New Year’s revolutions

Inspiration can come from any quarter.
Anything from a few lines of verse to a family trip can summon the muse, as demonstrated by several of the plays opening at Atlanta theaters in January. Not only are many of them written by local actors or performers, but they draw on an unusually diverse pool of source materials, showing just how flexible theater can be.
For instance, on Jan. 23 Theatrical Outfit artistic director Tom Key presents his adaptation of Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. The production marks the second time Key has adapted one of Percy’s books, having staged Lost in the Cosmos at Theatrical Outfit in 1996, a production that opened the door for Moviegoer five years later.
Key explains that when he originally sought the rights to produce a stage version of Lost in the Cosmos in 1990, his friend William Sessions wrote a letter to the acclaimed novelist on his behalf. “Walker Percy died in May of that year, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s that,’ but then in June, I found out from his agent that the day before he died, Walker said to extend the rights to me. I think that made all the difference in my getting permission to adapt The Moviegoer, since it’s so difficult to get the rights after an author passes away, especially with that first generation, which has to take so much care and caution.”
Key calls Percy a “cornerstone” author, whose writing has been extremely important to him. “The Moviegoer was the first of his books I read, because I heard that Flannery O’Connor admired him. I was about 30 years old, the same age as the moviegoer character, and the book was so illuminating on so many levels. It seemed like the kind of book I could lean on and return to again and again in my life. When I’m reading it, I frequently have to stop and reflect.”
In addition to Lost in the Cosmos, Key has developed stage versions of the Book of Revelations, Pilgrim’s Progress, Many Things Have Happened Since He Died and works by C.S. Lewis, although he’s found The Moviegoer to be a special case. “With The Moviegoer I had to go more slowly than any other adaptation because it’s so nuanced. It’s like working with something very delicate. If I were making clothes, this would be like dealing with lace instead of heavy material.”
Theatrical Outfit’s Moviegoer stars Jeff Portell in the title role of New Orleans native Binx Bolling, as well as Shannon Malone, John Benzinger and Shelly McCook. Key says that having a specific directorial vision reveals whether a literary work can be extended to the stage.
Key reads The Moviegoer as a comic novel about a man on an existential search to make his own life as meaningful as the movies he sees. Key explains that in the production, “There are a number of scenes where Binx is in charge of what’s happening, he’s commenting on something or narrating something. Those scenes we’ll score and light cinematically, as if he’s narrating his own movie.”
He adds, “But when he’s falling in love unexpectedly or traveling to Chicago or relating to his half-brother, who’s 14-years-old and in a wheelchair, those scenes are very realistic and plain and ‘unmovielike.’ I think Binx’s journey here is that he becomes the hero of his own movie, he discovers the authenticity of his own life.”
Actor Brad Sherrill credits Key’s dramatic reading of the Book of Revelation for inspiring his one-man performance of The Gospel of John, to be staged Jan. 16-Feb. 4 at Theatre in the Square’s Alley Stage. Sherrill says that this will be the piece’s first production in a theater, although he’s tried it out at churches. “I first performed John at the United Methodist Church in Chamblee in July. I grew up in that church, and my first performance as an actor was there at age 11.
“It’s an attempt to take an ancient text and make it alive for today,” he continues. “It’s the most compelling story there is, with such great politics and great conflict that it lends itself to this presentation. This is just the book, it’s just an actor and the text, and I think it’s very exciting. At different points, the audience become the other characters, they become the Disciples or the Pharisees.”
Sherrill uses the New International Version of the Book of John, which he admires for its combination of conversational language and faithful adherence to the original text. “John is atypical from the three synoptic Gospels that preceded it,” he explains. “The others seem more like reportage of events, and John has a more penetrating view of what’s going on. It’s also called the most poetic of the Gospels. And I picked it for reasons of length, since I wanted to be able to do the whole thing in two hours with an intermission. In the time it takes to watch a couple of prime-time television programs, one can see and hear a complete Gospel performed live.”
Using only a minimum of props, including a wooden basin and an oil lamp, Sherrill can perform The Gospel of John under nearly any conditions, and he plans to stage the piece in Africa later this year. He admits, “I never liked one-person shows, but doing one seemed the next logical challenge for me. Doing a Gospel started as a kind of whisper in my head about two years ago, and I returned to it in January of 2000. I finished memorizing it in May, and I have to keep a little of it in my brain every day. It’s been with me for a longer time already than most plays I do and has sunk deeper and deeper into me. It’s been very fulfilling.”
