Was
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. . . . When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and . . . the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at. –L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz
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The premise of Was, Road-works Productions’ superb new story-theater piece, will surely sound like a sick joke to some. The basis for this play, scripted and staged by Paul Edwards, is novelist Geoff Ryman’s reworking of the Wizard of Oz myth, in which 19th-century Kansas farm girl Dorothy Gael endures troubles far worse than winged monkeys and wicked witches. Abandoned by her ne’er-do-well actor father, Dorothy is orphaned when her mother dies of diphtheria and sent to live with her mother’s sister, Emma Gulch, and Em’s husband Henry. Here her life is uprooted by one psychic cyclone after another: Em shoots Dorothy’s troublesome dog Toto, for example, then leads the child to believe her beloved pet has run away. As Dorothy matures, she’s ensnared by Henry in a furtive, abusive affair (which Em refuses to confront) that teaches her to connect pleasure, pain, love, hate, and guilt. Finally Dorothy blurts out her tormented secret in school, where her substitute teacher Mr. Baum–yes, Mr. L. Frank Baum–is so upset by her situation that he brings the matter to the principal, then loses his job for doing so. The shame of scandal is the straw that breaks Dorothy’s mind: she’s committed to an asylum, where half a century later she astounds her keepers by declaring that the 1939 Judy Garland musical being shown on TV is her life story–only it wasn’t like that at all.
The key to this show’s vividness is its characters–lively, quirky, and played with a moment-by-moment energy, they make us believe that their minds and emotions are developing even as we watch. For the play’s parallel protagonist-narrators–Dorothy and Jonathan, a modern-day AIDS patient whose investigation into Dorothy’s life motors this postmodern historical epic–telling their stories is the way they live them. The mercurial Dorothy–Jennifer Erin Roberts, who ranges breathtakingly from shy sweetness to enigmatic curiosity to demonic, foulmouthed rage without missing a beat–illumines the anguished, sardonic alienation of mental disturbance without resorting to grotesque stereotypes or sentimental cliche. As Jonathan, Patrick McNulty conveys a crisp yet whimsical intelligence that keeps the character’s obsession with the Oz legend from coming across as fey triviality.
It’s appropriate that a Chicago theater should mount the first stage version of Was. After all, it was here that Baum invented Oz and its inhabitants, first as a book and then as a hit play, using the neoclassical towers of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition as the inspiration for his City of Emeralds. Was is itself a jewel–on the stage as on the page, a beautifully balanced work of brain, courage, and heart.
