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-- Michael Scott Moore
Buried Child
When the World Was Green (A Chef's Fable). By Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin. Directed by Chaikin. Starring Alan Mandell, Corie Henninger, and John Maxwell. At the Magic Theater, Building D of Fort Mason Center, through May 11. Call 441-8822.
When the World Was Green (A Chef's Fable) is perfectly inoffensive. It's superbly acted and directed, there's a nice clean story line and tidy closure on the central conflict. Like approachable Thornton Wilder scripts, it will be overplayed by high schools and colleges looking for literary quality combined with affordable sets. That is if it isn't completely forgotten. Remember A Memory of Two Mondays by Arthur Miller? He probably doesn't either. Great artists have their mediocre moments; When the World Was Green is an off night in stage sports for Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin. It won't dent their distinguished oeuvre; but it lacks the agitated, visceral writing of Shepard's other works and the drifting, desperate souls that Chaikin is master of. It's hollow but not hauntingly so.
We're in an eerie, existential wasteland. The set is a gray prison cell with one hard bed and the classic window with bars. A pianist strikes single notes like a death knell as the inmate tells his story. The unnamed convict has killed a man -- the wrong man, actually, somebody who looked like his cousin Carl and drank the same wine. Carl, the intended target, was marked for death because of an old European blood feud. (A good mule died mysteriously in a field and a family was divided.) The victim puffed up and keeled over from poisoned mashed potatoes. His assassin is emotionally indifferent to this crime. He was destined to avenge the insult; if the wrong guy died, c'est la vie. He's old, he's tired, his work is done. Insomnia and a lack of appetite are the only punishments the old man brings on himself.
This emotional distance is broadcast to the audience, and there's nothing to sympathize with or despise about the weary old man. Only his regular visitor, a young reporter trying to investigate his story, seems to care. The nameless woman, played delicately by Corie Henninger, is on a similar manhunt. Her father abandoned her when she was an infant, and she wanders New Orleans waiting to cross his path. Through a series of interviews the pair bond on the subject of obsessively stalking loved ones and sprout a cautious friendship. Potential friction (did the man accidentally kill her father?) emerges, then fades. Most of the tension comes from the inner conflicts laid out in the monologues that are placed tidily between the duologues like black keys on the piano. The balance is admirable, but the script is too tight and even; the characters never too sentimental or tragic. The emptiness of human life can be devastating and the collaborators have successfully dramatized this topic before, but this simply isn't their strongest work.
-- Julie Chase
