rain dance

'Rain Dance' Is a Slight Sermon
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:07 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- The moral quandary of scientists who participated in the creation of the atom bomb gets a cursory examination in ``Rain Dance,'' a slight sermon of a play by Lanford Wilson.

This talky, four-character drama, which closes the Signature Theatre Company's season-long salute to Wilson, is set specifically on July 15, 1945, in Los Alamos, N.M., as testing of the bomb is about to get under way.

The impending big bang has made a young scientist named Hank very antsy. He paces back and forth in a government cantina and chatters away. But most of his agitation is wasted energy that makes the 90-minute play seem longer than it is, despite Wilson's occasional poetic turns of phrase.

Hank has an affection for the native population and the geography of a particular part of New Mexico. ``You can't help feel the pull of this place, this country,'' he says at one point. But then, there's his job,and his feeling of being used by the government in helping to create something with horrific consequences.

The clean-cut James Van Der Beek plays Hank with an earnest anxiety that you think would get on the nerves of the others who drift into the cantina. There's Tony, an American Indian, who reminisces about leaving New Mexico as a young man and doing his native dances in Paris nightclubs of the 1920s. Now, he's in the Army, guarding the facilities where the scientists work.

Randolph Mantooth gives the man a certain dignity and the play a sense of history, particularly when he talks about his wild youth after leaving the pueblo. It is Tony's celebrated rain dance -- a sensation all over Europe -- that gives the play its title.

The other characters include a more pragmatic older scientist (Harris Yulin) and his much younger wife (Suzanne Regan), an enigmatic creature who appears to be having an affair with Tony. Yulin's scientist is the voice of accommodation, a man who knows all too well that the government is going to do whatever it wants with the bomb these scientists have put together.

The actors can't be faulted, though, especially since Wilson's meandering dialogue often leaves them stranded; director Guy Sanville doesn't provide much help. After an entertaining and affecting ``Fifth of July,'' its last Wilson production, Signature has come up with a ``Rain Dance'' that is dramatically arid.

Lanford Wilson's Rain Dance Makes NYC Debut Starring James Van Der Beek, May 20
By Kenneth Jones, Play Bill
20 May 2003

Rain Dance, a latter-day play by Lanford Wilson, makes its New York City debut May 20, opening in a staging by Off-Broadway's Signature Theatre Company.

TV actor James Van Der Beek (of the just-ended "Dawson's Creek" TV series) stars, and has a history with Signature: For the troupe that focuses on one playwright per season, he appeared in an Edward Albee play, Finding the Sun, in 1993-94.

Joining Van Der Beek in Rain Dance are Randolph Mantooth, Harris Yulin and Michigan actress Suzanne Regan. Regan is the respected Michigan actress who created the role of Irene (which she's reprising in Manhattan) for Purple Rose Theatre Company, the Chelsea, Michigan-based troupe (founded by Jeff Daniels) that commissioned the drama.

Guy Sanville, PRTC's artistic director, will direct, making the staging the big New York break for two Michigan artists. Previews for the play began May 6, amid media hoopla about the final weeks in the WB Network's "Dawson's Creek."

Signature explains Rain Dance this way: "Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1945, on the eve of the birth of the atomic bomb. Amidst the tranquil beauty of the desert, four individuals involved in the historic project count down to its inevitable conclusion. As the culmination of their work approaches, each wrestles with the weight of responsibility for an event that will change the world forever."

Performances play the Peter Norton Space on West 42nd Street. Rain Dance continues to June 29.
*

Mantooth is remembered for starring in TV's 1970s paramedic drama, "Emergency!," and Yulin has many Broadway and Off-Broadway credits, including last season's Broadway Hedda Gabler.

Rain Dance is the final Wilson play in a season of works devoted to the American playwright who gave us Fifth of July, THE HOT L BALTIMORE, Talley's Folly and Burn This.

Tickets are $55. Signature's Peter Norton Space is at 555 W. 42nd Street. For subscription and ticket information, call (212) 244-PLAY (7529). For additional information, visit www.signaturetheatre.org.

There's No Silver Lining in a Mushroom Cloud
By BEN BRANTLEY, NY Times

As a scientist's wife in "Rain Dance," the compact, elegiac new play by Lanford Wilson, Suzanne Regan emanates the concentrated stillness of someone who knows she has to stay quiet to keep from falling apart. An émigré from Hitler's Germany, Irene has been uprooted again and again. Now she finds herself at what seems to be the very brink of the world.

That place is Los Alamos, N.M., and the date is July 15, 1945, the eve of the first atomic bomb test of the Manhattan Project. These are facts that go some distance in explaining why a woman with a fear of displacement would seem especially on edge.

"Rain Dance," which opened last night at the Peter Norton Space of the Signature Theater Company, is filled with a quiet anger that erupts a few times too many from the urge to overexplain itself. Directed by Guy Sanville, it also suffers from a critically miscast central performance by James Van Der Beek, a major problem in a chamber piece of a play. Yet Ms. Regan's Irene consistently summons that violent, tender mixture of rage and compassion that have animated Mr. Wilson's best work, seamlessly melding the cosmic and the personal. As written and portrayed, Irene guarantees that the Signature Company's seasonlong celebration of Mr. Wilson ends not with a whimper but with an urgent, frightened whisper that stays in your head.

"Rain Dance" assembles four characters who have gathered in a makeshift cantina at Los Alamos, within troubling earshot of a party celebrating the crowning achievement of the Manhattan Project. In addition to Irene and her much older husband, Peter (Harris Yulin), a physicist, there are Hank (Mr. Van Der Beek), a boyish 27-year-old American scientist, and Tony, an American Indian soldier.

