Written and Directed by
George F. Walker
At Factory Theatre
January 30-February 28, 2010

   If you are not already a George F. Walker fan, his new play will not turn you into one. It has been ten years since Walker produced a new play. He should have waited longer for better inspiration. As So It Goes is not a bad play; it is a terrible one. It is a four-character tragicomedy (and I am using the term loosely) about a husband and wife, Ned and Gwen, their daughter Karen, and a ghost character named Vonnegut who is supposedly the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut, the famous writer, who claims to be writing a collection of stories. There is a fifth character who is named but never present on stage, and this is Ned and Gwen’s son Alex who, evidently, has been away from home a very long time. Long enough not to matter very much in the plot, which makes one wonder why he was ever mentioned. But then a lot of what transpires doesn’t matter very much in dramatic terms. Wry black comedy is often a distinguished feature of Walker’s writing, but here it is so wry, it is almost desperate. Gwen is a teacher who fears for her daughter’s mental stability. She appeals to her husband Ned, who has recently lost his job, to stay home and care for Karen who is paranoid that a stranger may steal her car. Karen is, of course, burned out, but so are her parents. So she thinks they should see a therapist. Instead, they see the ghost of Vonnegut, the modernist moralist. Karen suddenly reveals that she was a prostitute years ago—in fact, a whore on crack who used her mother’s name as her trade one. She had even been involved in a court case involving her violent attack on a woman at a shelter. So she’s been a mentally ill runaway, and there is little surprise that she ends up dead. Ned has to contend with this, as well as with what he perceives is his wife’s strange existential crisis. He buys a handgun ostensibly to kill himself or to kill the one responsible for his daughter’s death. Sad, useless lives up to this point, and Vonnegut (who is played by Jerry Franken as a smug bourgeois type) is not much help to them.

   The playwright is of even less help. In Act Two, it is Karen’s turn to be a ghost just so her parents can talk to her beyond the grave and discuss what happened to her and the reason for her bad relationship with her mother. The play now has two ghosts as active characters. Gwen has taken to drink. Wouldn’t you? Dad, once a financial advisor, has flunked out of cooking school. He turns into a walking, talking advertisement (“Blow-Out Sale”) before he becomes a propagandist for others who are as messed up as he and his wife are. “Fight the Power” one of his signs proclaims. Which would make more sense and have more dramatic power if his playwright didn’t just sound like a parody of George Lucas. Gwen hoards and guards piles of shoes, and joins him in a bathrobe and slippers in shouting out injunctions and advice to passersby and the audience, and this turns the play into a sort of tepid agitprop piece. At one point, a slogan asks Who Is Responsible? I’d say George F. Walker. In fact, he’s doubly responsible because he also directs, which is of little help to his actors, good performers all: Peter Donaldson as bald-headed Ned, Martha Burns as Gwen, Jenny Young in the showiest, nuttiest, and loudest role as Karen, and even, at moments, Jerry Franken.

   Shawn Kerwin’s costumes are really clothes rather than artifices, which is all to the good, and her set—an urban landscape of rigid, textured flats that suggest skyscrapers and buildings uncomfortably close to one another—becomes a palpable character, appropriately lit by Rebecca Picherack. Kerwin’s set strives to find a visual connective to Walker’s clumsy attempt at surrealism. In one sense it does work; in another, it doesn’t. The flats are sometimes too tightly close to allow for smooth entrances and exits, and Walker does not know how to solve a problem with dramatic rhythm. In fact, his problem is more basic: how to make a mess of a play interesting and coherent. It’s a problem that goes unsolved.

photos: Ed Gass-Donnelly

Epic 1: Peter Donaldson (Ned), Martha Burns (Gwen)

pic 2 (L-R); Peter Donaldson (Ned), Jerry Franken (Vonnegut), Martha Burns (Gwen)

pic 3: Peter Donaldson (Ned), Jenny Young (Karen)



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