EMERALD CITY
Zebra Crossing Theatre’s production of David Williamson’s Emerald City gives its audience plenty of time to grapple with these questions as it lumbers along through a story that is interminable, predictable, and cliche ridden. Williamson is a leading Australian playwright and screenwriter known chiefly for his script for Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli and for cowriting Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (you remember–white people screw as brown nation burns). Apparently the 48-year-old Williamson, who started his professional career as an engineer for General Motors in Australia, is mulling over his midlife anxieties, for Emerald City includes gripping moral dilemmas: Is one selling out by moving from a lifetime of writing successful films on the relationships of middle-class “trendies” to developing an eight-part miniseries on Australia’s World War II “coast watchers”? Is it better to let someone else cast a matinee idol in one of your pictures and retain your control of the script or to gain production control of your films and lower your artistic standards?
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A defender of Williamson’s work might say that I missed the ironies in what is actually a wicked send-up of middlebrow mores among the screenwriting classes. When Mike is through with his production partnership with Colin, he sweet-talks a banker into starting a $100 million film-investment pool, and then sets about moving Kate’s Black Rage to Tennessee, replacing aborigines with African Americans, and getting “strong interest” from Richard Pryor. Some irony. With appropriate camera angles and crosscutting, and with a creepy new-age score, it might work as a subplot in a television series on Hollywood. But in the theater one expects each line to be an offering from a playwright who has polished it free of the interference of studio or network executives. Here the inability of made-for-TV-movie writing to hold up as live drama is painfully apparent.