All of these characters are dismayed, to different degrees, by what Los Alamos will have wrought. How they express their concerns is a matter of individual temperament. Hank paces and jitters; Tony reads the newspaper in a posture of frozen serenity; Peter exudes a sad stoicism; and Irene burrows beneath her own skin, never quite hiding the scared animal inside.

The profound ambivalence felt by many of those who worked on Los Alamos has been thoroughly documented. And much of what is said in "Rain Dance" is a variation on J. Robert Oppenheimer's famous quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

In focusing on four souls on the periphery of the test, Mr. Wilson tries to humanize such terrifying sentiments. He is most successful when things remain unspoken, when dialogue skirts the momentous central issue instead of landing squarely on it.

And there is throughout "Rain Dance" a truly thought-provoking sense of the Manhattan Project as an inevitable extension of the world in which its characters live.

All of them, it seems, have been displaced in some way, wrenched from their natural contexts. The disruption of the tranquillity of the desert landscape of Los Alamos is mirrored in Tony's account of traveling in Europe as a young man as an Indian dancer, turning sacred rituals into something like the Folies Bergères.

What dramatic movement the play has is centered largely on Hank, whose awareness of the consequences of the bomb test keep tearing through his youthful professional exuberance. "I come to the most peaceful place on earth, only to turn it outside out," he says. Mr. Van Der Beek, the appealingly clean-cut star of the prime-time soap "Dawson's Creek," exudes a steadfast earnestness that doesn't begin to encompass the shaded transitions Hank must register for "Rain Dance" to be effective.

He is best when Hank is most self-conscious, as in the awkward charm he brings to trying to imitate Tony's steps in an Indian dance. Mr. Mantooth is appropriately self-contained without overdoing it. And Mr. Yulin is first rate, finding an exhausted resignation to his character that matches Ms. Regan's understated tenseness.

What hums between the often overly articulate lines is an overpowering feeling of isolation, echoed by Christine Jones's ramshackle outpost of a set and by James Vermeulen's sunset-into-dusk lighting. In the play's silences you do indeed sense the cold loneliness of life perceiving its possible extinction.

RAIN DANCE

By Lanford Wilson; directed by Guy Sanville; sets by Christine Jones; costumes by Daryl A. Stone; lighting by James Vermeulen; sound by Kurt Kellenberger; production stage manager, Amy McCraney; executive director, Kathryn M. Lipuma; general manager, Jodi Schoenbrun; production manager, Chris Moses; artistic associate, Beth Whitaker. Presented by the Signature Theater Company, James Houghton, founding artistic director. At the Peter Norton Space, 555 West 42nd Street, Clinton.

WITH: James Van Der Beek (Hank), Randolph Mantooth (Tony), Suzanne Regan (Irene) and Harris Yulin (Peter).

NY Daily News 5/21/03

Wilson's A-bomb play a dramatic dud

RAIN DANCE By Lanford Wilson. With James Van Der Beek, Randolph Mantooth, Suzanne Regan, Harris Yulin. At Signature Theatre Company's Peter Norton Space, 555 W. 42nd St. Tickets: $55. (212) 244-7529

A potentially explosive premise ends up fizzling in "Rain Dance," Lanford Wilson's talky drama about the dawning of the atomic age.

The story is set in Los Alamos, N.M., in the summer of 1945. It's the night before the scientists of the Manhattan Project will test their new secret weapon - an atomic bomb that will hopefully hasten the end of World War II by forcing Japan to surrender.

"Rain Dance" attempts to examine how scientists must deal with the responsibility that comes with unleashing such a destructive force, and the moral dilemma over whether to drop the bomb on live targets.

But the play is more Little Boy than Fat Man - the thin plot never lives up to its weighty issues.

The night before the test blast, the characters sit around a desert cantina chatting about their personal histories, Indian culture, the bad weather, and only occasionally touch on the history-altering event to come.

They're a cross section of types. Hank (James Van Der Beek) is a young, idealistic mathematician from the Bronx who naively believes the U.S. government will only scare Japan into submission through a demonstration of the A-bomb's awesome power. Providing a realistic counterpoint is Peter (Harris Yulin), a physicist who escaped Nazi Germany with his much younger wife, Irene (Suzanne Regan). The wise, stoical Tony (Randolph Mantooth) is a Native American military policeman who, in a subplot that goes nowhere, is having an affair with Irene.

The performances are good, with Van Der Beek - an accomplished stage actor though he's best known for his starring role on TV's "Dawson's Creek" - engaging as the anxious, confused Hank.

But given the subject matter, "Rain Dance" should have unleashed its own nuclear wind of dramatic conflict among the characters. Instead, it's just four people shooting the breeze.

Originally published on May 21, 2003

Wilson premiere lacks a nuclear payoff

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

BY MICHAEL SOMMERS
Star-Ledger Staff

NEW YORK -- Signature Theatre Company's season-long look at the plays old and new of Lanford Wilson concludes on a gentle note with the New York premiere of "Rain Dance."

Originally staged at the Purple Rose Theatre Company in Michigan, "Rain Dance" opened yesterday at Signature's Peter Norton Space.

It is a typically thoughtful Wilson piece that somehow doesn't pack sufficient dramatic punch, which is a bit ironic, considering that its characters have been struggling to perfect the atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945.

Actually, the work is already behind the people who gather in a makeshift recreation hall in Los Alamos. Even as they down a few drinks and swap stories, the bomb is being trucked off to its testing site a few hundred miles away, where it will be detonated at dawn. While a thunderstorm threatens, the scientists unwind and try to come to terms with what they have created and what its implications mean for the entire world.