A year ago Sherrill nearly starred in Theatre Gael’s revival of Rab the Rhymer, but a family emergency caused the production to be postponed. Theatre Gael’s Rab now opens Jan. 12, with actor and composer Clark Taylor playing Scotland’s “Ploughman Poet,” Robert Burns.
Rab was written by Atlanta actor Jim Peck, who rediscovered Burns’ poetry on a trip to Scotland in the early 1980s. “I was staying with friends in Edinburgh,” recalls Peck, “and one night their 12-year-old son asked me if I knew Robert Burns’ poetry. I said that I didn’t know him well, and that I didn’t find him very accessible. And he stood up and recited Burns’ entire poem ‘Tam O’Shanter’ that evening. I was delighted with it but a little humiliated that this 12-year-old new more poetry than I did. It was one of those things that accidentally happens in life — I had no real interest in his work before then.”
In 1985 Peck wrote Rab the Rhymer for actor John Ferguson, his friend at Atlanta’s Academy Theater. “When Ferguson and I developed it, we had him sing and play piano in the piece, because I knew he had those talents,” he explains of the play’s musical content. Peck adds that following runs at Theatre Gael and theater festivals, Ferguson took the play all over the East and Southeast for at least 50 productions.
The one-man show combines excerpts of Burns’ poems with autobiographical details in prose. “He was a situational poet, who was inclined to write about what was going on in his life at the moment, so it wasn’t hard to arrange his emotional outbursts with his work,” says Peck. “It’s basically Burns telling his own story through his poetry, and I think it has decent development. It’s not just, ‘And then I wrote ... and then I wrote ... ’ for an evening. It has more complexity than that. And it can whet one’s appetite to read more about Burns.”
Most writers, of course, draw on their own lives for their work. The surprising thing about Lauren Gunderson’s Parts They Call Deep, one of three works presented by the Essential Theatre’s New American Theater Jan. 17 at PushPush, is that the playwright would seem to have a modest amount of life experience, being an 18-year-old Emory University freshman.
“I started writing it when I was 16. This is the first full-length play I’ve written,” Gunderson says. “It’s about three Southern women — a daughter, mother and grandmother — driving a Winnebago from Maryland to Florida. It came out of my life and growing up in the South. We took trips like this one, and right after my grandfather died, we took her in a Winnebago from Orlando to Ohio, for five days of nomadic living. It’s kind of about me, but cut up until it doesn’t look like me any more.”
As a student of Decatur High School, Gunderson has acted in Atlanta plays, including Actor’s Express’ Approaching Zanzibar and Essential Theatre’s Images in Smoke — where you would never have guessed she was a high schooler from her role as a twentysomething publicist. Having worked with Essential Theater founder Peter Hardy, Gundersen sent him her script hoping to get a few pointers. “He called me to say not that he liked it but that he was considering it for the Essential Theatre Playwriting Award. In fact, the first day of orientation at Emory was the day that he announced they were going to produce the play.” Since winning the theater’s $300 writing award, Parts They Call Deep, has also received an honor from the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts.
Gunderson is considering becoming a creative writing major, although her interest in plays has paid off in an unexpected way. “I wrote a one-act play about a scientist for a physics class, since my professor let me do that instead of a term paper. He told me ‘You probably won’t get to do this for all of your classes.’ I wish I could, since I got an A.”
In addition to Parts They Call Deep, the other two plays of the Essential Theatre’s third annual festival are Bill Canning’s Cruel Disclosures, with Laurie Beasley and Darren Marshall (opening Jan. 6) and Private Eyes by Lonely Planet playwright Steven Dietz, starring Jeff Feldman and Kathleen Wattis and opening Jan. 10.
January would not feel complete without Jon Ludwig of the Center for Puppetry Arts debuting a new educational musical for all ages. This year, joining the ranks of such delightful shows as The Body Detective and The Plant Doctors is The Adventures of Mighty Bug, a superheroic glimpse at the insect kingdom, opening Jan. 4.
Which just goes to prove that there’s no topic too small for theatrical treatment.
curt.holman@creativeloafing.com