STAGE REVIEW : ‘Hope’ a Bracing Mix of Poetry, History

Sometimes life has stupendous timing.

If you were not lucky enough to see El Gran Circo Teatro de Chile’s “La Negra Ester” during the L.A. Festival or if you haven’t seen the inventive devices of Theatre Repere’s “The Dragon’s Trilogy” (still playing at UCLA), you may not be able to savor the coincidences between those shows and Adrian Hall’s “Hope of the Heart” at the Mark Taper Forum.

But surely you have tuned into at least some of Ken Burns’ mega-documentary, “The Civil War,” sprawled all over PBS. It supplies perfect context for Hall’s amazing “Hope.”

Or parts of it.

“Hope of the Heart” is nothing if not difficult to put into words, which is the surest manifestation of its theatricality. One hesitates to call it a play. It has the flavor and structure of a complex poem and is half based on one: Robert Penn Warren’s “Brother to Dragons.” That’s part two of Hall’s piece. Part one is an extrapolation of the fourth chapter of Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” first written and published in the Partisan Review in 1944 as “Cass Mastern’s Wedding Ring” and later incorporated into “Men” as a discrete chapter. Hall’s “adaptation” (an inadequate word, for what he has accomplished) is in fact two plays tied by their mutual exploration of man’s inhumanity to man.

The first, “Cass Mastern,” was inserted in the Penn Warren novel as protagonist Jack Burden’s investigation into his own past, triggered by reading his ancestor Mastern’s personal diaries. They describe this Southern plantation owner and Confederate soldier’s disastrous love affair with a married woman and the tragic rush of events that followed, leading to his crisis of conscience.

The second, “Brother to Dragons,” published in 1953 and revised by Penn Warren in 1979, is a spin-off on a historical incident: the vicious 1811 murder of a slave by two of Thomas Jefferson’s nephews, Lilburne and Isham Lewis--an incident Jefferson prefered to leave unexamined.

Hall took his cue from the poem’s subtitle, “A Tale in Verse and Voices,” and has delivered precisely that: an astonishing assault of ideas, images, language and a capella choruses “mediated” by turbulent emotion. “What is knowledge,” goes one of the more indelible lines, “without the intrinsic mediation of the heart?”

The copiously annotated program will supply the rest. Because in the long run it is how Hall has matched and theatricalized these stories, more than the stories themselves, that makes “Hope of the Heart” so stunning.

By using a combination of Story Theater technique--that is, narrated thought or action continuously mixed with dialogue--and the mildly disconcerting habit of having the actors face the audience even when addressing each other, Hall achieves a kind of stylized alienation that places us squarely in the realm of abstraction. As in poems or dreams, one scene slips seamlessly into the next.

The layering, too, is abundant and lucid. In “Cass Mastern,” Hall presents us with events in no less than triple time: Robert Penn Warren himself (alias an older Jack Burden) reflecting on the actions of the young Jack Burden as he riffles through the notebooks and incidents in Mastern’s life. All are on stage at once.

“Brother to Dragons” is even more committed to the sense of continuum, allowing its climate of violence to grow almost exponentially to its climactic murder.

Curiously, that climax fell short of the mark at Wednesday’s press preview. By having Charles McCaughan, who plays Lilburne Lewis, furiously hack away at a large cut of beef while the slave he’s dismembering hangs from the feet nearby, we are expected to feel the full horror of the violence. But the cleaver was either too blunt or the bone too unyielding for the fullness of the visual metaphor to take hold. That, however, is a minor flaw of a mildly exploitative act in a work that has so many other startling elements to recommend it.

While not rightfully heir to the title of “poor” theater as literally as El Gran Circo Teatro or the Bread and Puppet Theater, this staging is “poor” as in simple. Designer Eugene Lee, not previously known for his emphasis on economy, has traded here on the richness of his imagination more than the theater’s purse. Lee supplies the ideas and devices, but lets the actors construct and deconstruct sets as they go, turning a table into a carriage here, a saddle into a horse there, with not a lost moment or blackout. With Natasha Katz, he has also provided constantly changing atmospheric lighting.

Dona Granata’s costumes, on the other hand, broadcast an aptly discreet opulence. Nathan Birnbaum’s compositions and the use of music and other song (including an operatic parody and a surreal minstrel show done in black stocking caps) leave you reeling. Satirical barbs are not the least of the production’s achievements. Let us mention a couple of incandescent solos delivered by Sherritta Duran Burns.

The ensemble acting is uniformly fine, but this is Hall’s creation, stem to stern. It is a mega-work, displaying patience, love and care as well as brilliance. Only the lengthy gestation and labored birth this “Hope of the Heart” underwent (many years) could have produced theater of such convolution and clarity.

Hall’s adaptation of “In the Belly of the Beast” at the Taper a few years back was arresting. But this “Hope of the Heart” smashes through dramaturgical boundaries like an idea whose time has come.

At the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2:3 0 . E nds Nov. 11. $24-$30; (213) 410-1062, (714) 634-1300, (213) 972-7231, TDD (213) 680-4017.

‘HOPE OF THE HEART’

A new adaptation of writings by Robert Penn Warren by Adrian Hall, presented by the Mark Taper Forum. Director Adrian Hall. Associate producer Karen S. Wood. Scenic designer Eugene Lee. Lighting designer Eugene Lee and Natasha Katz. Costumes Dona Granata. Composer and musical director Nathan Birnbaum. Choreography and fight staging Gary Mascaro. Dramaturg Oskar Eustis. Production stage manager Mary Michele Miner. Stage manager Tami Toon. Cast Vaughn Armstrong, Casey Biggs, Sherritta Duran Burns, Russell Curry, Clifford David, Doug Hutchison, Jeff Jeffcoat, Jeffrey King, Richard Kneeland, Charles McCaughan, Patrick McCollum, John Morrison, James Ellis Reynolds, Margo Skinner, Emilie Talbot, Rose Weaver, Nance Williamson.