A Great Wilderness
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre
Thru Oct. 30
RECOMMENDED
One of the marks of playwright Samuel D. Hunter’s work is how skillfully he portrays people who lead lives in desperate isolation. In A Great Wilderness, produced by Rogue Machine at the Matrix Theatre, that scenario might apply to Walt (John Perrin Flynn), an elderly man, arguably in the first stages of dementia, who’s dedicated his life to the egregious practice of conversion therapy.
For 30 years Walt has lived in a secluded retreat in the mountains in Idaho. It’s a place where parents send their adolescent boys to be redirected away from their homosexual leanings. Fundamentally kind and gentle, Walt eschews the radical methods of some practitioners, like shock therapy, nor does he engage in fire-and-brimstone sermonizing at the youths in his care. He prefers instead to talk with his wards about his feelings, to read the Scriptures with them, perhaps take long walks together in the surrounding forest.
But Walt’s life as he’s lived it for three decades is coming to an end. His increasing forgetfulness has prompted his friends — his ex-wife Abby (Rachel Sorsa) and her second husband Tim (Tony Pasqualino) to engineer his move to an assisted living facility. Walt has docilely, but reluctantly, agreed to their plan and even packed his belongings. But then he receives a call from Eunice (Jacquelin Lorraine Schofield) a mother soliciting help with her son Daniel (Jeffrey Delfin), whom she’s discovered viewing gay porn on the internet.
The play opens with Daniel’s arrival, and an interchange where Walt does his darndest to make the bewildered stressed-out lad feel comfortable and allay his fears — of shock therapy, first and foremost (no surprise there). An actual therapy session never gets going, however; by the second scene, Daniel has disappeared into the woods, and the rest of the play takes place in tandem with the hunt for the missing boy, ill-equipped to survive in this rugged terrain, and with a forest fire raging nearby, no less.
One of the disconcerting aspects of A Great Wilderness is that it never actually depicts this immoral and harmful practice (still legal in 23 states) visited upon young gay men and women by (to put it mildly) misguided parents and their religious counselors. As the narrative unwinds, we learn that Walt has known tragedy in the form of a gay loved one who committed suicide — but his response has been to double down on the conversion thing, not reject it. It’s only as we approach catharsis that the thought that there might have been another path crosses his mind.
The play’s absence of polemic is a choice the playwright clearly has made; A Great Wilderness is less a political work than it is a character study of a man nearing the end of his life, taking stock and, with some trepidation, finding himself wanting. Only here and there are there hints of the bigotry and noxious closemindedness that Hunter more broadly exposes in some of his other plays — in Abby’s racist slurs and Tim’s opaque remarks about changing culture. Eunice’s twisted views (never verbally explicit, however) of her son’s sexual orientation are evidence also.
That said, Flynn plays Walt with dignity and grace, and to the extent that you identify or empathize with this character, a person for whom life in its fullness has begun to recede, the production will move you. But other elements are less successful — some related to the writing (see above) and others to the execution, under Elina de Santos’s direction. For example, I found it hard to relate to Eunice, a mother who claims to love her son (and perhaps she does) but, acting through the prism of her faith, views Daniel’s possible death as a liberation. Schofield relays the aura of a woman who is angry, unhappy and repressed, but her performance has a sameness and doesn’t offer much insight or nuance. Sorsa, in a plum role as a closeminded domineering individual, could be much larger and more dynamic. Pasqualini does a serviceable turn as an OK guy who must mediate between the controlling Abby and the increasingly resistant Walt. Delfin’s Daniel is still a blueprint awaiting development. As Janet, the no-nonsense local ranger, Tania Verafield furnishes this rather sad and sometimes slow-moving story with a measure of alacrity and humor.
The interior set (Bruce Goodrich) is aptly rustic and detailed, but there’s not a lot of warmth (lighting by Vicky Scott) or personality to reflect Walt’s genuine and giving nature. Also, I found the wide shallow proscenium at the Matrix Theater a liability in and of itself, with the actors sometimes positioned at too much distance from each other, when more intimate proximity would enhance the drama’s poignancy.
Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., W Hollywood. Fri.-Sat., Mon., 8 pm, Sun., 3 pm, dark Oct. 10; thru Oct 31. www.roguemachinetheatre.net Running time: approximately 2 hours with a 15-minute intermission.
