On Stage
VALENTINE, DEAN
On Stage ROLLING DOWNHILL by dean valentine Stewart Parker's Spokesong: A New Play with Music is like a Rube Goldberg sculpture: A huge mass of colorful machinery is set in motion only to...
...The mean between these two extreme men is a woman, an intelligent, sensible schoolteacher named Daisy...
...On Stage ROLLING DOWNHILL by dean valentine Stewart Parker's Spokesong: A New Play with Music is like a Rube Goldberg sculpture: A huge mass of colorful machinery is set in motion only to culminate in an anti-climax...
...To this end, he uses all sorts of dramatic devices, borrowed mostly from Thornton Wilder and Brendan Behan...
...to Frank, it holds the key to self-understanding and to the present...
...A dreamer, like many male characters in Irish literature, Frank is also in his own way religious—he believes in bicycles...
...When she walks into the store to have her bicycle fixed, Frank immediately falls in love with her...
...and the music by Jimmy Kennedy...
...Kenneth FrankePs direction is brilliant, and the scenery by Marjorie Kellogg does the impossible: It occupies the cavernous Circle in the Square space efficiently and elegantly...
...The story—which takes place in the "1970s and in the 80 years preceding"—concerns a bicycle shop in Belfast...
...John Lithgow (Frank), Josef Sommer (Francis), Joseph Maher (The Trick Cyclist), Maria Tucci (Frank's grandmother), Virginia Vestoff (Daisy), and John Hor-ton (Julian) all bring a warm, evanescent quality to their roles...
...Parker is at his best in the first act, where by confident use of the bicycle metaphor, by his evocative, sometimes delirious language and by his strong feel for character, he suggests the torturous distance between the world as it is and as it ought to be...
...The cast is inspired...
...Decides, that is, only for a short time...
...For whereas a car is merely "a hard shell of aggression secreting the soft urban mollusk," bicycles are peaceful, functional, in touch with the environment and with the past (their design hasn't changed in nearly 100 years...
...Julian is cynical, cold, manipulative, and hateful...
...in the end, she realizes that Frank and Ireland are in need of hard-headed idealists like herself...
...To Julian, the past is meaningless, an obstacle or a lie...
...Once run by Francis, whose life was transformed the day he saw Frank Boyd Dunlop invent the pneumatic tire, the shop is now the property of his grandson Frank...
...Spokesong begins to come apart as Parker throws in new themes and tries to hold his increasingly rickety contraption together with massive doses of action Hollywood-style (blackmail, bombings, betrayals, etc...
...The bittersweet, lyrical, resolutely human atmosphere that had shrouded the play dissipates—to reveal hollow, theatrical ideas and emotions...
...The playwright has much to say about Northern Ireland and its troubles...
...about war...
...In short, they represent everything that is good and true and valuable in life...
...the lighting by John Mc-Lain...
...when the IRA sets off a bomb in a local pet store, he drily comments that for once "it was actually raining cats and dogs...
...Everything here is interesting—indeed stretches of Spokesong are lovely—but the whole doesn't add up to much...
...The costumes are by-Bill Walker...
...His only regret at being in Belfast is that it is still there to be in...
...the realistic stage space is occasionally violated, though only slightly...
...and an Everyman character also known as The Trick Cyclist pops in and out of the action, singing songs that comment either directly or ironically on the action...
...The two men are complete opposites...
...about memory and human continuity...
...and about a great many other major and minor matters...
...She at first returns his affection, but sickened by the violence in Belfast, by the sense of a society decaying, she decides to leave with Julian to London...
...about bicycles...
...Dreamers, however, are always at the mercy of reality—and Frank more so than most, since he lives in Belfast...
...Or perhaps the death blow will come from Julian, Frank's adopted brother, who has returned from London for a few weeks...
...If the highway the town is planning to build in the neighborhood does not destroy Frank's business, the Irish Republican Army surely will...
...Parker can, and no doubt will, do better...
...Time, for instance, shifts continually between past and present...
...about love...
...In the closing sequence, a tandem bicycle—a deus ex machina, as it were —decends from the sky, and she and Frank ride off to the tune of "Daisy Belle...
...After that it's all downhill...
Vol. 62 • April 1979 • No. 8
