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Hot l USA
American Notes continues a tradition
BY IRIS FANGER

American Notes
By Len Jenkin. Directed by Jeffrey Mousseau. Set by Rick Vanzini. Lighting by Jeff Benish. Costumes by Denitsa Bliznakova. Sound by J. Hagenbuckle. With Barlow Adamson, Tanya Anderson, Siobhan Brown, Kippy Goldfarb, Kelly Lawman, Michael Nurse, Rick Park, John Porell, Jim Spencer, and Forrest Walter. Presented by the Coyote Theatre at the Boston Center for the Arts, Thursday through Sunday through January 26.


Len Jenkin has latched on to a favorite theatrical conceit in fashioning American Notes, a nocturnal fantasy being given its New England premiere by Coyote Theatre. The play unfolds in the neutral space of a motel lobby, surrounded by other generic locales including a restaurant, a motel room, and a carnival, where a disparate group of characters meet by chance to spill out their individual stories. There’s a parade of classics that attest to the lure of this dramatic set-up: William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, and Lanford Wilson’s The Hot l Baltimore, to name just a few.

For three-time Obie winner Jenkin, the stage seems to represent Anywhere, USA, perhaps a small town in Middle America with a Main Street consisting of a few strip malls lining a highway, more a throughway than a stopping place. Carrying a suitcase apiece, the characters are outsiders to the American dream in that they share a rootlessness. But unlike, say, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, Jenkin’s folks have no sense of rebellion or curiosity that drives them to push on to the next destination. As if they were figures in a medieval morality play, they can be identified by their personality traits — the drifter, the braggart, the hustler, the disaffected kids — and taken as human warnings.

The earlier plays in this genre present people who live on their illusions, refusing to face the truths about their lives. Writing at the turn of the 21st century, Jenkin replaces the self-defeating lies with a fatalism born of understanding too well the prevailing conditions of society, where there’s little sense in subscribing to a mistaken faith in the future. And in contrast to Saroyan’s cloaking of symbolism in naturalistic acting, or O’Neill’s, Jenkin chooses contemporary fantasy for his Neverland of misfits.

Director Jeffrey Mousseu, with the help of set designer Rick Vanzini, echoes the quick-moving tempo of the play — it’s 90 minutes, without an intermission — by cramming the various settings together on the small stage of the BCA Black Box Theatre to construct a cluttered landscape in the middle of nowhere. With no need for set changes, the action intercuts scenes as if in a film.

Mousseau and the 10-member cast treat Jenkin’s quirkish, philosophizing characters with respect, portraying the inter-relationships straight and as worthy of consideration. But the actors are essentially creating vignettes, because even when their characters are engaged in multi-character encounter, each is locked in a vacuum of loneliness or eccentricity that prevents him or her from making a connection.

You can pick your favorite among the entourage: Rick Park as the authoritative carnival pitchman who has been traveling for 30 years with Bonecrusher, " a crocodile from Egypt " who may or may not be alive; Kippy Goldfarb as the lapsed academic who makes a persuasive case for the shadow people living in the trees outside her window; Siobhan Brown as a latter-day incarnation of one of O’Neill’s whores with a heart of gold. Barlow Adamson is Faber, the down-and-out Everyman, on the run but not on the mend from a broken heart. Then there’s Forrest Walter as Chuckles, the homeless tramp who serves as universal servant, just happy for a meal and a pat on the head. He cannot speak, beyond mouthing the motto of the motel: " We’re easy to get to, hard to leave. "

The change of pace comes in the character of Pauline, the sunny young woman working as the motel’s night clerk. With little affectation or sense of incongruity, Tanya Anderson spouts her hopes in defiance of the reality of her situation and in contrast to Faber’s sardonic take on life. American Notes proves a low-key charmer, more as a result of Coyote’s likable production than because of any resolution of the multiple dilemmas it presents. And the images conjured by Jenkin’s dialogue, which is written in a street-smart vernacular poetry, resonate in the ear of one who, like the characters in the play, drops by to listen.

Issue Date: January 10-17, 2002
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