BWW Reviews: GIDION'S KNOT An Intense Opening For Open Stage of Harrisburg Season

Johnna Adams' GIDION'S KNOT is not a play designed to leave an audience cheered at the end - in fact, it is the exact opposite. It may leave the viewer sad, or depressed... or, at best, and at the play's best, unsettled. It may, if anything, be less cheerful and feel-good than LES MIS or SWEENEY TODD, where at least the audience can leave humming something. And that's not a bad thing, as long as the spectator comes in aware that this isn't the best story to sit through if you're celebrating an upbeat occasion or trying to soothe yourself after an unpleasant incident. It is worth watching if you want to be challenged, if you want to be provoked, if you'd rather have a side course of thinking along with your entertainment. On stage now at Open Stage of Harrisburg, directed by Donald Alsedek, it invites you to go out for late-night coffee with your companions afterwards to try to understand what you've seen - not because the plot is obscure but because the content is that loaded.

A short two-hander - it clocks in at 90 minutes with no intermission - it's also a new play, one that received a great deal of attention nationally when it premiered last year at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. Presented as the events of a parent-teacher meeting in an elementary school (presumably just outside Chicago), it ostensibly tackles such issues as school violence and bullying, and the all-too-common-these-days suicide of a child from the school. However, in the process, it also takes on such issues as the place of art in society, creative freedom versus social restraint, the perennial tension of free speech versus government regulation, and it may just take on a trifle too much in the process. All of these subjects are worth consideration, all are worth deliberation, all deserve time on the stage.

But ninety minutes' worth of two grieving and confused voices, ones that take much if not most of that time doing everything but having that conversation, merely raises the issues without allowing them to be examined until the audience leaves for that coffee and chat afterwards. In that respect, Adams' writing is perhaps a trick of style over substance - the contemporary issues are placed out there, the setting is modern and the two-hander dialogue-framing is pleasing, but the actual meat of the matter doesn't ever fully develop; only the slowly-revealed minor plot shocks do.

Fact: Gidion, a fifth-grader, has shot and killed himself in his mother's garage. Fact: he did so after being suspended from school. Aside from the fact of the parent-teacher conference itself, these are the only facts ever established in the show. After considerable wrangling, we discover that he had conflict with another older student. We discover that he wrote a story that caused his teacher to suspend him. We discover that Gidion's mother is a university literature professor who loves the story, who sees art and meaning in it, and that the teacher finds it shocking, disturbing, either a threat of or an instigation to violence against teachers and administration. The one thing that's clear between the lines? Schools don't understand - and neither do parents. Neither understands children all that well, and neither is able to understand the concerns of the other. The school seeks to protect structure in order to regulate through some degree of conformity; the parent seeks to encourage individuality... as long as it resembles the parent's individuality... and sees the school as a stifling influence on their child.

Beyond that? What may be style over substance; Gidion might have been gay; he seems to have had a crush on the older student who may have then bullied him. But there's no message to the almost unnoticeable disclosure, as it's handled, just as the actual issues of art and free speech versus regulation of implied threats to public order are never actually discussed other than for the mother and the teacher to express their disagreement over aesthetic judgement for one moment - the play spends far too much time with the women fighting over how much to say to each other at all for any of the really deep matter to be examined.

Alsedek handles the material well; he's up against script writing that has built-in far-too-long pauses, and far-too-awkward silences, to pace the show any more tightly than he has. If anything, Adams herself should consider a new edit to this play - the amount of time spent in real-time time-wasting ordered by the script has been criticized before. Time is different on a stage than it is in a real-life meeting, and the playwright herself seems to have missed that to some degree. Less pausing and a less convoluted opening would give more time to explore meaning.

Bringing the script to life on the stage in Harrisburg, local stage veterans Karen Ruch and Trish Baillie play Gidion's mother, professor Corryn Fell, and teacher Heather Clark, respectively. Ruch's work is quite fine here - her grief can be seen and felt all the way through her body as she moves on stage, even when she is seated; one need not hear her words nor see her face to feel what she is conveying. (This points up the one directorial problem to this show; as staged, half the audience cannot see the mother's face for a large chunk of the show, nor can the other half see anything but the back of the teacher's head.) Baillie is game, but there is sometimes what feels to be a slight disconnect between words spoken and her affect. It's true that the teacher is trying to cover, to some degree, which might be the cause here. Baillie comes to brilliant life, however, and begins to feel extremely genuine, just before a nicely-staged altercation between the women.

Kudos to Gwen Alsedek for the scenic design here - the setting is a classroom set that looks as if it might have been lifted bodily out of an area school, albeit a very good one (my friends' public-school-attending children don't have as many posters of various early cultures' mythologies presented on the walls, or so many student projects on Alexander the Great along the shelving). The cut-outs, the coloring projects, the tongue-depressor crafts, the colorful plastic supply bins, even the student desks with note paper, contraband, and bits of debris spilling out at edges, contribute to the feeling that this is a classroom we've all been in.

When is a teacher right to suspend a student out of fear that the written word, presented as art, might be something else entirely? How far should a parent go to defend a child's actions before agreeing that discipline might be appropriate? Can American public schools ever resolve the problems raised by placing clearly gifted students in a mix with those who aren't as talented or as achieving? Can they resolve the problems of school teachers and administrations who can't spot those students? Can either teachers or parents really know the children they care for? All of that is in the mix, both spoken and implied, here - none of it is really tackled further. That's unfortunate, because these issues need to be addressed. Who knows - perhaps theatre that simply acknowledges that the issues exist, as with this show, is a start.

At Open Stage of Harrisburg through October 26. Call 717-232-6736 or visit openstagehbg.com for tickets. Come with the open mind that Open Stage asks theatre lovers to have; this play requires it.

Photo courtesy of Open Stage of Harrisburg

CORRECTED: 12:30 PM 10/11/2013

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