Just shy of ten years ago, I went to the Public Theater to see Berlin/Wall, a pairing of two monologues written and performed by David Hare, the British playwright. The first was about a visit to the German capital 20 years after its wall was removed, and also a meditation on Europe in that hopeful, end-of-history time. The other was about the fence Israelis were then building around the Occupied Territories, a harbinger, we now see, of all the history still to come. The two monologues were exercises in storytelling, of course, but they were both intensely personal and fundamentally reportorial.
Earlier this week I went to the Public to see another slashed recitation, Sea Wall / A Life. The two halves are once again tightly intertwined, perhaps even more tightly than Hare’s, but what makes them especially interesting is that while they are exercises in personal storytelling they are not actually personal, and though they paired they are not linked by a common voice. Sea Wall and A Life are performed by actors—excellent actors—and they were written by different playwrights, at different times. In fact, these stories, while at least partially if not mostly fictive, are constructed to seem even more personal than were Hare’s, and the two halves, while fundamentally less connected than his it-actually-happened-to-me stories, feel even more closely intertwined. Sea Wall / A Life, which opened tonight in Public’s ground-floor Newman Theater, is the performance of personal reflection, a display of storytelling as style. It is masterfully constructed and beautifully performed, but it is as a meticulously constructed simulacrum of truth and revelation that it is perhaps most perfectly suited for our alternative-realities time.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★ review here.]
Sea Wall is written by Simon Stephens, the accomplished and widely produced English playwright responsible for the stage version of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Heisenberg, and much more. It is performed here by Tom Sturridge, last seen on Broadway in 1984, bleeding profusely. A Life is by Nick Payne, another English playwright, one who, as he mentioned in a recent interview with WNYC, was profoundly influenced by Stephens, and it is performed by Jake Gyllenhaal, who has previously appeared on New York stages in Payne’s If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet and Constellations (not to mentioned memorable turns in Sunday In the Park With George and Little Shop of Horrors, gardening profusely).
Both monologues are about sons and fathers, about both fathers and father figures in the protagonists’ own lives and about the experience of being a father to a young child. Both place birth and life in counterbalance to death. Both play with perspective, jumping back and forth between stories about being fathers and stories about the older men in their lives. Both stories are sad, revelatory, and quite deeply moving. (A reviewer is reluctant to give too much specificity, for risk of giving too much away.)
At the same time, the two consecutive monologues are noticeably stylistically different. One is tempted to say that the first feels more English, and the second more American, except that both playwrights are English and the distinction is perhaps imagined because of the nationalities of the two performers. Still, Sturridge’s monologue feels more other-focused and Gyllenhaal’s more self-involved. Sturridge’s character’s thoughts lean more toward the philosophical, Gyllenhaal’s is more interspersed with jokey asides. Certainly their styles of dress (the costumes are by Kaye Voyce) place them on opposite sides of the pond: Sturridge’s character pairs his sweater and jacket with track pants; Gyllenhaal’s Brooklyn bobo chic includes untucked button-down, khakis, cardigan.
Director Carrie Cracknell nicely differentiates the two parts, too. While Sturridge roams the Newman stage, sometimes climbing a ladder onto a second level of the stage, Gyllenhaal mostly stays put. While Sturridge’s freedom seems perhaps the product a restless mind, Gyllenhaal’s stasis suggests a man imprisoned by his thought. In fact, even when the latter does move — at one point, he ventures into the audience and across a row of seats—his spotlight usually remains fixed on his original location, a visual indicator that he’ll clearly return. (The lighting design is by Peter Kaczorowski.)
But overall Cracknell’s direction, and the set, by Laura Jellinek, serve to underscore the extent to which this is a performance of storytelling. Both men walk out onto stages with house lights still up and flick large switches that shift the lighting and start the show. The set is bare, with brick upstage walls, a work ladder connecting upper and lower playing spaces, stage lights left visible. The evening is about these men’s experiences, about love and life and death. But it is also about the stories we tell, the stories we tell ourselves, and how those stories are performed.
And if we’ve learned anything in these last few years, it’s the story you tell, the performance you put on, that matters.
Sea Wall / A Life opened February 14, 2019, at the Public Theater and runs through March 31. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
