Words fail in rare set of missteps
The trouble with a bungled line isn’t just the one ruined moment. It’s a breach of contract between artist and audience. You can’t invest your full attention into a scene because you’re too worried the actors won’t be able to shepherd you to the end of it without further embarrassing themselves — or without changing their relationship to you.
Actors can salvage that trust almost immediately, of course, through redoubled commitment to their character, their situation. But at the Saturday, Feb. 17 opening night of Word for Word’s “Lucia Berlin: Stories” at Z Below, the cast never fully recovered — a surprise from a company whose professionalism one can usually take for granted. An early blunder, a repeated passage of script, gave way to still further blunders: a barrage of “ums” and “uhs,” monotone delivery that meandered, groped for the ends of lines.
Even if these bloopers and hesitances came from opening-night jitters, the sorts of kinks that can be ironed out early in the rest of a show’s run, it’s still not clear that a perfectly realized “Lucia Berlin: Stories” would satisfy as an evening of theater. As with all its shows, Word for Word here translates prose to performance without altering a word of text, instead seeking creative ways to make narration dramatic; one sentence might be divvied up among a whole slew of speakers, so that what seems on the page a direct, declarative statement becomes a charged exchange.
But the five Bay Areagrounded stories Word for Word selects from Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” which was published posthumously in 2015, don’t always clearly lend themselves to theater.
Directors Nancy Shelby and JoAnne Winter structure the quintet to suggest an ur-narrative of one woman (played by Jeri Lynn Cohen) in the throes of and then overcoming alcoholism. Berlin’s writing can be sharply observed — the way all the people in a hospital emergency room are like “performers” at “opening night at the theater”; the way a great student, more than talent or smarts, might have “a nobility of spirit.” But often, the stories are no more than that — dispatches of the sort one might share in a breezy letter, slices of life.
Rarely does the heap of impressions move toward a payoff or build toward something bigger than itself. When it does, as in the evening’s last story, “Here It Is Saturday,” about a recovered alcoholic teaching a writing class in a prison, feel-good lurches toward rehabilitation and a subsequent, bloody dashing of hopes are equally predictable, somehow combining the worst of a Hilary Swank movie and film noir at its cheesiest.
When Berlin dives into the slovenly, subhuman realities of addiction, they’re sickeningly felt, as when a drunk is too scared to walk home with the booze she’s purchased at 6 in the morning. “I’m afraid I’ll drop the bottle,” she says. But unvarnished, painful as these details are, they tread the same ground as many other addiction narratives.
Shelby and Winter’s cast occasionally transcend the material. Phil Wong conjures a whole character, a needy, ingratiating student in the prison writing class, out of two words of script. As a prison guard, Norman Gee has a stride that’s both burdened and buoyant, conveying both a lifetime’s weight of hard work and the spunk required to stay human in spite of it.
That effort, to stay human, links all five of Berlin’s stories. But Word for Word hasn’t quite made the case that that inward battle still engages off the page.