Review: MKE Rep Presents Miraculous Masterpiece and World Premiere AMERICAN SONG

Perhaps only someone looking from the the outside can see more clearly than those living on the inside of the United States. This principle operates with brilliant clarity when Milwaukee Repertory Theater presents the World Premiere American Song by acclaimed Australian author and playwright Joanna Murray-Smith. The Rep commissioned the play almost four years ago in 2012 and then opened on the Quadracci Powerhouse stage this past weekend. Set in the America's heartland, a supposedly rural Wisconsin town, American Players Theatre actor James DeVIta gives an incomparable portrayal of a parent in agony, a father in midlife named Andy.

In Murray-Smith's evocative play, Andy continually ponders the past--"The moment it all started..when one thing leads to another, and one moment started a trajectory...like layering rock and stone."

DeVita stands in a plaid shirt and khaki work pants, isolated on stage through the entire 85 minute performance while he builds a sandstone wall in perhaps a wheat field,. The actor hoists the odd shaped rocks and places them one by one in meticulous order to build something that will eventually last, even with the flaws in walls and his life experience. Murray-Smith exquisitely constructs the wall as a task DeVita works at to relieve his internal pain, while he thinks out loud, and as a metaphor for a single life, which also encompasses a pictorial for life on a grand scale in this utterly transcendent play.

Under Artistic Director Mark Clement's astute direction, American Song underscores the changed and divisive nature of contemporary culture in the states when Andy references lines of Walt Whitman's poem "I Hear America Singing." Daniel Conway's rustic scenic design complemented by Jason Fassl's lighting design flashes a bright morning sky moving quickly across a screen behind the field and wall that ultimately clouds over as the day. When the script moves forward through the no-intermission evening, DeVita's Andy poignantly retells his personal moments that transformed his life.

Clements appears to underplay these production elements, hearkening to Whitman's simpler era, to heighten DeVita's supreme storytelling and to contrast the reality of contemporary society. The audience sat enraptured on opening night to watch DeVita, where barely a sound could be heard except for laughter from the humor Murray-Smith wove in between the foundation of her play, as the stones provide a strong foundation for correlating Andy's story to American life. By focusing on a highly personal, specific incident and the family of Andy, Amy and their son Robbie, Murray-Smith presents the universal experience of being people and also parents in a fast paced, Facebook world---feeling out of control over their child growing into adulthood, often misunderstanding him and what to do, somehow lost to any chorus of unified voices Whitman speaks of in his classic poem.

With these stories revealed through a flashback, DeVita's Andy relieves those moments in his life from when he met his wife as a very naive youth until "the moment" when everything changed--again a specific story illustrates the larger questioning of when America transformed into a country steeped in mass shootings and violence on the streets, instead of singers of unique songs, working to build America, from the carpenter, mason, mechanic, mother, or a girl washing clothes. To reveal more of Andy's stories, and his timely musings, would lessen the intensity of the evening as the play unfolds for those who will attend a future performance.

When DeVita takes that final curtain call, and refuses to name and place his last stone on the wall he's building, The Rep stages Act II, where audience members listen to a Milwaukee Community leader and his/her reaction to the play. On this night, the city's Public Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Darienne Driver reacted with her comments on how the educational system attempts to "keep all children safe:" from bullying, incarceration, depression, hunger, family dysfunction, poverty, suicide, and violence---a tall order when a school's function was primarily to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. After her brief comments, the audience may participate in group discussions held in the theater lobby paired with free wine to drink while discussing the play in a controlled setting through the assistance of a leader from the Frank Zeidler Center for Public Discussion. During one session, a few participants had tears welling in their eyes when answering the question: Would you please share a scene from the play which meant something to you?

From the moment the play opens, to the end of these powerful discussions, this profound story breathes life into a pinpoint view of 21st century America from a small Midwestern farm field while current statistics indicate that one out of three people will be a victim of gun violence. This discouraging message resonates as far away as Paris, France and Denmark, or in the Middle East, where ever a person takes another human life by shooting a gun, currently the global state of the human condition. As the play states for Americans: "We can escape what others know about us, but we cannot escape what we know about ourselves."

Murray-Smith peered inside the country's human heart from her Australian perspective to produce an American Song, a perfectly tuned elegy to to a bygone America and her deceased citizens, especially the innocent children caught in the crossfire. Whether speaking of Columbine, Sandy Hook or the West Nickel Mines tragedies, the six deaths at the Oak Creek Sikh Temple, anyone or anyplace violated by a weapon, Murray-Smith offers a silver of honor, redemption for a moral reckoning at the finale. Especially profound when Andy remembers what his wife Amy reminds him during one point in his life: "Look after what you have, Andy, or one day it might be gone."

Attend to what we have in Milwaukee. Take a moment, one moment to transform a personal and community trajectory--- purchase tickets to The Rep's and Murray-Smith's eloquent, miraculous, masterpiece of theater featuring one equally magnificent actor James DeVita in the World Premiere American Song.

Milwaukee Repertory Theater presents the World Premiere American Song by Joanna Murray-Smith on stage at the Quadracci Powerhouse in the Patty and Jay Baker Theater Complex through April 10. To contribute a personal comment or 'song',' visit #AmericanSongMKE@ MKE Rep. A list of the community leaders providing comments for each performance available online, along with additional special programming, further information about the 2016-2017 season or to purchase tickets for this performance, please call: 414. 224.9490 or www.milwaukeerep.com

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