‘Censored’ limits credible dialogue
Fraught language, stagey acting get in the way
Midway through a tense exchange with a Women’s Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) in Phylis Ravel’s “Censored on Final Approach,” a testy Maj. Stephenson (James Fletcher) notes “there’s a war going on. And I’d like to get on with it.”
There are many variations on this line and its accompanying theme in “Censored” — now on stage in a collaboration between Renaissance Theaterworks and Marquette University that opened Saturday night under Leda Hoffmann’s direction.
Invoking a sorry historical record, “Censored” profiles the shoddy treatment that a quartet of WASPs endured during World War II, awkwardly interspersed with stilted scenes set in 1955 involving WASPs Gerry (Megan Kaminsky) and Catherine (Kat Wodtke) looking back.
Maj. Stephenson’s sense of wartime urgency — a convenient excuse for men feeling threatened by high-flying women — is suggested here through numerous short, quickly played scenes, with many entrances and exits scored for snare drum, sometimes accompanied by both brass and relentlessly marching recruits.
In the military parlance routinely deployed through this play, that leaves these characters little time to be “at ease” — just as the WASPs’ requests for permission to speak are regularly denied.
We therefore don’t get much sense of who these women are; “Censored” is continually too busy marching toward its next scene. Or providing one of many exposition-heavy exchanges — most of which play as lectures rather than real speech. Or setting up clunky, contrived encounters between the WASPs and their superiors.
The result is a play markedly short on credible dialogue.
Instead we get stiff debates between singly dimensioned characters: piggish men and put-upon women, women willing to suck it up and rebels who’ve had enough, women trying to remember and others who want to forget. Written in fraught language, the result is some painfully stagey acting, involving pointed exchanges that one couldn’t ever imagine unfolding in life.
The crammed “Censored” also never really chooses among the several plays — each itself potentially interesting — that it wants to be.
The back story explaining how these intrepid women became WASPs, which we best glimpse when one of them (Madeleine Farley) describes watching barnstormers as a Minnesota farm girl?
The dilemma confronting women like WASP founder Jackie Cochran (a fine Greta Wohlrabe) or the offspring of a military family (Jordan Feger), both torn between preserving the WASP project at all costs and the actual cost paid by women whose planes were being sabotaged?
A story of camaraderie among the women themselves? Or perhaps one featuring the survivors’
guilt haunting those whose planes didn’t go down (presented in contrasting flavors by Kaminsky’s extroverted, overdone Gerry and the self-loathing of Wodtke’s dark, introspective Catherine)?
Trying to be too many things, “Censored” often silences the voices of the very women it wants to honor — true to a history in which much of her story remains untold.