Plan-B Theatre: Wallace

Wallace
Plan-B Theatre Company
Rose Wagner Theater
March 4-14, 2010

Wallace is the story of two men whose lives run aground in Salt Lake City. Wallace Thurman is a young, gay, African-American writer who planted his roots in the dried-up lake bed of Salt Lake City before setting out for New York City where he became one of the prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Avant-Garde. The second is Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer-prize winning writer who survived the brutal plains of Saskatchewan and eventually formed a new Eden here in the City of Saints with his wife. In life their paths never crossed, in the minimalist set in the Plan-B theater they only once acknowledge each other, but their lives, at some point, share a city, a passion for writing, and a name: Wallace.  

Wallace is a single play comprised of the two solo one-act plays FIRE, adapted Jennifer Nii and WHERE I COME FROM, adapted by Debora Teedy.  Both plays are adapted exclusively from the memoirs of Thurman and Stegner and are interwoven together under the direction of Jerry Rapier. The minimal set, consisting of a table and a few chairs, allows each actor’s physical presence to hold commanding sway during the 85 minute dual-monologue.  Carleton Bluford, a vivacious young actor, convincingly portrays Wallace Thurman and Richard Scharine embodies the reverent austerity and unyielding humor that defines Wallace Stegner’s prose. Both actors are in worlds apart, never addressing each other except to fill in for lines spoken by other characters.  This distance allows the thematic narrative of their lives to fill in the blanks where the tangible similarities are silent.

In every facet Wallace is a study in contrasts that extend beyond the obvious difference is age, race and sexuality. Stegener begins his monologue sitting calmly at a table addressing the audience that the rumors may be true, he may or may not be starting his autobiography. The subdued and coy Stegner is violently interrupted by Thurman as he bursts from the shadows, leaps up on the table and launches into the first line of his autobiography, “Fire!/Fiiire, gonna buuurrn my soul!” There is no question about Thurman’s intentions, he has a life-story that demands telling—so much that he can barely contain his enthusiasm to tell it. The way the two actors use the limited space given to them point to the obvious distinctions between their personalities. The table and chairs serve as apt metaphors for the venerable Stegner, rarely gets up from behind the table as he reads from “The Colt” and collected short stories or dispensing wisdom and anecdotes like a master storyteller. Thurman on the other hand, plays the stage and props like his own personal jungle gym. His monologues find him frantically pacing the stage, sitting at awkward angles on tops of chairs, shouting his lines from tabletop. Even when Thurman is dying Bluford still wrings every last drop of life that he can from the character, refusing to let him fade into obscurity the way he has in the history of this city.

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