Nightwalking: Voices From Kent State
Nowhere is this tendency toward solipsism more apparent than in our fumbling attempts to come to terms with the waning years of the Vietnam war. As Ronald E. Yates wrote in last Sunday’s Tribune, “The final siege of Saigon remains as vivid for me today as it was that dark morning 20 years ago, down to the smallest detail. I can still recall how cool the cracked ruby tiles of my room felt as I padded across them and out onto the balcony.” Abigail Foerstner, writing in the Tribune Sunday magazine about the weeklong shutdown of Northwestern’s Evanston campus in response to the killing of four Kent State students 25 years ago, devoted a paragraph or two to the social and political context and focused on the dramatic effect the Kent State tragedy had on the apolitical insularity at Northwestern, an effect she admits “didn’t last beyond spring.” Most of her story is made up of personal interviews with six participants in the events–a professor, a trustee, an administrator, and three students–who primarily discuss how it felt to be involved.
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Director Jenifer (Gwenne) Weber does little to orchestrate the self-conscious musicality of Perlman’s interspliced voices–and because these voices generally appear without context, attention to Perlman’s rhythms is critical to creating more than a list of disconnected facts. Instead Weber keeps everyone cut off from everyone else. For the most part each actor is lit independently and speaks without regard to the others. When not speaking, the actors stare blankly into the middle distance as though unable to hear or see the others. The characters’ isolation only adds to the play’s insularity, and the resulting sterility precludes any real ensemble energy from developing. The play ends up looking and sounding like a haphazardly edited talking-heads documentary.
