The “staged reading” is a pretty new phenomenon to Milwaukee. An integral part of play development in America, readings are quite common in first-tier theater cities like New York, Philadelphia or Chicago. In fact, one of the complaints about new play development in the United States is the tendency to trap plays in a development “limbo,” subjecting the playwright to reading after reading, while full productions are reserved for plays with surer box office appeal.
Milwaukee Chamber Theater is the first “first-tier” theater in Milwaukee to regularly schedule readings of plays that are “works in progress.” The Montgomery Davis Play Development Series has offered several staged readings in the last two years, one of which – Jonathan Gillard Daly’s The Daly News – went on to a full production. Monday night, the series featured Gwendolyn Rice’s A Thousand Words, and in spite of the balmy Monday night (which kept the temperature in the Broadway Theatre Center’s Skylight Bar & Bistro a bit warm), the house was packed.
A staged reading is not a first go for actors. After all, they want to give the playwright a good sense of the play as it stands. They know their roles (even though they keep scripts with them for reference), they ar
e well rehearsed (here by director Jennifer Uphoff Gray), and they do act.
Rice’s play takes off from the life of Walker Evans, the well-known Depression-era photographer best known for his Dust Bowl photographs and his collaboration with writer James Agee (on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). Here, Evans has a different collaborator, a woman who reluctantly accepts a Farm Services Administration assignment to document the lives of the rural poor in Kansas, a place where she has a history.
Eighty years later, there’s something else going on in Kansas. While doing research for a show of quilts and textiles, a Metropolitan Museum of Art curator discovers some unknown Evans photographs, and they come with a surprise connection.
The two stories – told mostly in alternating scenes – eventually come together with satisfying closure. But for me, the most interesting parts of A Thousand Words come along the way. The conflicts here touch on a number of interesting art-world and life issues: The struggle to keep artistic values alive in a corporate world; the nature of photography and its potency as an art; and most tellingly, the moral qualities of a photograph which depicts suffering – is it ultimately enlightening or exploitative?
With a great cast and some perfectly picked incidental music between scenes, this reading showed that Rice’s play has great promise. And offered a great chance for audience members to think about what exactly makes theater – a good play in particular – tick.
