Randall Newsome is tossed about in a reenactment of the Johnstown Flood in A True History of the Johnstown Flood
When the leading repertory theater in the nation's most important theater city after New York stages an ambitious new play about one of the greatest disasters in American history; when the play, written by one of the city's major playwrights, is given an elaborate, no-expense-spared production by the theater's Tony-nominated artistic director; and when the play is roundly panned by nearly every critic in town ("A theatrical disaster," said the Chicago Sun-Times) ... well, there's only one thing for a jaded theater critic to do.
Hop a plane to Chicago.
I'm not being willfully perverse here. I start with some admitted prejudices. A True History of the Johnstown Flood is the latest play from Rebecca Gilman, a much-underrated playwright whose work I have championed often in the past. Chicago's Goodman Theater, the host of this reputed debacle, wound up at the top of my list of the best regional theater in America a few years back. More to the point, any play that prompts that kind of critical outrage must be doing something right: defying expectations or flouting theatrical convention in some important way that demands a look.
A True History of the Johnstown Flood is a big, unruly, defiantly unfashionable play. It's a sprawling historical drama in an era of tidy, contemporary character plays. Its subject — a flood that wiped out a thriving industrial town near Pittsburgh in 1889, killing more than 2,200 people in the deadliest disaster in American history to that point — has little resonance for modern audiences. It has lots of characters and multiple set changes — the sort of expensive accoutrements that would most likely scare off any self-respecting, budget-conscious New York producer. But it is far from a disaster. On the contrary, it struck me as one of the most provocative, moving and gutsy works of theater I've seen in a long while.
Gilman had become interested in the Johnstown flood after reading David McCullough's 1987 book about it, but only began envisioning it as a dramatic subject after Hurricane Katrina, which had some uncomfortable parallels. Johnstown was inundated by a private lake that had been created by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, an exclusive haven of moguls like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. The lake had been stocked with fish, which were kept from escaping by a screen installed in the dam's spillway. But that caused the lake to rise, and after several days of torrential rain, the poorly constructed dam burst — sending 20 million tons of water rushing toward the largely working class populace below.
Gilman's social-political concerns have long been apparent in her work, if rarely front and center in it. In plays like Spinning Into Butter and Boy Gets Girl, she turned deceptively small-scale character dramas into larger explorations of society's discomfort with issues like race and sexual stereotyping. Her brilliant adaptation of Carson McCullers The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (staged a few months ago at the off-Broadway New York Theater Workshop) managed to restore all the political context and Depression-era social realism that had been scrubbed out of the sentimental, Oscar-nominated 1968 Hollywood film.
It's not hard to turn the story of the Johnstown flood into a metaphor for America's class divide. And yet Gilman is too savvy a dramatist and too adventurous an artist to settle for routine social-protest docudrama. Instead, she comes at the story from an eccentric angle: focusing on a family acting troupe that travels the country performing dated melodramas in the tradition of their late father. (We see long — perhaps too long — excerpts of these plays-within-the-play.) The younger of the family's two brothers is on a crusade to replace these sentimental warhorses with more socially relevant plays, in the mode of Ibsen and others whose work was coming into vogue in Europe. Gradually it becomes apparent that Gilman's intention is not just to document a historical disaster, but to explore the responsibility of artists in such times of crisis.
This dual-track approach is complicated further by layers of irony and ambiguity. While poking obvious fun at the cornball plays performed by the family troupe, Gilman is just as skeptical of the earnest, Waiting for Lefty-style militancy of the play that younger brother stages later, in an effort to rouse the populace against the injustices that led to the flood. Gilmans irony extends to her own work; this is a "true history" that is frankly fictionalized, the natural disaster at the center of the story reduced at times to the role of a walk-on.
It is these diversionary tactics that apparently left the Chicago critics so frustrated — the Tribune's critic complaining, for example, that the play is "derailed by the weight of its own symbolism and reluctance to get to the core of the story." Yet by showing the disaster through the prism of these fictional bit players, Gilman manages to avoid the didactic heavyhandedness of most docu-plays. The flood itself is conveyed harrowingly with minimal stage effects — a thunderous cacophony of noise that takes place in blackness. Its aftermath is chronicled in small vignettes that focus on the grubby, mundane realities of what humans are reduced to in extremity: a violent sex scene amid the rubble, a man struck by a sudden fit of diarrhea (a first on stage, at least in my theatergoing experience). Even the one or two interludes of fairly straightforward exposition — Clara Barton shows up in one scene tending to the victims, the first mission of her newly created American Red Cross — are marked by unusual tenderness and honesty.
I don't mean to ignore the extraordinary production — Robert Falls' careful direction, Walt Spanglers striking, alternately realistic and expressionistic sets, and a cast of journeyman Chicago actors who could hardly be bettered. But the real star is Gilman, who has created a play that defies category, demands attention and will outlive its critics.