Hank (James Van Der Beek) is a young metals expert from the Bronx. Peter (Harris Yulin) is an older scientist who fled Germany for New Mexico with his wife, Irene (Suzanne Regan), at the beginning of Hitler's rise to power. Tony (Randolph Mantooth) is a local Native American who is an M.P. at the remote scientific outpost.

So these people sit around and talk about their lives and the austere beauty of the surroundings and whether or not the government will actually use the "gadget," as they call it, if the test goes well tomorrow morning. Gradually, the characters realize that they have corrupted the spiritual environs with their activities and that it is likely nuclear capabilities ultimately mean more harm than good for the planet.

Wilson pursues a worthwhile theme, but his play is couched in such diffuse, indirect terms that it is hard to string together the points he makes. The drama drifts along for 90 minutes and more or less fades away without achieving critical mass. Although the play is under-dramatized, "Rain Dance" still bears Wilson's characteristic intelligence, sensitivity and craft.

Director Guy Sanville, who staged the Michigan original, fields a capable ensemble. Van Der Beek's boyish restlessness contrasts well against Yulin's seasoned weariness. Mantooth's laconic local guy -- with an unexpectedly wild past in 1920s Europe -- is more of a watchful than brooding presence. Regan gracefully suggests Irene's unusual mix of mental fragility and spiritual strength.

Best of all, the actors bring a genuine sense of being to these people, which helps to give the carefully wrought text a feeling of spontaneity.

As usual with Signature productions, all of the design elements are first rate, especially James Vermeulen's lighting, which begins with a fiery sunset and slowly transmutes into the lavender glow of the nighttime desert.

Engineering the Approach of Clouds
Science and ceremony meet at the birth of the nuclear age

'Rain Dance' (Newsday/ARI MINTZ)

By Linda Winer
STAFF WRITER

May 21, 2003

We think we have seen all the plays we need about the Los Alamos scientists who made the atomic bomb. We believe we know what theater can tell us about the mystical nobility and the sad reality of Native Americans in the 20th century. But along comes "Rain Dance," the beautiful 90-minute play that had its New York premiere last night as the finale of the Signature Theatre Company's revelatory Lanford Wilson season. And then we know better.

It is July 15, 1945, just hours before the test in the New Mexico desert that irrevocably changed humanity's sense of its own destructive power. Four insiders - three men and a woman - are waiting with complex combinations of excitement and dread in a bare-bones cantina near the Sangre de Cristos mountains. They all know more than they are saying about the bomb - officially known only as "the gadget" - though no one wants to face what it will mean if the great experiment actually works.

This is a big little play about secrets and deceptions - vast and intimate, deadly and loving. The deceptively tricky character studies have been directed with modesty, intelligence and sensitivity by Guy Sanville, artistic director of the Purple Rose Theatre Company, the parallel theatrical universe that actor Jeff Daniels created in Chelsea, Mich. Daniels took the name from his Woody Allen movie, "Purple Rose of Cairo," and was a regular during Wilson's heyday in the '70s and '80s downtown at the much-missed Circle Repertory Company.

If "Rain Dance," commissioned by Purple Rose and first staged there, is indicative of the company's work, Wilson has a trustworthy sanctuary for his rich and graceful repertory. We're filled with envy. As New York has been reminded this season with the revivals of "Burn This" and "Fifth of July," Wilson writes hearty, grown-up poetic naturalism about the fragility of idealism.

This is another of his intricate yet straightforward ensemble pieces. The complexity of each person - not to mention people we never see - unfolds with such transparency and ease that we forget how awkward some of Wilson's devices here should be. There really is an Indian - an acceptable term a half century ago - who actually does a rain dance. How we buy this becomes part of the wonder.

The stage is peopled with great chiseled faces. There is Tony, the Indian who is an MP, played with elegant, Clint Eastwood-style dynamism by Randolph Mantooth. There is Hank, the young desert-loving genius from the Bronx, played with endearing boyishness by James Van Der Beek. Then there are the German emigres - the sturdy Harris Yulin as Peter, brilliant, battered scientist, and the subtle Suzanne Regan as Irene, his handsome, enigmatic younger wife.

She has found comfort among the Indians, in more ways than one. Wilson manages both to scoff at Hank's newfound romanticization of the Indians while imbuing the awful reality with a sense of sacred awe. Desires are pulled tight in opposing directions in a world in which theoretical physicists are distorted into engineers for practical warfare. James Vermeulen's lights transform Christine Jones' aptly prosaic set with the magic of the last innocent sunset.

Wilson doesn't lecture. He doesn't have to. Hank suddenly realizes the meaning of his work there, that the government is "going to take it away from us ... Everything that's gone before tonight is broken, extinct, gone, evaporated, useless." Perhaps. On the other hand, it is good to have Wilson back.

OFF-BROADWAY REVIEW

RAIN DANCE. By Lanford Wilson, directed by Guy Sanville. Set by Christine Jones, costumes by Daryl A. Stone, lights by James Vermeulen. Signature Theatre Company, 42nd Street east of 11th Avenue. Through June 29. Seen at Sunday's preview.

Rain Dance Waiting for an Explosion That Never Comes
5/21/2003 - American Theater Web

Signature Theatre Company

Waiting for an monumental event to take place can cause any number of things in people. Some are stirred to frantic random activity while others may find themselves unable to accomplish the most ordinary of tasks. Stress can also lead some individuals to excessive talkativeness or unusual silence in others. Unfortunately, in Lanford Wilson’s Rain Dance, which opened last night and is the final production in the Signature Theatre Company’s season dedicated to the playwright, audiences experience the inactivity of the former category and the verbosity of the latter, making for a very long 90 minutes of theatergoing.

