From the refuge of an empty fallout shelter in 1970 to the horror of the falling twin towers in 2001, American Duet is a long and complex song about this country, its politics and two of its citizens, Jessica and Charlie, who struggle to live and love through it all. The play premiered on Saturday evening before an audience of 40 or so people in the ideal setting for such an intense and focused work, the intimate and spare Studio@620 in downtown St. Petersburg.
The play is presented as a series of short scenes, each set in a particular year introduced with appropriate music and with news images from that year flashed on a screen behind the nearly bare platform on which the action takes place. Minimalist in design with a few tables and chairs, a handful of props and some costume changes, American Duet depends utterly on the power of its insights and arguments to capture its audience and carry them along on a political and personal journey that spans 30 years.
The daunting task of humanizing the philosophizing falls on its two-member cast: Christopher Rutherford as Charlie, Dahlia Legault as Jessica. In the opening scene, they are high school students infatuated with each other; at the play’s end, they are wiser and worldly, having been through marriages, divorces, children and career changes. Polar opposites in style and taste, politics and ambition (she is a lefty, he is a conservative; she reads Richard Brautigan, he reads Ernest Hemingway), they are nonetheless drawn to each other and, as Charlie explains late in the play, they are joined in some deeply unchanging union despite the changes that have turned their country and their lives upside down. Perhaps in that way, they serve as a symbol of the country itself — united in some profound way despite the divisions and disputes that threaten to rend the body politic and that sometimes challenge public and private civility.
Certainly these subjects are as timely in today’s divisive political climate as ever.
The play is broken into two acts, each an hour or so long, and that is a lot to ask of the actors who are in constant motion, confrontation and discussion, and, frankly, it is a lot to ask of the audience as well. The two hours of political wrangling and personal upheaval would benefit from some tightening. The emotional seesaw at times was wearying and the politics, especially some of Jessica’s diatribes, seemed redundant and shrill.
The scene in which Charlie is delivering a speech in support of Ronald Reagan and delivers it directly to the theater audience might be a prime candidate for cutting, as it engaged the actual audience in a give-and-take with the actor regarding Reagan’s merit (you can imagine how that went!) and it broke the illusion of the fictive drama. Also a bit disconcerting was the scene in which Jessica left the stage and moved around in the seating area — sometimes behind the audience and out of sight. These are matters for director Karla Hartley.
At any rate, Rutherford and Legault give compelling, energetic performances and create credible, sympathetic characters, although he seems to age more realistically than she does across the three decades (but perhaps some point about sexism is being made in that, too).
To the credit of playwright Mark E. Leib, neither character seems merely a political mouthpiece, despite the ebb and flow of their opinions and arguments. It is, after all, their humanity — so effectively expressed by the playwright, so effectively projected by the actors — that draws the audience into their story.
American Duet is a smart, funny and intelligent work and some of the writing is downright brilliant, including the scene in which Jessica compares the modern-day downtrodden in a one-to-one correlation with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Dolly Madison.
Editor’s Note: Mark E. Leib, author of American Duet, is theater critic for Creative Loafing. He was not involved in the assigning or editing of this review.
This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2011.