Photo Source: Ian Flanders
In some ways, Deborah Brevroot's earnest 2003 tribute to the Scottish town over which Pan Am 103 exploded on Dec. 21, 1988, killing all 259 passengers and crew and 11 people on the ground, is a Theatricum natural. The company remains unswervingly devoted to the same progressive, humanist precepts that founders Will Geer and Herta Ware established. "Lockerbie," with its deliberate mining of classic Greek dramaturgy to focalize the human tragedy and political machinations, certainly suits the house ethos.
Moreover, director Melora Marshall, taking a well-deserved detour from a banner acting year, treats the narrative—which occurs on the seventh anniversary of the crash—with knowing use of the matchless sylvan venue and understated forward momentum. This is evident from the pre-show, when a charming chorus sings Scottish chestnuts that go from show announcements directly into the action.
We first encounter Lockerbie stalwart Olive Allison (Ellen Geer, more like Judi Dench's transatlantic cousin every year) and bereaved Bill Livingston (an underplayed yet vital Thad Geer), the American father of 20-year-old Adam, who was seated above the bomb. Bill, his inability to openly grieve as transparently crafted as everything else onstage, has come to this memorial in hopes that seeing the site and being with other mourners will cauterize Madeline (Susan Angelo, beyond praise), his inconsolably obsessed wife.
Instead, she scours the hills in search of something, anything, of her son. When Angelo, who is having a benchmark Theatricum season, enters from way up behind the audience, her voice both penetrating and pathetic, it's impossible not to become engrossed. That is fortunate, as Madeline's grieving trek toward face-offs with Bill and Olive, and the latter's clash with government bureaucrat George Jones (Blake Edwards, breathing life into a prefabricated role) regarding the 11,000 recovered articles that she and her neighbors wish to launder for the passengers' families, comprise what passes for plot. Otherwise, it's all atmosphere and incident, polemic and sentiment, which Brevroot's obviated, unyieldingly italicized dialogue—"Our lives are made of choices, hundreds of little choices that determine our fate"—does little to ameliorate.
What supplies the post-millennial punch as we journey to the touching, stage apron–as–riverbed ending is Marshall's quiet directorial assurance, embodied by her well-accented players (thanks to dialect coach Susan Clark). Their invested ranks include Victoria Hilyard and Elizabeth Tobias as post-Greek choristers from the title brood, and ever-welcome Katherine Griffith as cleaning woman Hattie, the comic-relief pivot point for the documented social protest that "Lockerbie" sincerely commemorates.
Presented by and at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga. June 30–Sept. 29. Schedule varies. (310) 455-3723 or www.theatricum.com.