The event that is about to take place in Rain Dance is the first A-test in Las Alamos, where America races to build a nuclear warhead. Here, in an outbuilding (designed with claustrophobic accuracy by Christine Jones) in the desert where scientists such as Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr have gathered to develop the weapon that would fundamentally change the world’s history, one meets four of the people who have been involved in the project.

There’s Hank (James Van Der Beek from television’s "Dawson’s Creek"), a 27-year-old Bronx mathematician, who’s still agog about the scientists with whom he’s been working, anxious about the test and unable to sit still or be quiet. With him is Tony (Randolph Mantooth), a Native American who now works on the scientific base as an MP. Later, Irene (Suzanne Regan), the wife of one of the scientists joins the two men and soon, she is joined by her husband, Peter (Harris Yulin).

Unlike Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, where Bohr himself is a character and one hears the ominous sound of a bomb being detonated at one point, Wilson never gives the audience an explosion. Rather, he has the audience join in for the all-night vigil leading up to the 4am event. The most concrete events of the play are the oncoming thunderstorm that threatens to derail the test (sound designer Kurt Kellenberger makes the thunder roll through ominously) and the changes in the early evening to late-night sky (seen through James Vemeulen’s handsome lighting that glows bright red at sunset to harsh white of moonlight).

Beyond these two meteorological events, Wilson shows the stasis of the characters. One learns a a great deal about their pasts and the acts of self or societal desecration they have committed. These stories aptly mirror the desecration that the bomb would soon inflict on Japan, but one still wishes something might happen in Rain Dance.

As Tony talks about how he used his tribe’s dances to become a star of the Follies Bergeres, dancing sans undergarments, one is touched by the pain and shame that creeps Mantooth’s face. Regan is equally moving as she jokes about her alcoholic past, one which has been firmly ruined by Fermi’s accurate description of liquor’s effect on the liver. It is not surprising that these two characters, one discovers, have been having an affair; they share not only troubled pasts, but also an ethereal understanding of their relationship to the world’s bigger picture. Both Mantooth and Regan manage to convey this separateness, seeming at times to almost float through the proceedings.

As the two scientists, Van Der Beek and Yulin are more grounded in reality. Yulin brings a statesman-like dignity to the proceedings as well as a stooped posture that conveys his character’s troubled past as a refugee from first Nazi-controlled Germany, and later Europe. In direct contrast to Yulin’s physical weariness is Van Der Beek’s almost unbridled verve. The character is a bundle of nerves, and Van Der Beek rarely sits still. Speaking with a Bronx accent at lightning speed, Van Der Beek is often difficult to understand (at fault are both the performer’s diction and the dropped ceiling of Jones’ set, which makes for unfortunate acoustics). Wilson has made Hank’s repetitious ramblings so overt that other characters note that he is becoming tedious. In the audience, one unfortunately agrees with their assessment.

Director Guy Sanville has taken a cue from the script and staged the work sparingly. Often the performers sit for extended periods (with the exception of Hank). While appropriate, the performers’ inertia only heightens the sense of nonmovement in the production. It comes as no small relief when Tony begins to perform his tribe’s rain dance and Hank tentatively joins in. One almost hopes that Irene and Peter will join in, and they might find some relief from the demon that is haunting their lives and this space. The moment never comes, just as one never hears the explosion.

Wilson’s conceit for Rain Dance is unquestionably daring. One wishes, however, it were more satisfying in theatrical practice.

----------

Rain Dance
Reviewed By: David Finkle

There are no end of plays in which audiences wait for a figurative bomb to drop while watching an increasingly anxious protagonist. Now there's a play in which an audience can wait for a figurative bomb to drop while watching an increasingly anxious protagonist wait for an actual bomb to drop.

The drama in question is Lanford Wilson's Rain Dance, which begins in a Los Alamos, New Mexico cantina at just about sunset on July 15, 1945. For those with a tenuous grasp of facts surrounding the Manhattan Project, the very specific place and day means that Wilson's newest work unfolds in the hours remaining before the first atomic bomb was tested at -- to be precise -- 5:29:45am on July 16. The date is also a few short weeks before atomic bombs, having proved their effectiveness and efficiency to the pertinent decision-makers, were ejected from bomb bays over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The man who can't sit still in the makeshift room is Hank (James Van Der Beek), a Bronx-born theoretical scientist on the lookout for the car assigned to transport him to Alamagordo, New Mexico and the historic blast. As he paces round the large wooden spool that serves as a table at the center of Christine Jones's two-by-four set, his only companion initially is Tony (Randolph Mantooth), a Native American who hardly moves a muscle as he scans the newspaper. In time, graphic artist Irene (Suzanne Regan) arrives to chat with the two men while expecting her husband and Hank's project colleague, Peter, to show up. When Peter (Harris Yulin), considerably older than his wife, shambles through the screen door, he joins a discussion that gets into the subject of the impending explosion, into pointed opinions on fellow theorists Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, and into speculation on the possible long-range effects of the impending test.

Not much is revealed, really, about the participants. Hank, having left New York behind for a part of the country where he feels he can do much more significant communing with nature, imputes more wisdom to Native Americans than Tony is eager to accept. Irene gives background information on when, why, and how she and Peter left Germany for the United States and, ultimately, the fast-approaching Trinity Test. Though Irene is visibly in love with Peter, there are more than casual hints that she's also attracted to Tony, who eventually gets up from his chair to demonstrate the Indian dance he did in the 1920s in, believe it or not, a Paris girlie show. A thunderstorm approaches: It's highly symbolic, needless to say, but this storm is actually documented. As the weather thickens along with what there is of the plot, Hank's fear for the nearby terrain he's come to love and his mounting anger at potential future uses of the bomb lead him to act out.

