By the Bog of Cats, A Frank Theater production at The Guthrie Theater on 3/13/09
By: David de Young
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| Annie Enneking (left) and Virginia Burke in By The Bog of Cats (Photo by Tony Nelson) |
I am the mother of your children. Whither can I fly, since all Greece hates the barbarian?" – From The Medea by Euripides.
The last Frank Theater production I saw in the Dowling Studio was the Ivy Award-winning The Pillowman, one of the best shows I saw anywhere in 2007. To kick off their 20th season, Frank Theater is back in the Dowling with Irish playwright Marina Carr’s By The Bog of Cats. Theater-goers expecting the same high standards and intensity they’ve grown accustomed to from Frank will not be disappointed.
By the Bog of Cats is loosely-based on Greek playwright Euripides' 5th Century BC tragedy The Medea, sometimes considered one of the first works of feminism. Carr’s play had its debut at the Abbey Theater in Dublin in 1998. The playwright found renown in America a few years later following a San Jose production of the play starring Holly Hunter as Hester Swane shortly after 9/11.
As the play opens, Hester Swane (Virginia Burke) is dragging a dead swan across the bog and is visited by an apparition who calls himself the Ghost Fancier (Christopher Kehoe). The ghost has come too early, at dawn instead of dusk, and it’s not really a spoiler to point out he does ultimately return at the correct time. The single day during which all the action of the play takes place is the wedding day of Hester’s former lover, Carthage Kilbride (John Catron) who is also the father of her 7 year old child, Josie (Izzy Rousmaniere.)
A dead black swan and a character named Swane in scene one? There must be a theatrical rule somewhere that tells you this will not end well.
Carthage wants Hester to leave the bog so he can live in Hester’s house with his soon to be wife, Caroline Cassidy (Anika Solveig), daughter of a wealthy landowner. Aside from the fact she considers it her home, Hester doesn’t want to leave the bog because she believes the mother who abandoned her as a child will someday return.
Indeed, this is a long narrative set up I have laid out here, but most of Act I of the play itself does the same, serving to introduce you to the dozen characters and show the relationships among them. It’s necessary preparation for what it is to come, and when that hits, it hits hard; I thought the whole of Act II had an immediately palpable emotional weight and tone that hadn’t been present before. And I felt that contrast starkly, and am sure it wasn’t the result of the glass of white wine I had at intermission.
Director Wendy Knox makes the characters in Carr’s play multi-dimensional where they could easily have been caricatures (crazy witch, domineering grandmother, young man trying to marry up, naïve bride, etc.). Though in some ways these are archetypes, they are also still believably modern. The wedding scene which provides the production with much needed comic relief – complete with the Catwoman of the bog lapping wine from a saucer - is almost disturbingly familiar. There are many outstanding performances here including Burke as tragic heroine Hester, Catron as Carthage, Annie Enneking as Catwoman, Melissa Hart as Mrs. Kilbride and Bob Davis as Xavier Cassidy. They player all interact like a big star-crossed dysfunctional family, and as I said, it doesn’t end well.
The evocative set is more suggestive than functional throughout, and working with the eerie music piped in during the bog scenes, this production takes on a tone that is in many ways as disturbing as the terrible things that take place.
Two and a half hours with one intermission, By the Bog of Cats runs through April 5th. Tickets and more information at http://www.guthrietheater.org
Location Info:
The Guthrie Theater
Artist Info: Frank Theatre
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