Blasted Garden

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TRAVELER IN THE DARK by Marsha Norman

The impulse toward poetry seems to burn more hotly in playwrights than the impulse toward literal truth. The conjurer's tricks of the dramatist--metaphor, epigram, literary allusion and the fateful juxtaposition--somehow feel more artistic than the precise evocation of life. That attitude seems to have gripped even one of the stage's most adroit neorealists, Marsha Norman. She won her reputation with the 1979 drama about a woman's leaving prison, Getting Out, and last year received the Pulitzer Prize for 'Night, Mother, a mundanely detailed conversation over cocoa and marshmallows between a daughter who intends to commit suicide and a mother desperate to stop her. Now, in Traveler in the Dark, Norman has turned away from the art-as-life style and has crafted a witty, eloquent, far-ranging and altogether too clever play.

Her central character is a cancer researcher (Sam Waterston) who has superficially mastered all he surveys in the adult world but who remains fixated on the griefs of his childhood. The set is a blasted-heath garden in which the fretful doctor's boyhood playthings--including building blocks that spell out his name--have been mortared into the walls, ostensibly by his long-dead mother. He ruefully explains: "It was her way of teaching me not to leave my toys outside." The audience for the premiere production, at Harvard University's American Repertory Theater, soon realizes that this remark, and many others throughout the play's two acts, may not quite be true.

The doctor is in the throes of a rather too calculated crisis: his longtime office nurse, a childhood sweetheart and pathetically faithful dogsbody, lies dying of cancer that he failed to detect in time.

Shamed and disillusioned by his only gods, medicine and himself, he has bolted from the hospital, gathered up his neglected wife (Phyllis Somerville) and possessively loved son (Damion Scheller), and taken them to the home of his father, a rural revivalist preacher (Hume Cronyn).

What follows is frequently funny and pointed but sometimes mutes Norman's natural voice and sounds uncomfortably like those of other playwrights. There are Neil Simonesque one-liners: "Life is summer camp, and death is lights-out." Ibsenesque dialectic about values: "God found God, and it was Man: God has sat up there believing in us." Albee-like catharsis: "My only comfort is knowing that my life is actually as empty as it feels." Moreover, the equivocal closing scenes of reconciliation between the doctor and his father seem anticlimactic after the keenly perceived torments of his marriage. Somerville and Scheller ably play the wife and son, and Cronyn invigorates the ill-defined minister, but Waterston starts at so shrill and petulant a pitch that he has nowhere to go. In the big scenes, he flounders like a gaffed fish.

Still, Traveler in the Dark has emotional power, an insight into men that matches Norman's previously demonstrated understanding of women, and a hearteningly grand ambition. The play seeks to debate science and faith, love and self-knowledge, the rage to grow and the resistance to change. Norman writes candidly and capably about God, reason and honor. And those topics do count for more than cocoa and marshmallows. -- By William A. Henry III