White Fang: It’s All About Lyzbet

Don’t let the title mislead you: Jethro Compton’s White Fang (based loosely on the Jack London novel) isn’t really about a wolf. Its real subject is Lyzbet Scott, a young Native American woman who’s presented as a late 19^th-century feminist: brash, indomitable and handy with bow and arrow. In the beautiful production at freeFall Theatre, Lyzbet proves herself more than a match for various characters good and evil, and even participates in a friendship with fleeting but inescapable homoerotic overtones. As to the play’s eponymous canine, yes, he’s present in many scenes as a fearsome-looking puppet, loyal to no one but Lyzbet. But author Compton’s concern is primarily for his heroine, and there are sections of White Fang in which Fang is pretty much irrelevant. Lyzbet, meanwhile, is so politically correct — proud of her heritage, proud of her femininity, always motivated by a sense of justice — that she eventually seems an emblem rather than a human. In a world where good and evil are so often wrapped up with each other, it’s hard to feel moved by such an uncomplicated figure. Most of us adults lost that simplicity the day we registered to vote.

The plot of White Fang is mostly about Lyzbet (the near-perfect Jen Diaz) and her “grandfather” Weedon Scott (the equally impeccable Michael Mahoney), who rescued her from a massacre when she was a baby, and has been raising her ever since. Into Weedon and Lyzbet’s life comes Beauty Smith (the delightfully cagey Alan Mohney, Jr.), who wants to buy some of Weedon’s land — acreage the Native Americans consider sacred — in order to carry out the inevitable capitalist exploitation of same. Weedon sees the sale as a method to pay for Lyzbet’s education at a fine territorial school, but Lyzbet is against it, and anyway feels that she’s capably coming into her own without institutional assistance. Beauty, meanwhile, is as shrewd as he is bad, and the possible proximity of an escaped murderer thickens the soup. By the time the drama ends, Lyzbet the Good will have to face Beauty the Evil, and not even Lyzbet’s admirer Curly (the charming Hannah Benitez) will be able to share the burden.

The freeFall production is splendid. Sharply directed by Compton, it takes place for the most part on this author/director/designer’s outstanding set of Weedon’s cabin home, and features stirring songs (by Gavin Whitworth, lyrics by Compton) sung a cappella by its talented cast. The puppet Fang (designed by Eric Davis) is striking in appearance and operated skillfully by Benitez, Robert Johnston and Daniel Schwab (Johnston and Schwab also have small parts as humans). And even if Lyzbet is too good to be fascinating, Diaz plays her with great consistency as conscious of white bigotry, unseduced by white mores, self-reliant (no males need apply), self-assured, and without a craven bone in her body. Mahoney as Weedon is somewhat more complicated: He’s all integrity when sober, but can slip up a little when drinking, and occasionally gives way to a bad temper. Mohney, Jr. as Beauty is a fun villain to root against — there are even moments when you have to wonder if you’ve misjudged him — and Benitez as Curly is dependable, caring, resourceful and just possibly in love with Lyzbet — though that potential appears more in the emotional tone Benitez brings to her lines than in the lines themselves. Adrin Erra Puente’s period costumes are terrific.

Late in Act Two of White Fang characters and the audience learn information that suggests the story we’ve seen is not really black and white. I think these facts come too late, and in any case aren’t dramatized. What Compton does give us is a world of heroes and villains such as might turn up in a comic book, or in a particularly literate video game. There’s no harm in presenting such distinct moral polarities, but neither is there much pleasure, at least for an adult. The best plays of the contemporary theater, from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to How I Learned to Drive and August: Osage County are moving precisely for their depiction of a complex, paradoxical cosmos in which love and hate can share a psyche and our protectors may be our worst enemies. freeFall gives White Fang an ideal production, but the battle lines are too well drawn here, and the bad guys are, at heart…bad guys. Even a noble pup like Fang needs more than that to chew on.

 Mark E. Leib's theater criticism for CL has won seven awards for excellence from the Society for Professional Journalists. His own plays have been produced Off-Broadway and in Chicago, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the Tampa Bay Area. He is a Continuing Instructor at USF, and has an MFA in Playwriting from the Yale School of Drama, where he won the CBS Foundation Prize in Playwriting. Contact him here.

This article appears in Oct 5-12, 2017.