Chronicling a wild and woolly trip across America in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, author Ken Kesey famously said, “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.”
When watching Spoleto Festival USA’s world-premiere production of George + George, it occurred to me that the same could be said for a work in progress. Either remain at the reading table or advance to full-production. Anywhere in between might result in the loss of bearings, not to mention limbs.
The guiding vision of the work is a departure for collaborators Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, who previously brought to the festival An Iliad and The Song of Rome, based respectively on The Iliad and The Aeneid. Each work is astounding both in its clarity of vision and muscularity of execution. When these two are good, they are very, very good.
As co-writers of this year’s piece, which was written as a nod to America’s 250th birthday celebration, O’Hare and Peterson try a different tack, grasping instead at levity as its main theatrical quiver and leavening its look at the American Revolution and its present-day political parallels via comedy. Such political satire is well-trod territory, dating back to sly, subversive playwrights like Aristophanes, who in works like Lysistrata and The Birds wielded his pen to searing satirical effect.
The text at the heart of George + George is a tragedy, the very one George Washington used in 1777 to lift spirits at Valley Forge over the frigid winter–serving up a lesser-known slice of Washingtoniana. Cato, a Tragedy is the 1712 play by Joseph Addison about the fall of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, a Stoic who resisted the tyranny of Julius Caesar.
The staged reading of a play, it is directed by Peterson is paced through by a narrator (Rachel Christopher), who introduces the work and reading stage directions directly to the audience.
Among the cast is an affable, frequently laughable, George Washington (Jeremy Shamos), a smarter-than-the-lot aide de camp (Leland Fowler), an endearingly uneducated infantry (among them Lilac Emery Haynes and Daniel Pearce) and a dramatically-endowed red-coated interloper (Emery Featherington).
History buffs will likely relish the appearance of an engagingly cagey Benedict Arnold (Shivam Patel) and a competent Betsy Ross (Angel Desai), the multi-tasking female who must button it all up. A star turn by O’Hare, who never disappoints, delights.
Here, the famously enigmatic Washington is all conviviality, with Shamos wearing his privilege as comfortably as his powered wig while the hapless infantry bumble through lines and his enslaved aide de camp Will subtly raises the intelligence quotient of the lot of them. As the Cato plot thickens, George + George piles on a mother lode of inside theater jokes.
It’s a rough-and-tumble romp among the players, on book with scripts in hand, makeshift wardrobes malfunctioning. Rather than a play within a play, George + George is more the making of a play within the making of a play. It has yet to cohere into the work it might be, but offers a palatable amuse bouche ahead of this summer’s 250 feeding frenzy.
Certainly the “how it started” and “how it’s going” of the American proposition offers fertile comic fodder, and prompts continued scrutiny. With 250 advancing, many will find themselves marrying the collective heartswell with a healthy dose of keeping it real–particularly in light of fighting matches on the White House lawn.
Speaking of rose gardens: George + George never promised to be fully formed. In its festival iteration, it can be challenging to make sense of the work-in-progress mashup of reading and rudimentary production values. The spirit of invention is certainly American, though seeing an early stage of the process may not be everyone’s cup of revolutionary tea.
What it does deliver is a genial peek under the hood of theater-making, akin to that old chestnut film, Waiting for Guffman, which also chronicled the making of a play, that one marking the milestone of a fictional American town.
As satire, it draws comparisons with tyrannical leaders past and present. When putting up the two Georges, there’s a royal assertion that the pair share more than the revolutionary might cop to. Still, this timing and topic beg for more bite. The benign backstage glimpse goes over easily, but holds back from breaking the skin to get to the meat of the matter.
In recent years, late night comedians, particularly Charleston’s own Stephen Colbert, have been making jocular hay of such comparisons and contrasts. Joining their razor-sharp ranks is bound to underscore the old theatrical adage that “dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
Perhaps, as the creators forge ahead to a full-scale production, George + George can drive home the agency of theater that may well have bolstered those at Valley Forge. With these capable collaborators in the driver’s seat, I look forward to hopping on board.
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