Published in the Mountainview
On the Theater Lab stage at the John
F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts in Washington , D.C. , another
Middlebury College
The seats were filled to capacity, and hopeful attendees
without tickets were turned away at the door. The re-staging of the play was
impressive, given the time limitations and the fact that the original play had
been so closely tied to the Middlebury College Studio Theater space in which it
was first performed.
A significant revision of the original Middlebury
production, this version was the one which went to the Irene Ryan Festival in
Boston last autumn; the reworking succeeded at clarifying and simplifying a
piece whose intellectual depth was matched by the quality of the company's
performance. (Disclosure: the part of
Caterina was played by my sister, Katherine Inglis '98.)
The cast and crew were in at least three countries and three
states the week before the production went up at the Kennedy Center; airlines
and car-rental companies no doubt rejoiced when they heard that O'Brien would
be coming from Ireland, Coert Voorhees would fly in from Chile, Ted Dowling
from Seattle, Nick Molander and Katherine Inglis from Vermont, and others from
Vermont and New York City. The diaspora of the company is a testament to its
level of ability; their capacity to perform the play for the first time in
three months after only a couple of days of rehearsal is nothing short of
phenomenal.
Dealing with three different time periods in the fifteenth
and twentieth centuries, the play is a detailed amalgam of the lives of
Leonardo da Vinci, a restorer of da Vinci's "The Last Supper," and
the son of that restorer. Blending the diverse threads of art, homosexuality,
Nazism, Judaism, love, fear, and death (among others), "The Last Supper
Restoration" is in itself a restoration of multi-level dramatic arts, when
each speech had multiple meanings, and each character stood for something much
more than just one person in a
story.
O'Brien's National Student Playwriting Award is actually a
series of awards, including cash awards, professional memberships and
development opportunities, and the publication of his play by high-profile
drama publisher Samuel French, Inc. In addition to those awards, O'Brien is currently
on a Thomas J. Watson Foundation Fellowship in Ireland acting in Irish productions
and working on new plays of his own.
In attendance at the first national production of an O'Brien
play were members of the Middlebury alumni community in Washington, D.C., an
impressive contingent from the College (attending in both official and
unofficial roles), and a large number of the general public. Comments in the
audience afterward ranged from the confused to the congratulatory, though the
reaction was unanimous to a scene in which an airline stewardess puts her hand
inside a bag of a passenger's vomit.
O'Brien has made a promising beginning with a play which appeals
to the intellectual and the emotional, combining history and conjecture in a
story which entrances and intrigues. We will definitely hear more from O'Brien
soon, and we congratulate him on his success to date.
The ICC/ACTF program is a national program for all dramatic
arts, sponsored by academic institutions, businesses, and theater organizations
nationwide. Awards are given for excellence in areas too numerous to name, and
the prestige of such awards is great in the world of theater. Middlebury College