Playwright Heather McDonald, as yet little-known in Chicago, is a rising star among contemporary American dramatists, and Faulkner’s Bicycle reveals why. Although an early play, this 85-minute one-act shows McDonald’s mastery of a spare style built of simple moments, which create a complex whole through a cumulative, layering effect. Somewhat of an impressionist—at least in this play in which she consciously parallels the literary moodiness of Faulkner—McDonald doesn’t answer every expository question about her characters, and yet creates a complete emotional terrain.
The play is set in Oxford, Miss., in 1962, where William Faulkner at 64 is an alcoholic semi-recluse in the town where he grew up. He is pursued by Claire, the daughter of Isabelle (Mama), a life-long Oxford neighbor of Faulkner’s. Unmarried and 35, Claire has become the caretaker for the prematurely senile Mama. Another sister, Jett, escaped to New York 12 years earlier, but has returned for undefined reasons. Never sentimental yet filled with tenderness, Faulkner’s Bicycle orbits around Claire, an open and giving earth mother harboring deep pain. All four characters share loneliness. How that loneliness is bridged, with some humor and a few shocks, is the play’s tale along with its exploration of the “the difference between memory and knowledge,” in which the work definitely sounds a Faulknerian note.
Under director Edward Sobel, the Rivendell Theatre Ensemble turns in another champion performance, of the kind we have come to expect from them. Simply staged and lively but never rushed, the production respects the elegiac, almost dream-like character of the work even down to Michelle Habeck’s soft and hazy lighting. The four actors seem perfect for their tasks in an intimate space where faces are everything, almost like a two-shot on TV.
In a lovely lead performance, Tara Mallen brings the qualities of a young Colleen Dewhurst to Claire, who hovers between her mother’s eccentric despair, and impish joy at life’s absurdity, with the latter winning out. Diane Dorsey as Mama is the mirror image, bringing her particular gamin charm to a woman whom life and the repressive South have beaten. Mary Cross as Jett effectively shows how life has paralyzed her—she is her mother’s daughter—even though she has escaped. Her tearful confrontation with Claire is remarkably effective. As Faulkner, Kent Reed has the least to do—this play belongs to the women—but does it forthrightly and with charm.
This is a good one; an effective and unpretentious play and production in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.