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24th Street’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
A tale of porcelain dolls
By Steven Leigh Morris
Moscow, Russia: There lives a woman whose body is wracked with cancer. She’s been fighting for her life for several years now. After surviving a double-mastectomy and lung surgery, both in order to gouge out carcinogenic lumps, the comparatively easy, remaining challenge is leukemia, for which she is being injected with three chemotherapy treatments per week. The doctors there are good. The treatment is working. Her red blood cell count, once having dropped perilously to between the disease’s third and lethal fourth stage, is once again rising.
I know this because she is my ex-wife, a native Russian. If you were in Los Angeles during the early 1990s, you might have seen her on our stages, mostly in productions by Playwrights Arena. She also performed off-Broadway at Abingdon Theatre Company.
We speak on occasion, from continents apart. Before I ask how she’s faring, I already know, just from the timbre of her voice. Sometimes weary. Sometimes animated.
The story she told me this week was that of her live-in assistant, Katya – a Ukrainian woman in her 60s. On occasion, Katya has sent me text messages – in Russian, since she speaks no English. The messages are constructed simply, to help me translate.
“Don’t worry, she’s just sleeping.”
“She’s afraid of the surgery tomorrow.”
“The doctor said she’s going to be fine.”
Katya and her employer have become like sisters. Katya rages at her when she refuses to eat. Sometimes she defers her own salary in order to buy strawberries and blueberries on doctor’s orders. She blends milk-shakes, and fries chicken livers, all to help feed her employer’s anemic blood.
This week, Katya was supposed to return to Ukraine for a week in order to renew her passport. She is able to live in Moscow on a Russian work visa. The day before she was to leave Moscow, Katya was out running errands while my ex-wife lay in the clinic. Two police detectives arrived in her ward, and asked if she could identify somebody from photographs. One of the detectives, a woman, held my ex-wife’s hand while the other presented her the images from a cell phone. There, she saw pictures of Katya lying on the ground in broad daylight between two apartment buildings. She had been discovered by construction workers, who at first thought she had passed out drunk, but then realized she had been mugged, robbed and left for dead, her head bludgeoned with a hammer. They stole Katya’s money and her passport, but perhaps because the workers interrupted the thugs’ attempted murder, they left her work visa undiscovered in a zipped-up jacket pocket. It was only because of that visa that the police were able to find Katya’s employer in the clinic.
The image that upset her most wasn’t the skull distorted from hammer blows, nor even the pool of blood on the sandy ground beside her head. What upset her most were the fresh strawberries and blueberries strewn on the ground around the blood pool, the fruit that Katya had just purchased to give her employer some strength before she left the country for a week. The thoughtfulness of it. The care. The love.
That’s the image that sent my ex-wife running from her clinic to the hospital where Katya now lay. The clinic’s doctor, who understood the entirety of the situation, pleaded with his friend, a surgeon in one of Moscow’s elite hospitals, to operate on Katya without charge. After the surgery, she lay behind glass, on a ventilator, white gauze and bandages wrapped around her head.
“Katya, it’s me. I’m with you.”
“She can’t hear you. She’s in a coma.”
Brady Dalton Richards, Rachel Weck and Carlos Larkin in The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane at 24th Street Theatre. (Photo by Cooper Bates)
And this is the scene that brought back a stage production I’d seen at the 24thStreet Theatre some three weeks prior, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, adapted by Dwayne Hartford from a children’s story by Kate DiCamillo. When it’s working, which isn’t often, the theater stays with you that way.
In Edward Tulane, the eponymous character is a porcelain rabbit. When push comes to blows, as it often does in life (and in this story), which of us isn’t made of porcelain?
The story and this fanciful stage adaptation follows the picaresque journey of that rabbit (portrayed as both an inanimate doll, as well as by actor Carlos Larkin) in the early 20th century, from the loving care of a child (Rachel Weck) in a wealthy East Coast family containing tinges of stern cruelty by her mother (Jennifer Hasty), to being thrown overboard a ship, to being plucked off the ocean floor in a fishing net, to join the rescuer fisherman (Brady Dalton Richards) and his wife (Weck) who are grieving the loss of their 5-year-old child, to a journey with a hobo (Weck) and his mutt (Richards) across the American plain, to the indignity of being used as a scarecrow, and – to the larger point – to having its head smashed open.
A German doll maker, not unlike the Moscow surgeon, stitches the rabbit’s porcelain head back together. The now scarred doll sits for months in a toy shop waiting to be bought, existing in a kind of coma, waiting for the return of something resembling a life.
