Dylan Thomas immortalized a mythical Welsh seaside town in hisradio play "Under Milk Wood." Edgar Lee Masters created a graveyardview of small-town Midwestern life in his "Spoon River Anthology."And now the American poet David Budbill has set his eye and ear onthe fictional world of Judevine, a rugged little town in northernVermont where Christmas tree farms and a ski resort are the mainsources of jobs and the human tragicomedy is omnipresent.
"Judevine," Budbill's stage adaptation of an extensivecollection of poems he wrote about a Vermont town where he lived for20 years, is now on view in a glorious production by Equity LibraryTheatre. The show is being mounted in the intimate confines of theChicago Dramatists Workshop, where a cast of 11 fine actors set fireto the material. Their work should not be missed.
Wrenchingly real, fiercely emotional and unexpectedly funny,this is a show that pierces the heart and engages the senses, growingin intensity as it draws you into the lives and battered fortunes ofan entire community. Budbill's characters are unusually rich andthree-dimensional. And he offers profound insights into the secretlives and overt eccentricities of the inhabitants of a modern ruralcommunity where unemployment, child abuse and loneliness coexist withlove, friendship and the unmatched beauty of the natural world.
The production is structured as a sort of choral round, withvoices entering, receding and returning to create a rhythm akin tothe beautifully evoked seasons. "Judevine," superbly directed byVirginia Smith, is a series of interlocked character sketches andbrief scenes stitched together by sound effects created by theactors, and by Paul Amandes' subtly woven score for guitar (fine work by the lovely Suzi Regan), harmonica and a cappella voices.
Serving as narrator for the play, which was first staged in1990, is the poet himself (played by Norm Boucher, with just theright writerly distance). And it is through him that we get to knowthe townspeople, including Antoine La Motte (the beguiling JackHickey), a feisty little French-Canadian woodsman forever in searchof the perfect earth mother and wife to help him fend off lonelinessand drink; Arnie Pike (Robert W. Behr), the marginally employedhandyman who barely ekes out a living, and Roy McInnes (StephenSpencer), the welder whose passion for his craft has an almostmedieval intensity.
There are memorable couples, too: Alice Pwiss (Annalise Raziq),the husky owner of a great junkyard emporium who quietly goes abouther life with her petite, ladylike lesbian lover; Raymond and AnnMiller (played magnificently by Craig Spidle and Diane Dorsey), themodest and meticulous farmers whose passionate marriage is conjuredto exquisite effect; Edgar Whitcomb (Spencer), the decorous postman,and his independent lover, Laura Cate (Maureen O'Dowd); andtragically, Grace (played with ferocity by the excellent SuellenBurton), the single mother with a record of child abuse who finds afew brief moments of happiness with Tommy Stames (the splendidSpencer), a traumatized Vietnam vet.
The people of Judevine, Budbill says, tend to be survivors,"waiting, always, for the spring." We gladly wait with them and growin their presence.
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