But only just -- and therein lies the beauty of Wilson's script, which might be considered a companion piece to Michael Frayn's Copenhagen for its focus on theoretical physicists and their worries about nuclear fission implications. (N.B.: Charlotte Jones's just-opened Humble Boy also involves an edgy theoretical physicist.) Wilson has dared to write a play in which very little seems to happen as four people pass the hours before something calamitous occurs, about which they can do very little. The enormity of what they're up against is only hinted at when Peter reports, "This morning, Fermi says very quietly to me, 'In the event this gadget does not go off with all these fission products we're creating, which would be the most effective poisoning agent? If we were to introduce it into the enemy's water supply?' I suppose so our experiments shouldn't be a complete waste. This is the way moral men are thinking now." (How topical does that sound?!)

Wilson's figures are people who sense that their best hope is to remove themselves, emotionally and geographically, as far away from where they're currently situated as possible. It's as if master playwright Wilson has taken T.S. Eliot's frighteningly prescient phrase about the world ending not with a bang but a whimper and decided to work a change on it. This is the way civilization as we'd known it is about to end, Wilson is saying -- not with a bang but with a mournful sigh before the bang.

In a palpably pessimistic mood about how the world has gone awry since 1945, Wilson wants to devastate through understatement as Eliot does in "The Hollow Men," written in 1925. That's both the boldness of Rain Dance and its potential drawback. The author runs the risk that audiences wanting more bang for their buck will lose patience with the undramatic verbal give-and-take in which Hank, Tony, Suzanne, and Peter indulge.

For quite some time during the 90-minute play, the quartet seems involved in a gabfest with nothing more than benign undercurrents. Only slowly -- perhaps too slowly for some theatergoers -- does Wilson show his hand. It's easy to imagine theatergoers leaving the play muttering, "They talked a lot but nothing happened." The reality is, Wilson's characters are aware that one of the most crucial moments in the history of the planet is about to happen: the moment when man wrested from nature the ability to cause apocalyptic destruction.

As overseen by director Guy Sanville, all elements in Rain Dance combine to make Wilson's play an elegant elegy. As the piece begins, Hank doesn't know whether to dance to the music he hears wafting from elsewhere or whether simply to gaze out a window; lighting designer James Vermeulen creates a premonitory flaming red sunset for this sequence. Throughout, sound designer Kurt Kellenberger unleashes thunderclaps and the shush-shush of accompanying downpours. The characters' clothes are meant to be unprepossessing -- two of these people are scientists, after all -- and costume designer Daryl A. Stone hits the mark. Jones, having rounded up a bulky old Coke dispenser and an equally old electric fan with which to dress her set, may be pulling a grimly deliberate joke in placing that wooden spool center stage: Lying on one side, as it does, its lines suggest a mushroom cloud.

Asked to deal strictly in nuance, Sanville's actors comply with precision and integrity. James Van Der Beek, having concluded his sixth and last season of Dawson's Creek, may be in the mood to solidify his legitimate stage credentials -- and that's just what he does here. Handsome as they come in a Guess model way, he beautifully plays a man whose looks mean nothing to him but whose gaze into the future is eroding his spirit; and his Bronx accent, probably overseen by voice coach Kate Wilson, is pretty much consistent. Suzanne Regan and Harris Yulin, playing Germans eager to shuck their past but wary of their perilous present, also strike all the appropriate muted chords. Randolph Mantooth, whether standing stock still or recreating the ritual dance he did in his Josephine Baker days, undercuts whatever familiar quality might have attached to this depiction of a stoic Native American.

Though calculatedly quiet, Lanford Wilson's Rain Dance sounds loud alarms.

Even When Theater's Bad, It Has Ways of Making Good
Mixed Blessings
by Michael Feingold, The Village Voice
May 21 - 27, 2003

You know the Chekhovian anecdote about the actor who gets his line wrong. "We're traught in a clap!" he exclaims, and then tries to repair the damage with "I mean, we're clapped in a traught!" Correcting the mistake only makes it worse; critics know the feeling only too well. The two basic parameters of our art: (a) The critic holds the theater to its highest standard, always demanding perfection. (b) The critic loves the theater so much that all the flaws in a work can be forgiven for the sake of one minute's greatness. Anyone sense a contradiction here? But like the unlucky actor in Shamrayev's reminiscence, we who review plays persevere, going from one mistaken extreme to the other, every now and then miraculously getting something right. And as on the stage, getting the simplest thing right turns out to be extremely difficult.

This is by way of prelude to a trio of Off-Broadway productions that get many things, sometimes big central things, wrong. But two of the three have, at the end, a few minutes' greatness. Should I pan them for their failings, or rave about them for the greatness's sake? What I'd prefer, I suppose, would be for readers to gauge from my review whether the work will interest them enough to judge it for themselves. "The drama's laws the drama's patrons give," which means you, who pay for your seats, and not me and my ilk, who get comps. The critic has to know what art costs the public, as well as what it costs the artists. But the public's approval, too, can be reviewed; everything that affects the critic is fodder for criticism.

