Lær's Last Prayer
Written and Directed by Stephen F. Murray
At City Lit Theater in Chicago
A review by M. D. Ball of the performance on July 24, 2011
A lesson in lessons is what this play is. It shows us not so much how we might interpret quotations from Shakespeare, Beckett, and other sources to give more gravitas to the truths they condense, but more how we might teach ourselves to use
those quotations effectively. Can we cut and paste them, even from selected great playwrights, and cobble from them a meaningful and engaging piece of theatre? Stephen Murray, the author of Lær's Last Prayer, calls it a "patchwork of quotations" from Shakespeare, Beckett, the Bible, and other sources, going on to warn us that whereas the elements may lack meaning in and of themselves, together they form a "linear" story. I suspect, however, that Murray is so close to his own creation that he doesn't notice its opacity. Being cryptic can be a strength, like Waiting for Godot, but only when the audience has an initial feeling of directionality, when they detect even a faint scent of intelligibility, because then the code promises to unravel itself later, whether partially or fully, after a few more encounters with the play. Last Prayer, however, lacks that feeling of directionality, leaving little room for hope that the story's elusive linearity will ever appear. Even so, there's something in this play's obtuseness that leads me to wonder whether an artifice is present in the script.
I'm going to give Murray the benefit of the doubt by reminding myself of another cryptic play, Albee's The Lady from Dubuque, which, on first meeting, is a baffling, even aggravating, story that just seems confused. Hence the play's general drubbing. On closer scrutiny, however, it opens up into a rich tapestry of interesting possibilities, all of them coherent but individually debatable, and all depending on the interpreter's perspective. Last Prayer may be similar, the key word being "may"; therefore, before dismissing this play, I'll wait for a second or third encounter with it. But whereas Last Prayer feels muddled at first, like Lady, it has more the character of Godot. Murray has the germ of a good idea that could become engaging if restructured and refined, like Stephen Guirgis' not-quite-ready The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. If Murray did indeed weave coherence somewhere into the fabric of Last Prayer, then teasing it out poses no less a challenge than does Lady or Godot.
The basic theme is a familiar one: the demands of caring for an aging parent. So trite is this theme that if the play limited itself to that, it wouldn't be worth further discussion. But the play doesn't limit itself to that. Rather, it goes far enough beyond such simplicity to bring up various corollary questions that become impossible to ignore. For example, how do we protect a person's mind within a moribund body? Should we preserve a body that houses a moribund mind? What if both the mind and the body are decaying fast? Even more disturbing is the mind's own awareness of its own deterioration, an awareness that moderates, through pity, our disgust at King Lear's cruelty. Lear's mind, or Lær's mind, is disintegrating into discrete, self-contained units, each of which is intelligible, even out of context, but that function together as an irrational whole, like a dream that connects logical units into something preposterous.
Is Murray trying to draw a parallel between the units of Lær's mind and the units of this play? Is he telling us that the component parts of Lær's thoughts and memories function like the quotations in this story? Does he want us, the audience, to suffer the same frustration as Lær is feeling, and probably as his children in this play are feeling, in trying to find some logic, some coherence, in this "patchwork", as Murray calls it? If so, then what does Murray mean by "linearity"? Perhaps he's reminding us that a sequence of events, even an irrational one, is still a sequence of events catenated across time. And if time is linear, then the sequence is linear. If this was Murray's intention, then there's precedent for it, an example being Lady, but my hypothesis would fail to accord with his implication that the whole of this play is greater than the sum of its parts, which are the quotations.
Elliott Fredland, who portrayed the dying Lær, gave us a pathetic king whose only remaining dignity exists in his dry humor. Fredland is particularly good at that, especially when it's tinged with condescension, as in his portrayal of Prof. Riley in Provision Theater's recent production of Shadowlands. In fact, Fredland's Riley and Lær overlapped considerably. At any rate, Lær wanted those around him to know about his fear without his having to acknowledge the impact of that fear on the Royal Stoicism. Thus, the pride of this egomaniacal king didn't have to yield fully to the natural process of irreversible decay, creating the impression of a majesty that was only slowly asphyxiating. Humiliation averted. Well, some humiliation averted. To me, it wasn't clear whether Fredland was trying to convey a dread of going mad, or whether he was instead punching up the anger and befuddlement. "Is this the promised end?", he asked poignantly, less with the fear and trembling of Kierkegaardian dimensions than with the bewildered disappointment of a Shakespearean adolescent.
Played by Nick Lake, Jack is Lær's anxious son who resorts to clowning in order to distract himself from his father's imminent death. In the role of Jill, Jamie Bragg delivered some touching acting as Lær's dead daughter, a Cordelia figure who shares Jack's grief and who tries to soothe him with comforting nursery rhymes from their childhood. Moreover, Jill gave us some Ophelia, Viola (Twelfth Night), and Little Miss Muffet. Lake and Bragg played off each other well, justifying their characters' names, though it wasn't clear to me whether the passage "Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after" symbolically described their relationship or whether it just served as a sign of their refuge from the pain of two children watching a parent die.
In this story, Dr. Kent tries to prolong Lær's life, as the Earl of Kent tries to protect his Sovereign in King Lear. Brian Hurst projected not only the goodness and loyalty we expect of the earl, but also a disturbing taint of fanaticism in his devotion to Lear. Hurst succeeded in distinguishing Kent's love for Lær, manifesting as controlled panic, from that of Jack and Jill, who displayed more sadness.
Whether Murray did use the artifice of forcing his audience to experience directly the same incoherence as do the four characters, is something I don't know. And it's something I don't want to know because an answer of "no" might mean that the script really is an impenetrable mess. But because there's so much power in Murray's idea, I prefer an explanatory or redemptive interpretation that starts with an answer of "yes", even if the particular artifice he employs isn't the one I proposed, because it would lead us to reconcile the reality of the issues raised with the absurdism of the approach. And absurdity seems to provoke more conversation.