Review - And I And Silence

I couldn't help myself, I had to buy a ticket to the Signature Theatre's production of Naomi Wallace's new play And I And Silence.  I mean, how could I miss a new play by an American female playwright?  I couldn't.  I got one of the few remaining $25 tickets for the Friday before it closed.  I'm not sure I entirely enjoyed myself, but I am glad I saw it.

I don't know a lot about Wallace's work - I saw one of her plays, The Hard Weather Boating Party, at the Humana Fest a few years ago and remember enjoying it.  After reading a couple of articles about her, I see that she is also a poet and that she frequently writes about people who are powerless.  I think both of those qualities come into play in And I And Silence.  The story takes place in two time periods: in 1950, two teenage girls meet and bond in a girls' prison.  One girl is white, the other is black.  Then we see these girls as adults, in 1959, after they're out in society.  Their bonds are tested and their interdependence works both for and against them.  The play is very episodic, with relatively brief scenes filled with very poetic language, moving seamlessly back and forth between the two time periods.  The scene work was good and I could see the gradual changes in the characters throughout, but it did seem as if most of the 'action' of the play was saved for the very end.  It gave maximum impact, I guess, but it made waiting for it a little tedious. 

Well, not tedious, exactly.  I did enjoy seeing this story play out, since it's one I hadn't seen before.  I always enjoy stories about women and their connection to each other; however, this piece was rather unrelenting in its fatalistic quality - I knew from the beginning there was no other way for this story to end other than the way it ended.  So I was rather depressed throughout, wishing there could be another future for these interesting characters.  Though I did also feel that the characters were sometimes more mouthpieces and not as flesh-and-blood as they could've been, which kept me from getting as emotionally engaged as I normally like to (though that may not have been the playwright's wish).

photo credit: Ruth Fremson

The play is very well-acted by two sets of actresses - the younger characters are quite joyful and optimistic, so seeing that played against the older versions of the same characters and their gradual descent into despair was well done.  Each acting pair had a nice chemistry and I could believe them completely as friends and (near) soulmates.  If I didn't quite buy into the relationship as depicted in the last scenes of the play, well, all right.  I mean, I guess I can understand how the characters got there, but I was a little skeptical at the same time.


As I was watching And I And Silence, I was reminded a few times of Genet's The Maids; I also felt hints of the film Heavenly Creatures, where those characters have such a fantasy life that they fantasize themselves out of ever understanding their reality.  There were moments of a sort of erotic tension in this play when the girls, while in prison, play-acted hitting each other with a switch to prepare for their grown-up lives as servants (and a strange aside - during one of the scenes with the switch [large twig, actually], the switch broke and flew into the audience.  It hit the woman next to me, who shrieked, then her husband got into the act.  The play continued, but I missed a lot of what was going on because of the ruckus.  I guess, in theory, I could've missed the dialogue that explained the whole play and was the most emotional part of the evening.  I doubt it, but maybe.  I asked the gal after the play if she was ok and she said she was, it just grazed her cheek, but it scared her.  As I was leaving, her party was speaking to the house manager.  I'm guessing a different prop was used for the last few performances).  It was an interesting  piece of business, but I'm not quite sure how it illuminated anything else in the play.

I felt badly for these young women, their powerlessness and the fact they couldn't regain their selves and couldn't just live their lives, because of their race, because of their station and situation in life, but it was sort of a disconnected bad feeling, not a completely engaged one.  So, for me, And I And Silence was more an interesting intellectual exercise rather than a compelling theatrical experience.  For all I know, that's exactly what Wallace intended.  It just didn't add up to everything I hoped for in my world.  Ah well.  On to the next.