That includes the entire world—I went into the theater because, after seeing Jean-Louis Barrault's company, I believed theater could include the entire world—and a sense of the world is what makes me feel greatness at the end of Lanford Wilson's Rain Dance, a problematic play having its New York premiere in a deeply flawed production as the finale of Signature Theater's all-Wilson season. Yes, I did just say "problematic" and "deeply flawed." But let me offer a supplementary suggestion: Before attending Rain Dance, go to some major news Web site, type "Indian Point" in the search box, and click. Read the most recent stories that come up, and then go to see this play about life at Los Alamos in 1945. What Wilson is up to here will be brought home to you more forcefully, and maybe the reverberations will compensate for what you dislike about the 90-minute event.

You're bound to dislike some aspect of it: Wilson's characters are a young American physicist (James van der Beek), an older German-émigré physicist (Harris Yulin), the latter's jittery wife (Suzanne Regan), and an MP (Randolph Mantooth) who happens to be a local Native American. The time is the evening of July 15, 1945, so you automatically know that nothing dramatic will happen onstage; the action is only a prologue to the sight of the world's first mushroom cloud, which Wilson leaves to occur in your mind after the house lights come up. Such action as we do see is desultory; this is Wilson's version of those Conor McPherson plays in which the characters tell each other stories, except that the large topic hanging over the evening gives the stories longer and more ominous shadows than the failed little lives in McPherson's work usually offer. The drama here only surfaces in tiny, unexplored blips: a clandestine love affair, a few other murky interrelationships. Given what went on at Los Alamos, maybe one of the four is a Soviet spy, but if so, this is a secret Wilson has kept to himself. (At best it would make a good post-show guessing game, like the identity of the hero's closeted gay teammates in Take Me Out.)

Instead, Wilson smuggles into the succession of narratives a map of the world's consciousness as it existed before and after the unleashing of nuclear power, with the adumbrations of what's to come laid over the encroaching sense of what exists, like a transparency in a science textbook. The four people in the room—two waiting for a ride to the test site, two compelled by military order to stay behind—turn out to be a summary of all the cultural conflicts the moment unlocks: Europe and America; Freud and Marx; instinct and reason; man and nature; art and science; totalitarianism and democracy; innocence and sophistication; bigotry and solidarity; sexuality and companionship; war and diplomacy; despair and hope. You name it, it's in there. A few of the themes are leveraged in rather too patly: The pueblo-raised MP who just happens to be willing to discuss code talkers and also to have performed tribal dances in 1920s Paris constitutes a distinct dramaturgical stretch. But Wilson's ability to make his talk convincing, his quiet skill at sliding one idea into the next, lets the pattern of his thought take hold of you unawares.

Still, this seemingly painless process provokes a lot of resistance, partly because the absence of any overarching drama among the characters leaves the ideas virtually naked onstage, and also because Guy Sanville's production has a lackluster feel, alternately de-energized and hokey, as if simultaneously displaying a total faith in the script and a total lack of faith in the audience's ability to follow it. This passive-aggressive approach, which does little for Wilson, seems to have had a draining effect on the actors. Even Yulin, always knowing and forceful onstage, looks comparatively pallid. Mantooth, though good during his long stretches of storytelling, italicizes and pulls faces during his dialogue; Regan is so understated that her vital role nearly disappears. And I feel nothing but compassion for van der Beek, whose training, if he has any, has left him hopelessly underequipped for a role of this length and difficulty. Nobody's saying it's easy; there are probably very few actors under 30 right now who could convince an audience that they're Italian American Bronxites, passionate students of pueblo culture, who understand nuclear physics. Unluckily, van der Beek isn't one of them. Even so, when he slumps in his chair at the final fade-out, you may well sense his link, and your own, to the nightmare course human destiny has taken in this half-century. Which will mean that the play has had its effect on you, and that van der Beek, for all his limitations, has not blocked your path to its touch of greatness.

A CurtainUp Review

Rain Dance

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
---J. Robert Oppenheimer, U.S. theoretical physicist and science administrator, director of the Los Alamos laboratory during development of the atomic bomb.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It would be nice to report a triumphant finale of the Signature Theatre Company's exhilarating Lanford Wilson season. Commendable as it may be to give a little known, only once produced Wilson play a New York airing, Rain Dance doesn't come close to being as satisfying as the Wilson plays that preceded it.

The still pertinent issues pertaining to the Manhattan Project that created the Atomic Bomb should but doesn't make for high drama. What we have is a talkfest by four people drinking Coca-Cola and green tea as they nervously await the crucial testing of the bomb that two of them worked on. There's no tension and, worse, little of the lyricism and characterizations that one expects from this playwright.

The heavy layer of retro sensibility and the parallels with the movie, The Big Chill, enhanced rather than diminished the enjoyment and freshness of The Fifth of July. Not so in Rain Dance.

The 40s music you hear as you take your seat includes big band crooner Bob Eberly presciently singing "Fools Rush In. " The small bar or cantina at the New Mexico site of the Project is authentically if sparsely furnished. But once the lights go down authentic details prove to be a prelude to a case of four cardboard characters in search of real human beings. The story, such as it is, moves forward by having them take turns in a debate on nuclear energy.

Mr. Wilson''s dual focus on the issues affecting those involved in the historic project's final countdown as well as its effect on the tranquil beauty and Native American customs of the desert where it all happened contains the seeds of a solid play. With Wilson's story telling skills fully utilized it might be worth revisiting a topic already dramatized in Heinar Kipphardt's 1969 courtroom drama, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Unfortunately, the human elements that could involve us in the lives of the three men and one women and their relationships with each other are insufficiently developed. Each is stuck within the mold of a representative viewpoint: Young American idealist-scientist. . . pragmatic physicist. . . physicists much younger and more emotionally fragile German refugee wife. . . Native American who straddles his past and his present connection as a military policeman.

