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Michael Stebbins, "An Almost Holy Picture"
Follow me.
In Heather McDonald’s “An Almost Holy Picture,” that’s what Samuel Gentle (Michael Stebbins) remembers God telling him to do when he was nine years old, while clutching his father’s hand in a cranberry bog. Samuel listened, and started off on a four decade journey of faith and occasional despair.
Now Rep Stage is asking us to do the same, with its brave production of a two-hour, one-person play. It can be a long two hours; but there are rewards. Many of them are in the afterlife, as you drive home from Columbia, Maryland mulling over the epigrams on life and faith that the play leaves stuck in your head. The other rewards come sporadically: as synapses of staging, lighting, and fine acting by Mr. Stebbins create textured and epiphanic moments.So, yes, follow. But turn off your cellphone, and be prepared to take the high road.
But if you need a more down-to-earth reason for heading out to Howard Community College’s campus, it’s probably actor (and Rep Stage artistic director) Michael Stebbins. Five years ago, with his solo performance of “Fully Committed,” Stebbins offered a dazzling, manic portrayal as an underemployed actor juggling phone calls and about fifteen different personae. His performance here is almost a complete turnaround. Samuel Gentle is an unassuming, meditative, and intensely religious (even when he has turned his back on religion.) His life is one of slow rhythms, mystical encounters, and quasi-religious ceremonies. Stebbins has more than enough confidence to create his own timeline, however, and let the audience follow. In a play that requires the solo actor to fill a jar with stones (one a day) and arrange tulip bulbs, that’s no mean feat.
Stebbins gets support: a spare but striking set (James Fouchard creates a perspective-skewing combination of a cathedral doorway and Stonehenge), along with expressionist lighting design (Jay Herzog) that is dazzling without being distracting.
I’m not sure, however, that that description would apply to the script itself, which is also dazzling, but overloaded with vague truisims about faith and redemption, love and death, and a perceived bond between religious and artistic vocations. While the acting is magnetic, the existential tidbits that the hapless Samuel Gentle is made to dish out leaves me wondering whether they be better served in Chinese fortune cookies or by a simple staged reading.
The plot, loosely based on a short story by Pamela Ward, “The Hairy Girl” could be described as a Bildungsroman of a modern-day Job. Samuel Gentle feels the call to the ministry from a young age. But that faith gets shaken when, as a minister in New Mexico, his school bus lurches off the road, and nine children from the local congregation perish. Gentle drops the vocation, heads to Massachusetts, and takes up gardening on the grounds of a New England parish. He also marries and has a child. But the gauntlet of his life has only begun. His child, Ariel, is born covered with hair, a rare genetic syndrome passed through the father. Gentle takes that in stride, and then, about a decade down the road, finds himself faced with the ultimate insult: of watching Ariel, the one redeeming focus of his life, become an independent human being.
If not for the admirable efforts of director Tony Tsendeas and Mr. Stebbins, though, it wouldn’t be a play at all. Pulitzer-nominated playwright Heather McDonald is an eloquent and thoughtful writer who, in this play at least, can’t seem to keep her fist out of the jellybean jar of motifs, images, religious and artistic references, and fortune-cookie quotes about faith, art, and life that Gentle’s story offers.
I’m sure she’s being faithful to the story, and it’s a story she believes in, but the stage itself, along with the character she plunks onto it, get sold short. For instance, with the aid of lighting design, Gentle narrates his moves from Cape Cod to New Mexico (and back?). There’s a reason, apparently, in the text, but it leaves the actor on the stage hovering in an dislocated zone that is largely a reflection of the writer’s own mind. If there’s a link between Provincetown and New Mexico, frankly, it has something to do with artists colonies.
Stebbins brings us down from that zone as he and Tsendeas create a relationship triangle: between Samuel, his hirsute daughter, and the audience. But McDonald insists on injecting cheap literary references that (just sayin’) reek of summer stock and Provincetown galleries. Miriam, his wife seems to be a plot device, who gives this particular groundskeeper a reason for peppering his lines with gratuitous references to Tennessee Williams’ “Glass Menagerie” and to photographic chiaroscuro techniques.
McDonald spends so much time with her sermon on the mount that she forgets about the transubstantiation. If it was a Mass, parishoners would start leaking out the door.
As it was, there was a little shuffling, and a brief (premature) round of applause halfway through the second act, just as Gentle seemed to bring his story to its crisis point. Like an eloquent but long-winded museum guide, McDonald dove into an extended, fifteen minute coda that stranded Stebbins on stage after his character had completed his journey.
Despite Rep Stage’s efforts, there’s a disconnect in this playwright-centric production. Yes, we need more plays that make us think. Rep Stage does that, and this production was no exception. But, in this play, McDonald feels that she has to shove Gentle aside and use the stage (and the two hour window of opportunity) to tell us what she thinks. That’s where I (and, it’s safe to say, a portion of the audience) stopped following.
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