going to school, working two jobs, raising a kid, sobering up her sweet alcoholic husband and all the while reciting Wordsworth.
What’s she doing all this for? What is her dream? To buy a house. With the sub-prime disaster looming on the horizon when the play was written, the audience cringes, knowing Regina’s dream will become a bitter nightmare. You want to scream “No! Don’t do it!” But then the play ends with an unexpected twist.
None of the characters are well off; and no one gets off easy; they’ve all got it pretty tough. Although ordinary people, they aren’t antiques. Galjour’s portraits breathe, speak with their own voices and touch us when we least expect it.
Galjour wrote “You Can’t Get There from Here” during her participation in Dartmouth College’s Class Divide Initiative, one that aims to “raise awareness and spark discussion about this highly important and under-explored issue of class in America.” (For those of us who remember Dartmouth as the cesspool that spawned right-wing dingbats like D’nesh D’Souza and his cohort of particularly vicious neocons, this news could be scary.)
To achieve knowledge and intimacy with her subject, Galjour spent months interviewing people in the immediate rural vicinity. The result was a big hit at Dartmouth, ostensibly providing students with insight into the conditions and people surrounding them (OMG!).
Galjour intends this to be a play about class and class divisions, and the story of working class people displaced from their homes by slick developers and the new petty bourgeoisie (sounds kind of familiar, no?) is one rife with class conflict. But those tensions and resentments never boil over; rather they simmer and stew and in the end wind up suggesting more common ground than class warfare. Regrettably, the story’s true protagonists are far removed from the action. The rapacious development corporation only appears through the agency of its local sales rep, an unlikable but sympathetic Willy Loman-type character. And Dartmouth College, like Kafka’s castle, presides over the dismal scene in its backyard while training the next generation of corporate developers within its walls.
A superb performer, Galjour changes characters with dexterity, fluidity and subtlety. She treats both characters and audience with sympathy, understanding and wit. Her capacity to inhabit her characters allows her to transform the stage into a collective imaginative experience. Unfortunately, many of her most class-conscious lines feel tacked on to monologues. The characters also share a strange penchant for verbosity and fast-talking not usually associated with laconic New Englanders. Is Galjour suggesting a hidden meth lab in the backwoods? Perhaps. The meth lab and its product have become ubiquitous demons in the lives of America’s rural working poor.
The Z Space directors are inviting the community to come over to Theater Artaud and participate in the building of a new performing arts center Mission, where we continue to struggle with our own issues of class division and displacement. In choosing Anne Galjour’s “You Can’t Get There from Here,” the Z Space crew deserve props for kicking off its adventure in the neighborhood with both its artistic and its class conscious feet forward.
“You Can’t Get There from Here“
SEPTEMBER 10 – SEPTEMBER 27, 2009
Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Friday, Saturday at 8 p.m.
Sunday at 5 p.m.
Z Space
131 10th St # 3
San Francisco, CA 94103-2604
(415) 626-0453