Guy Sanville, who also directed the only other production of this play (for The Purple Rose Theatre Company which commissioned it and employs him as artistic director), brings little to the Signature's stage in the way of inventive blocking or helping the actors make the lengthy discussions more absorbing. Most egregiously, he fails to steer James Van Der Beek, the actor whose talk dominates the play, to speak so that his words project. As Hank, the young physicist from the Bronx whose love affair with the New Mexico desert (beautifully evoked by James Vermeulen's lighting) has exacerbated his anxiety about what he's involved with, Van Der Beek captures some of the explosive energy (echoed by little bursts of real explosives we hear going off in the desert) generated by the tense countdown to the big test , but much of his non-stop talk is lost in his delivery.

Harris Yulin, who plays Peter, the older scientist, presents no problems in terms of clarity. But even this fine actor can't do much with his underwritten part. Suzanne Regan, as his wife, is very much the melancholy refugee. She has a rather touching scene in which she tells Hank that she had a nervous breakdown years earlier but what this implies about her marriage to Peter remains vague. A kiss exchanged with Tony, the resident Native American adds little more than an intriguing moment which we are left to puzzle out for ourselves.

As for the character of Tony, Randolph Mantooth conveys the image of an Indian of few words. Happily Wilson softens the stereotype by substituting at times amusing dialogue for monosyllables. Tony's account of leaving the Reservation as part of an Indian Dance Group (which explains the play's title) is interesting enough to make one wish for a whole play about this character's youthful exploits though its connection to this play is, like so much else, ambiguous.

Those who wish that one of Wilson's most popular "Talley " plays had made it into this season, might consider a summer visit to the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge which has it on its agenda in August.

Posted 5/28/2003 9:18 PM

Today's Top Life Stories

• Joining the pillars of film society - 4:46 PM
• Jolie-Thornton marriage officially over - 3:09 PM
• 'Race' looks like early winner - 10:29 PM
• Fans weigh in: Size doesn't make Ruben less of an Idol - 10:12 PM
• MTV Movie Awards let celebs have a little fun - 8:45 PM

Curtain's up on off-Broadway's variety show
Off-Broadway is where new trends start and where hot Broadway prospects percolate. USA TODAY's Elysa Gardner looks at star turns, Shakespearean science and bio-musicals.
• The Signature Theatre Company wraps up a season of Lanford Wilson revivals with the New York premiere of Wilson's latest effort. Rain Dance, which opened last week at the Peter Norton Space, is set in Los Alamos, N.M., in July 1945. In a cantina, two scientists helping develop the atomic bomb and two of their confidantes grapple with the moral and emotional fallout of their involvement.

Dawson's Creek graduate James Van der Beek's awkward, overzealous performance as the younger scientist is the one weak link in this intimate, gently moving production, which Guy Sanville has directed with an understated grace. Harris Yulin and Randolph Mantooth are particularly compelling as the elder scientist who is a German expatriate and a local Native American who is serving in the Army. The two men are uniquely qualified to appreciate the quandaries Wilson presents so thoughtfully

New York Magazine by John Simon

What makes Lanford Wilson such a valuable playwright is the variety of his subjects, the lightly worn research he brings to his characters’ professions and problems, and the compassionate understanding he invests in his creations. His range is vast, his authenticity unimpugnable, and his empathy deeply involving. Rain Dance takes place at Los Alamos on the night leading up to the first atom-bomb detonation, July 15, 1945. The scene is the cantina, the characters Hank, a young Italian-American mathematician from the Bronx; Peter, a middle-aged Flemish atomic physicist; Irene, his much younger, neurotic, German-born artist wife; and Tony, an Indian native of the region, now a much-traveled Army sergeant. Unseen but talked about are the major players: Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Szilard, and Bohr. And somewhere outside, wrapped in secrecy, is Ground Zero and the ominous weapon waiting to be born, unless it miscarries. Unfortunately, it is the play that does.

The characters are overshadowed by what is offstage; onstage, nothing much happens beyond a table overturned in anger and a stealthy kiss. There is a thunderstorm outside that may wash out the scheduled explosion; in the cantina, despite anxiety about the future, the talk remains close to becalmed. It covers a multitude of subjects from the rise of Hitler to Italian cuisine, from secret and sacred Indian dances to prostitution tolerated on the premises to keep the bachelors on the project from going crazy.

Guy Sanville has staged things dutifully, but for once, the worthy Wilson has bitten off less than he can chew. It is all intelligent, informative—and as close to boring as this playwright has ever come.

nytheatre.com review
      by Martin Denton · May 18, 2003

      Rain Dance, the latest work by Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson to be seen in New York, deserves your attention. It also deserves a better production than the one it's been given at Signature Theatre Company, which is marred by an indifferent staging by Guy Sanville, a confusingly over-dressed set by Christine Jones, and, especially, a poor performance by James Van Der Beek in the play's leading role. Rain Dance is concerned with the inner conflict experienced by a young man participating in the Manhattan Project and the birth of the atomic bomb. Van Der Beek simply lacks the depth and acting chops to reveal his character's turmoil, and without this to anchor it, the play falters badly.

      Van Der Beek's character is Hank, a brilliant young mathematician who has been drafted by the U.S. government to work with the greatest scientists in the world on the top secret program. At first awestruck and jazzed to engage in study and research with the likes of Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, and so on, Hank has now-on the night when the bomb is to be tested, somewhere in the remote New Mexico desert-begun to appreciate the enormous implications to humanity of the work he has been doing.

