THE WAGER
Borealis Productions and Puszh Company
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The rest, idiotic gunplay and tedious, red-herring plot developments, is thuddingly predictable. So are the joyless revelations–Honor isn’t happy with her sexless marriage of eight and a half years, Ron is a weenie who hunts deer with an automatic rifle, Ward is a Spur Posse womanizer who’s constant only to his mirror, and, least surprising, Leeds is an intellectual bully who hides behind words and, yes, is afraid to love!
It’s hard to believe this was fresh in the 70s, when Medoff lifted it from pulp fiction. Today his smart-ass psychologizing seems a paltry excuse for the play’s real menu, gratuitous threats of violence and ill-disguised misogyny. (Honor’s name is just the first of many jokes inflicted on her.)
Nicholson’s work movingly depicts the true-life love that briefly bloomed between the cloistered British theologian/fantasy writer C.S. “Jack” Lewis and poet Joy Davidman, a divorced American with enough spunk for ten people. Initially a technical alliance intended to win her the right to stay in England, their marriage became a gentle union of opposites, Joy’s directness of thought and openness of heart a tonic to Jack’s Oxonian reserve and cerebral maunderings.
A further flaw is the clumsy blocking required by the set’s crude alignment. The audience members sit along opposite walls, facing one another, and the action takes place in the center. The actors turn their backs on one another or huddle incongruously in a circle of chairs; and, awkwardly, they never leave the room, so the audience has a full view of them as they wait along one edge of the playing area to come onstage. Add to this an erratic pacing and you get a very dim Shadowlands.
