GRACES
Eventually it became clear to everyone but my friend that he would never get around to writing the play, and that even if he did, he’d have to be the next O’Neill or Ibsen to create a play that meant all that he wanted it to mean.
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I thought about my friend the other night after seeing Jeff Helgeson’s play Graces and speaking with Helgeson after the show. Like my friend, Helgeson has consciously and in excruciating detail pondered his play’s various levels of meaning, its literary, biblical, and mythological references, and which other plays it resembles (Helgeson’s example: A Streetcar Named Desire). The three women in the play, Helgeson told me, represent at once the three Graces, the three witches in Macbeth, three Olympian goddesses–Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite–and the three women at Christ’s tomb when the rock was rolled away.
Helgeson, for all his academic hot air, has nothing new to say. Not about women–Doris, Janet, and Brenda are little more than idealized male projections of women. Not about theater–Helgeson’s easy swipes at Method acting hardly add up to an informed critique of American theater. Not even about mythology and how it informs our everyday life–for all his talk about blurring the boundaries between individual characters and the archetypes they represent, Helgeson has created characters who are strikingly empty.