      So he's hanging around the cantina at Los Alamos, ostensibly waiting for his ride to the test site, but actually arguing with himself. Will he be able to live with himself after he's helped to create the cruelest weapon in human history? Will the team-and the U.S. government-really use this honest-to-goodness weapon of mass destruction on the Japanese to try to win the war faster?

      The other question, obviously, is: will it work? That's the main concern of Peter, the German expatriate scientist who is Hank's mentor, who joins the younger man, along with with his own young wife Irene, to pass some of the time before the test begins. Rain Dance finds its intellectual bearings in the contrast between these two men, who represent not only different generations but also different views of the world (Old vs. New) and different views of science (the pure wonder of discovery vs. the wanton destructiveness of man's insatiable quest to master nature). Wilson raises provocative questions that are, if anything, more relevant now than ever. Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Peter Parnell's "Q.E.D." have recently covered some of the same ground, but I don't think either one has unearthed the raw human cost of what we call the forward march of scientific progress with so much precision.

      The play's fourth character, a Navajo M.P. named Tony, speaks for the common man, extolling the traditional Native American values of respect for the land on the one hand, and praising any solution that will shorten the war on the other. In one of the drama's crucial
set pieces, he talks about the Navajo rain dance, telling Hank that if there's enough goodness in a man's heart, he can make the rains come. Control of the universe is never the issue; the question is always how to do it.

      Randolph Mantooth is commanding as Tony, and when he momentarily executes part of the tribal ritual, the production, which is sadly listless most of the time, comes to life. This happens, too, whenever Harris Yulin (as Peter) is on stage; his is the smallest role, but he makes the biggest impact because he brings tremendous weight and intelligence to every line he delivers. Unfortunately, neither Suzanne Regan (as Irene) nor Van Der Beek come close to matching him. The imbalance hurts the production badly.

      That said, Wilson's subject matter is so compelling, and his arguments so thought-provoking, that Rain Dance merits our consideration, even under less than optimal circumstances. Playwrights like Wilson are among the elder statesmen of our country's great thinkers; we need to hear what's on their minds. So I'm ultimately grateful to Signature Theatre Company, not just for giving Rain Dance a belated New York debut (two years after its
premiere!), but also for bringing us a whole season to listen to the wise and challenging words of this-alas-underappreciated author.

'Rain Dance' dramatizes an atomic moment
By Frederick M. Winship
Published 6/23/2003 7:00 AM

NEW YORK, June 23 (UPI) -- Lanford Wilson's 17 full-length plays and 30 short plays have held a mirror up to the American scene in the last half of the 20th century that now reflects the eve of the first atomic bomb test in 1945 by way of a poignant new drama, "Rain Dance."

The tense, economically written play is being given its New York premiere by the Signature Theater Company at its Off-Broadway Peter Norton Space as the conclusion of a season-long salute to Wilson, one of America's most eminent playwrights. The setting is a cantina at the Manhattan Project's base in Los Alamos, N.M., and the cast includes a German emigre physicist and his wife, a young American scientist, and an American Indian soldier who is assigned to the base.

The four are friends, and in the case of the physicist's wife and the soldier they are lovers. They seem to have taken refuge in the cantina to get away from a gathering thunderstorm and a party under way nearby that is celebrating a historic event, the birth of a weapon whose importance to mankind they can only imagine with differing degrees of alarm.

Hank, the boyish 27-year-old scientists, has the worst jitters and resorts to nervous conversation to hide them. Tony, the soldier, is the most laid back and given to long silences. Peter, the physicist, is being philosophical, and his younger artist wife, Irene, is deeply concerned about whether she will be wrenched from the beautiful New Mexico desert she has come to love now that the Manhattan Project has achieved its goal.

They do their best to skirt the main issue on their minds – the atomic bomb and its almost inestimable destructive power whose consequences are too awesome to put into words. But Hank, in particular, is obsessively drawn to this issue despite his enthusiasm for his job and the scientific breakthrough in which he has played a part, and he is the most articulate in voicing his ambivalent concerns.

Thus it is Hank who tends to dominate the play and provide it with the almost unbearable tension that makes "Rain Dance" work as a drama. James Van Der Beek, star of TV's "Dawson's Creek," plays the role with an innocent earnestness that is most endearing, especially when he allows his crush on Irene to surface and when he joins Tony in a rain dance that was a part of a touring Indian show in which the soldier once performed.

Harris Yulin, fine actor that he is, makes Peter more interesting than perhaps the playwright even intended, creating the portrait of a man who seems resigned to whatever the outcome of the bomb test may be, having given his best to the project. He is weary and needs a rest. There are indications that he even winks at his wife's affair with the soldier since it fulfills needs he can no longer satisfy.

Suzanne Regan is luminous and sympathetic as Irene, whose artistic temperament has been sorely strained by being uprooted from her native cultural setting and set down in a strange foreign landscape. Fortunately she has been able to find friendship and inspiration in the Indian community to offset her feelings of displacement, but now she faces the loss of even this consolation if her husband moves on to another project.

Wilson has not given the role of Tony much delineation, but Randolph Mantooth makes the most of this enigmatic Indian whose calm is a reality rather than an assumed cover for fear and anger, as it is for the others. Tony is more of a listener than a talker, but the expression on Mantooth's face as he listens is revelatory and worth watching.

"Rain Dance" has been expertly directed by Guy Sanville, artistic director of the Purple Rose Theater Company in Chelsea, Mich., where the play was premiered last year. Christine Jones' simple, shack-like set is detailed and realistic and it is nicely lit by James Vermeulen to suggest dusk and an increasingly stormy night. Daryl A. Stone's costumes are appropriate to the time and place.

Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International