Theatre review: American Song
Renato Musolino delivers an outstanding solo performance in Joanna Murray-Smith’s monologue of a father who finds himself in a relentless, but seemingly invisible, chain of events leading to an American tragedy.
What is it that makes us who we are? After Freud and the decoding of DNA, after Rousseau and Charles Darwin, we strongly suspect it’s that pesky combination, that cosmic arm wrestle between nature and nurture. What causes things to turn out the way they have? Can our path be altered? When do we intervene, or let each make their own discoveries? These are, especially, questions in the mind of every parent.
In her 2016 play, American Song, originally commissioned by the Milwaukee Rep Company in Wisconsin, playwright Joanna Murray-Smith explores a father’s struggle with catastrophe.
It is late afternoon, we are told, and he is standing in “an astonishingly beautiful rural field.” Andy Manchewski is in his mid to late forties, “a regular guy” wearing horsehide work gloves. He is building a dry stonewall. He is wanting to make something durable and lasting – every stone in its own place and congruent, without the need for mortar.
The American poet Robert Frost was preoccupied with a similar ambition in ‘Mending Wall’, while also pondering: “What I was walling in and walling out”.
Also resonating in the title of the play is the bardic celebration of unity and diversity in Walt Whitman’s ‘I Hear America Singing’. The mechanics, the carpenter, the boatman, shoemaker, woodcutter, the wife, the young mother, the girl sewing: “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none [sic] else.”
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Inspired by Leaves of Grass in college, Andy yearns for the robust optimism of Whitman’s embracing multitudes as he himself faces a world gone to Hell for guns and money. “There is no unified song,” he sighs in despair, “There is no harmony of voices. Each voice strives to drown the others out.”
In this excellent production from director David Mealor and his Flying Penguins, Murray-Smith’s splendidly crafted text is brought vividly and poignantly to life.
Using the mainstage of the Goodwood Theatre for both audience seating and performance space, Mealor and designer Kathryn Sproul have created an intimacy and intensity as Andy narrates his life – from the time he met his wife-to-be Amy, through the raising of their only child Robbie (including when Andy was the stay at home Dad), to the day when he gets the life-shattering phone call that there has been a shooting massacre at his son’s high school.
Sproul’s design is elegant and spare. A carpet of green turf, a wheelbarrow and a few building implements, a folding chair for coffee break (and Andy’s introspection), and the imposing wall, curving into our consciousness, heavy implacable stones, supplied by Boral Quarries in Para Hills, and lit like Vermeer by the ever-stylish Nic Mollison.
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With the audience seating on three sides, the fourth is the edge of the mainstage where the wall begins (or ends?) creating an ominous chasm effect, amplified by Mollison’s large screen projections of skyscapes from promising blue with soft cloud, to louring storm and inky chaos.
Quentin Grant’s music and sound design completes the experience – from the loud turbulence of the opening moments to the rustic, almost subliminal use of pensive guitar, jaunty banjo and trickling piano. Never intrusive or attempting to be descriptive but effortlessly complementing the action.
As Andy, recounting his story of American middle-class luck turned waking nightmare, Renato Musolino is outstanding. In his checked flannie and work boots, moving capstones and tapping small odd-shaped fragments with a rock hammer, his narrative is compelling.
Murray-Smith’s writing is carefully cadenced and emotionally volatile, but in containing Andy’s grief and anger, his guilt, bewilderment and despair, Musolino amplifies the impact to enduring effect. He has delivered fine performances over a long period, often in collaboration with David Mealor, but this is one of the very best.
American Song marks twenty years of Flying Penguin Productions and it finds them as accomplished as ever. Mealor has again found a text that has been under the radar too long and yet speaks urgently to the current time.
It is a microcosm, not of America singing, but wailing in existential lament.
American Song, presented by Flying Penguin Productions as part of State Theatre Company South Australia’s Stateside program, continues at The Goodwood Theatre until November 2