A FARM UNDER A LAKE
Women’s Project of City Lit Theater
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The arduous structure of the script is probably unavoidable. Bergland’s narrative is largely an internal monologue by Janet Hawn (Nespor), a private-care nurse in Green Bay, Wisconsin, who volunteers to drive an elderly patient some 500 miles to see her relatives in Quincy, Illinois. Since her passenger is only marginally aware of her immediate surroundings, the long drive gives Janet plenty of time to contemplate the people, places, and events of her life: the farm in southern Illinois, her childhood home, which had to be sold; the neighboring family that bought it; their two sons, Jack, whom she married out of acquiescence to other people’s plans, and Carl, whom she loved and continues to love with a kinship bred of their love for the land; her father’s second wife, who on the eve of Janet’s wedding instructs her how to run away from husbands (“Don’t ever let it get so bad that you have to go and leave your dishes,” she intones solemnly); the displaced farmer Janet remembers only as the Cabbage Man, whose sense of humor finally fails him, with tragic results; and Carl’s wife, Shirley, who shares with Jack a frustrated desire to belong in a white-collar world–an ambition that dooms them both to being forever out of place, like “a farm under a lake.”
The economy and lyricism of Bergland’s language mean that the minutes of this epic-length play slip by for us as quickly as the miles do for the characters. The mood can be casual (Janet notes wryly that “Jack was using up some of Carl’s air”) or intense (Janet muses that “[Jack] had become ‘self-reliant’–a cult which I was expected to join. . . . He only reminded me of the man I had married. I left, feeling neither guilt nor relief.”) But all of it succeeds in evoking, on a tiny stage, the sense of sweeping plains and ageless grandeur and an awareness of the nobility of those who work the earth.
Fortunately the directors and performers of All the Rage do not restrict us to only one message. Though there are three pieces that adhere so closely to formula that the characters may as well have numbers, the rest allow us to interpret as we see fit and to draw our own conclusions.
