In Umbrella Stage’s ‘The Minutes,’ it’s time for the truth
CONCORD — Having covered countless meetings of city councils, school committees, and boards of selectmen, I can attest to the fundamental accuracy of “The Minutes,” milieuwise at least.
To sit through hour after hour of those laudably civicminded but somnolent gatherings is to reside in a special kind of purgatory.
What playwright-actor Tracy Letts has done with “The Minutes” is to give the inner workings of local government a satiric twist, then take the proceedings to a very dark place.
It’s a problem for “The Minutes” that you can guess, in a general sense, what that place will turn out to be. But under the direction of Scott Edmiston, an Umbrella Stage Company production still manages to land with considerable impact.
As the play unfolds in a city council meeting in the fictional community of Big Cherry, it’s clear that Letts wants us to think about history: Who gets to write it, who gets written out of it, and what lengths people in the first category will go to preserve their version of it. The playwright is intent on reminding us that a nation’s blood-soaked origins are often prettied up in the retelling.
Or, in the words of the mayor in “The Minutes,” played by Letts on Broadway and in Concord by a chillingly impassive Steven Barkhimer, “History is a verb.”
Now, dissecting rose-colored falsehoods masquerading as historical fact is not exactly a new theatrical idea. One prominent example was Daniel Fish’s controversial 2019 Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”
I saw the COVID-delayed Broadway premiere of “The Minutes’' two years ago, and I think the Umbrella Stage production actually makes a stronger case for Letts’s play.
In New York, “The Minutes” had a sluggish and desultory feel for much of the first hour as it made its meandering way toward the Big Reveal. In Concord, though, Edmiston has taken pains to make the early scenes crisper, more tightly focused, in a way that nails the comedy but also feels organically of a piece with the latter, decidedly non-comic parts of the play.
Mr. Peel (Ryan MacPherson), a dentist newly elected to the council and a relative newcomer to Big Cherry, had missed the previous meeting due to the death of his mother. When he asks for the minutes of that meeting, the answers he gets are curiously evasive, even hostile, from the clerk (Eliza Fichter) and his new colleagues.
And when he asks why a council member named Mr. Carp is not present, and is told that Mr. Carp is no longer on the council, tensions rise further.
As the meeting proceeds, the councilors bicker over issues involving an unclaimed parking space at city hall available to one of them; the discovery that the local sheriff was selling lost or stolen bicycles; whether a water fountain should be renovated to rectify the lack of access for people with disabilities; the Big Cherry Heritage Festival. The mayor gives thanks for the high school football team, named the Savages.
Mr. Peel keeps asking, keeps pushing, for the minutes and an explanation for Mr. Carp’s absence. Ms. Innes, a veteran councilor played by June Kfoury, raises her colleagues’ hackles by giving a lengthy speech that alludes to “Mr. Carp and his fate.” Periodically, the power grid buzzes, and the lights in the chamber flicker and go out. (The handsomely appointed chamber is the handiwork of the ubiquitous Janie E. Howland, who also was in charge of the scenic design for two other plays that are currently running: Lyric Stage Company of Boston’s “Thirst” and SpeakEasy Stage Company’s “Cost of Living.”)
Barkhimer is one of several cast members familiar to Boston-area theatergoers, including: Jeremiah Kissel as a character seen only in a flashback; Damon Singletary as the council’s only Black member, who proposes a “Lincoln Smackdown,” in which a mixed martial arts fighter would dress up like Abraham Lincoln and take on all comers in a steel-cage match; and Richard Snee as a dotty councilor who’s been on the board for four decades. (Nobody blends befuddlement and cantankerousness more amusingly than Snee: The man could make me laugh by reciting the Yellow Pages.) Other councilors are played by Julie Perkins, Scot Colford, Dan Kelly, and Jason Myatt.
When Mr. Peel acknowledges he knows little about Big Cherry’s history, the councilors spring from their seats and enthusiastically re-enact the Battle at Mackie Creek, in which a white family and a single soldier supposedly held off nearly two dozen attacking Sioux warriors in 1872.
Let’s just say it’s not the only performance within a performance that takes place in “The Minutes.”
The last words of “The Minutes,” spoken by Barkhimer’s mayor, are: “Here is your future.” Playwright Letts, though, is saying something different: Here is your past.