Oregon ArtsWatch

ArtsWatch Archive


Review: Imago Theatre’s ‘Pimento + Pullman’

By A.L. Adams
June 13, 2014
Theater

For four nights only ending Sunday, with a free ticket promotion for its newsletter subscribers, Imago presents Pimento & Pullman, a lighthearted living-room short that Imago’s Jerry Mouawad has written in-house followed by a haunting train tale by the playwright perhaps best known for Our Town, Thornton Wilder.

Woods, Triffle, Mullaney: three clowns in a fountain. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Woods, Triffle, Mullaney: three clowns in a fountain. Photo: Jerry Mouawad

Pimento

A pimento, as you probably know, is a pepper, most easily recognized as the red chunk in a green olive. Imago’s Pimento, too, is a spicy nugget served with a grain of salt. In this uproarious little short by artistic director Mouawad, a mother (Carol Triffle) tries to encourage, yet manage, a courtship between her young daughter (Stephanie Elizabeth Woods) and her suitor, a decorated young soldier (Mark Mullaney). Using commedia dell’arte style clowning techniques, falling all over each other and babbling variously in fake German, fake French, and fake Japanese, the trio still manages to embody the many micro-emotions that would accompany that scenario in real life…and eventually, believe it or not, they play beautiful music together.

This piece is an appetizer for, or a garnish on, the longer work of the evening, Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha…and as such, it’s not meant to match but to augment and contrast. Like its namesake, it could go with a lot of things. It’s tonally in-mode with Imago’s signature Frogz and Big Little Things, though its “adult” content puts it at odds. Its theme goes with the more serious fare it’s set with here…but its antics are much sillier. In this way, it’s most similar to touring group Wonderheads’ Grim and Fischer, a sprightly mask show about an old woman battling death. At any rate, Pimento brings its own piquant flavor and whets the appetite for the next offering, making great use of its 15-minute runtime.

Pullman Car Hiawatha

“Let’s get everyone together here,” prompts the narrator (played by Bill Barry) of Thornton Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha. He apparently means not only the passengers and porter on a 1930 train from New York to Chicago…but also the conversations they’re having, the train cars that hold them, the fields and towns the train happens to pass, the planets of the universe, “the weapon,” and two silent “archangels” who seem to have been running the show from the get-go.

Oh, Wilder. What a pantheist, seeing the sublime in literally every thing. Or arguably a deist, letting an omniscient narrator observe the proceedings with minimal interference. At any rate, Pullman mimics Wilder’s more popular Our Town in these key ways.We even get a character here, as in Our Town, who’s transformed into a ghost and observes the retreating world with a new appreciation for the little things.

The passengers’ clothes and suitcases, which mostly adhere to the script’s suggestion of era, give the show an antique distance and also nod to classic noir: here a fur coat, there some heeled maryjanes, everywhere a fedora. Scene changes are accompanied by a rumble of jazz, and sometimes, of course, the rhythm of the train as lights speed across the stage to show movement.

The passengers move around plenty, changing their seating arrangement in a flurry of clockwork-tight chair dances to present their travel from multiple angles. Some even switch character and accent midstream…we’re just getting a sense of the variety of lives. A mentally fragile woman (Sascha Blocker) struggles with a ham-handed doctor (Cedar Braasch) and a reassuring nurse (Laura Loy). A young man (Mark Mullaney) muses about his love, Lillian. An older couple (Terry Lybecker and Carol Triffle) bicker, and an Asian porter (Samson Syharath) complains in his native tongue about the passengers’ needy demands.

Where the passengers are era-bound and complex, the chairs and one long diagonal staircase are simple, stark, and modern. So are the “archangels,” dressed in slim suits and dark glasses like modern FBI, CIA, or Secret Service agents. They’re agents of something, all right, manning the lights and cuing the tunes that permeate the train passengers’ fitful night.

It’s these two characters (played by Rafael Miguel and Sam Bridgnell) that lead the willing into a philosophical rabbit-hole. It’s unclear in this production whether the agents are sinister, like the manipulators of The Matrix, or benevolent like most angels are storied to be…or simply in limbo like Dogma‘s Bartleby and Loki. They hardly speak, but their angular movements range from coldly procedural, to tender, to almost homoerotic. This brings to mind another pair of angels: the Biblical ones who visited Lot in Sodom (incidentally, a silent film titled just that came out in 1933…and bear with me…).

In the Bible story, Lot receives angels as guests in his home, but the citizens of Sodom surround his house and threaten to assault them, then settle for abusing his daughters. Turns out the angels are on a spy mission to decide the fate of the city, and once they observe the townspeople’s aggressive behavior, they declare the place fit for demolition. Although theologians have overemphasized the supposed genders of the characters involved…what we really have is a morality tale against a society that puts rabid individual self-interest over the safety and sovereignty of others — a rape culture, if you will.

Now, Wilder’s troubled little train-people are way less messed up than the ones in this older story. They may obsess over their own needs, but not at others’ peril. Still, In Pullman just as in Sodom, angels deliberate over who deserves to “go” with them and who must stay, and whether to “take” the whole train. Scorched earth policy, or careful selection? Choose those who are mistakenly eager, or take the wisely reluctant? Suffice to say, these archangels’ dilemmas have a long literary precedent.

Less obvious is the story’s connection to Song of Hiawatha, a Native American myth set to verse by Longfellow. While this story is about surrender and community, that one seems much more about individualism and righteous conquest…but it’s probably quoted along with a barrage of other literature midway through the play. Actors portraying fields and other atmosphere recite and credit passages while crossing the stage on a porter-operated handcar, their words almost too fleeting to catch.

Novel staging elements at Imago are like a gun in Chekhov: if they’re there, they will be used. Therefore, view the stair steps that crane dangerously into the rafters with appropriate suspense. Someone is either going up, or coming down.

Oregon ArtsWatch Archives