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player ready...He may live in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and he may have made a few urban digressions over the years. But on Lanford Wilson’s tombstone, it should read “Here Lies the Dramatic Poet Laureate of the State of Missouri.”
Now 65 years old and increasingly self-reflexive, Wilson always has been at his best when writing about small-town Midwestern life. Sure, some academics have waxed rhapsodically about his urban works — “Burn This,” “Balm in Gilead,” “The Hot L Baltimore” — but Wilson always has seemed most theatrically comfortable when writing plays set within a few hours’ drive of Ozark, Mo., the town of his birth.
One can see this thematic ease very clearly in “The Book of Days,” Wilson’s best recent play (perhaps his best play, period), which talks of a cheese factory, the struggle between liberal forces and the Christian Right, and the encroachment of Hollywood forces on a small Missouri town.
But although a four-volume anthology of Wilson’s numerous plays has recently been published, “Talley’s Folly” remains Wilson’s biggest success. It won him the Pulitzer Prize.
Once over-exposed in community theaters thanks to its cast of two, sweet sensibility and single riverside setting, this tale of middle-age romance in the rural Missouri of 1944 has not been seen much in recent years. But “Talley’s Folly” has come back into vogue in regional theaters over the last couple of seasons — there was a major revival this spring at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.
The renewed popularity of this 1979 play partly is based in practicality — it’s simple, cheap and accessible, and its theme of last-gasp love offers soothing balm to the middle-aged and older folks who make up the bulk of the audience at non-profit theaters such as Northlight Theatre, which opened Kate Buckley’s production Wednesday night. But it’s also true that “Talley’s Folley” represents the peak of Wilson’s lyrical powers.
As he told the story of Matt Friedman (here played by Matt DeCaro) and Sally Talley (Lia Mortensen), a Jew and a WASP trying to overcome their baggage and find romance, Wilson managed to create a remarkable blend of poetic language and tension-inducing edge. His other plays have more complex narrative structures, but “Talley’s Folly” remains an unforced masterpiece of simple human conversation spoken with a simple human end in mind.
DeCaro, the vulnerable actor who plays accountant Friedman, has always appeared almost pathologically incapable of doing anything on a Chicago stage that does not evoke sympathy. He’s perhaps too likable at times here, especially since Mortensen’s defiantly complex and constantly interesting Sally comes with such a palpable edge. Even as her defenses are worn down in the script, one senses that the actress remains skeptical. Ideally, “Talley’s Folly” is a dance rather than a seduction.
Then again, this play is also much about a wounded but poetic man making his case to a reluctant but ultimately rootless woman, who takes her time coming around. And by giving Matt direct address at both the start and finish of the play, Wilson intentionally turns his audience into his cheerleaders. That’s certainly the case with this production.
Buckley’s production falters slightly in the key part of this play when Matt and Sally reach their emotional watersheds, but its collective heart and mind are firmly anchored by the right river. This play always needs a no-nonsense director and Buckley cuts through emotional excesses and finds a laudable variety of visual pictures in a play that, in the wrong hands, can resemble something painted by Thomas Kincaid.
I’ve seen “Talley’s Folly” done with far more in the way of nostalgic planks, lily pads and so on, but Matthew York’s restrained but evocative set captures the small-town essence of this still-vibrant work without turning on the treacle. Buckley has never had much truck with overblown romanticism — and that frees Wilson’s poetry and emphasizes the simple truth of the work.
“Talley’s Folly”
When: Through June 23
Where: North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie
Phone: 847-673-6300