Having arrived at 24th Street Theatre from recently seeing David Hare’s Skylight at the Chance Theatre in Anaheim Hills, I was on the verge of giving up on theater. This happens to critics more frequently than most care to admit. That production of Skylight was very polished, the various British dialects (coached by Glenda Morgan Brown) were almost perfect, but we were being asked to look at the world’s injustice through a rhetorically pitched battle between the classes – that is, between a willfully arrogant philanderer (Steve Marvel) who professionally occupies London’s top financial tiers. His opponent is his former mistress (Kyra Hollis), whom he visits, uninvited, after the death of his wife. She’s now a hard-working schoolteacher of impoverished children and an endearing truth-teller who gave up living in his manse to occupy a squalid flat, having run out on him when his now late wife discovered their affair. He snivels contemptuously at her digs (very persuasive set by Bruce Goodrich, if one is vested in this brand of naturalism), and he derides her neighborhood. Meanwhile, she defends, extorts, her purpose in life, along with the right to live as one pleases. Mostly, though, they have an increasingly impassioned dialectic about privilege and social class. By play’s end, we’re invited to judge which one is more worthy, as though that was ever in question.
Which brings us back from the world of social dialectics to the theater of allegory and imagination, an entirely different language, at which 24th Street Theatre excels. Both plays grapple with cruelty. One uses topical conversation. The other employs a far more elemental and physical form of storytelling. One is for adults. The other is for youth, though it certainly resonates through the adult world. If both were on a referendum, I’d vote for the latter.
This is why: Out on the American plains, Edward, the Hobo and the pooch (named Lucky, of course), find themselves under a star-lit sky. Using what director Debbie Devine described as a cheesy $7 gobo, the entire theater was engulfed in starlight. A 10-year-old girl in the audience couldn’t contain herself.
“Look!” she exclaimed out loud. “There’s stars everywhere!”
It’s in moments like these that you realize how this theater is doing God’s work: Revelation through enchantment. You just won’t find that kind of enchantment in a social debate — intellectual pirouettes yes, but not enchantment.
Devine chose to forego any kind of early 20thcentury set, or costumes. No pretense to artifice. Just plain old in-your-face-artifice. It feels so much more honest. No, honesty doesn’t really matter in the theater. It feels more authentic.
The actors are donned in black. Keith Mitchell’s set consists largely of a step-ladder, and a small screen in a gilded frame for Matthew G. Hill’s gorgeous video design. Mostly it’s used to project settings as told in words, but the lettering appears as though it were in a faded 1920s movie, with blotches popping across the screen.
Devine messed around a bit with the casting of this production, from the way it’s depicted in the script, and her choices landed on terra firma.
None of this would have worked without the dexterity of the cast. In her multiple roles, Jennifer Hasty portrays a surliness that’s weirdly nuanced and terrifying. Brady Dalton Richards is a veritable gymnast on the stage, leaping like a gazelle, then, as Lucky, rolling on his back and scratching his privates endlessly, eliciting howls of mirth from the children present. Rachel Weck beguiles as the first child to own Edward, before she morphs into unrecognizable variants as, for instance, the Hobo.
This review hasn’t yet mentioned onstage musician Bradley Brough, nor the powerful influence of the music that accompanies this odyssey of love and cruelty. The music from “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” is in the script, but other musical motifs were added by Brough, bravely bringing to a youth production more components of sadness and regret.
I can’t think of Edward Tulane, its view of the world’s savagery and redemption, and the way they’ve intertwined throughout history, without thinking of Katya floating somewhere between life and death. And of course those strawberries and blueberries left on the ground where she was almost killed. I can’t help thinking of all the children in the 24th Street Theatre taking in the cruelty and redemption of Edward Tulane, in both English and if needed, via Spanish supertitles.
An old song lyric comes to mind. Leonard Cohen:
There are heroes in the seaweed,
There are children in the morning,
They are leaning out for love,
And they will lean that way forever,
While Suzanne holds the mirror.
When at its best, our theater holds that mirror.
THE MIRACULOUS JOURNEY OF EDWARD TULANE | Adapted by Dwayne Hartford from the book by Kate DiCamillo | 24thStreet Theatre, 1117 24thStreet, Los Angeles | Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.; through June 2. | (213) 745-6516, or www.24thstreet.org Running time: approximately 90 minutes with no intermission
