The Road Home: Re-Membering America Has World Premiere

"The Road Home: Re-Membering America" 

Written and Performed by Marc Wolf; directed by David Schweizer; scenic design by Andrew Lieberman; costume design by David Zinn; lighting design by Peter West; original music and sound design by Robert Kaplowitz 

 

 

Performances: Now through April 30, Huntington Theatre Company at the Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts

Box Office: 617-266-0800 or www.huntingtontheatre.org

 

 

At the end of "The Road Home: Re-Membering America," the Saturday night audience gave a sustained and respectful, yet somewhat muted, round of applause to playwright/performer Marc Wolf.  What it said to me was that we appreciated his talents, but that he made us feel uncomfortable with his dramatization of the voices he heard as he drove across America shortly after September 11, 2001.

 

 

Wolf was on the West Coast when the terrorists attacked his hometown of New York City.  He rented a nondescript American car and began a journey that would take him through numerous cities and towns, affording him the opportunity to meet and talk with a diverse cross-section of people en route to the northeast.  From Seattle, he traveled through the redwood forest of California, across Nevada to the Grand Canyon, south to Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia, to the nation's capital, and home to NYC.  He spent two months on the road, covering 7,612 miles and recording conversations with 180 people on 65 audiotapes.

 

 

The result is this interview-based play in which Wolf represents 20 voices selected from his encounters on the road.  While he is onstage alone for 80 minutes, flanked by two American flags, we feel the presence of these people he met in the aftermath of the attack as the actor shifts postures and speech patterns to go from one scene to another.  Each segment is identified by its location and featured speakers being projected on the wall at the rear of the stage.  A picnic table and benches center stage serves as the main prop, morphing from a lunch counter, to the interior of a car, to a hair salon.  The lighting provides a silhouetted office door and spotlights a couple of the individual speakers.

 

 

The set is minimal, resembling a classroom or meeting hall, and Wolf is casually attired in the manner in which one might dress when spending hours in a car – jeans, t-shirt, and an outer shirt.  There are few distractions from the material and many of the speakers hit us right between the eyes.  A woman in Chicago seems callous as she pointedly states her feelings about New York, using a scatological term to illustrate just how much she does not care that the eastern metropolis was attacked.  She is half a continent away and is not connected to the city or its people.  Other speakers mentioned not knowing anyone who was a victim, as if that justified their lack of concern.  A middle-aged man in California said, "If my heart bleeds for every person that dies in the world, I'd go out of my mind, wouldn't I?"  While I think he has a point, I was still incredulous that anyone in this country could feel isolated from the 9/11 attack.

 

 

One of the things that Wolf did successfully was to show a wide range of reactions and emotions from a diverse group of people.  His journey across America became a vivid illustration of the differences among us.  He really listened to what everyone had to say and funneled it all into this performance piece that feels very authentic.  It is more about the fractures and fissures that dot the countryside than solidarity and connection.  We hear about consumption versus conservation, racism, discrimination, hopes, fears, cynicism, fantasy, and reality.  At a Mississippi mosque, a dentist who is a native-born U.S. citizen relates his feeling that Islam "got hijacked that…day," while a college student at the Texas-Mexico border bubbles as she describes New York as the place where the American Dream still holds.  They're both right.

 

 

A little girl carving a Halloween pumpkin with her father in the Redwoods gave Wolf some beans they had grown in their garden.  The playwright imagined them to be like the magic beans of "Jack and The Beanstalk" which, when planted, sprouted a magnificent plant that stretched to the sky and poked into a land of giants where Jack found the goose that laid the golden eggs.  Wolf envisioned himself returning home and tossing the "magic" beans into the cavity at Ground Zero, but he held them in his outstretched hand for the audience to see that he had not done so.  With a melange of recorded voices in the background, he asks, "In our dismembered American ground, what could we grow?"  He does not sit in judgment of the characters he portrays, but his journey seems to have led him to some difficult conclusions about the country he crossed.  We applauded his achievement, but did not relish the peek into the looking glass.