Theater Review - Silence is golden
Life Goes On pays loving tribute to silent film
Writer/director John Ammerman doesn’t just salute silent films with Life Goes On: A Silent Play in Black and White at Theater Emory. Ammerman constructs a nearly flawless homage to the cinematic styles that predated the talkies, then unveils ideas that make his silent picture show more than just a loving, pain-staking gimmick.
Bryan Mercer, the show’s composer, provides live piano accompaniment near the front of the house, so you can see his fingers and sheet music throughout the play — though your attention seldom wanders from the action. A lush curtain like you’d find in an old movie palace conceals the set until after Mercer’s ragtime-style overture.
When the curtain draws back to reveal the setting and actors, briefly frozen in place, the 1929 tableau looks freaky at first. Not only are the jazz age costumes and splendid art deco hotel lobby rendered entirely in shades of black, white and gray, but the actors wear pallid, almost ghoulish makeup consistent with the monochromatic color scheme. (Only the live black dog onstage gets spared.) Shortly after the action begins, we grow completely accustomed to the pale faces, while the lack of spoken dialogue gradually arrests us.
The hotel lobby hosts a wedding reception for a groom (Eric Reeser) and bride (Anne Maxwell), with perfect period details. As a flapper with a cigarette holder, Suzanne Jordan Roush resembles a strutting, boozing Al Hirschfeld caricature of Prohibition-era starlet Louise Brooks.
In his “Note from the Director,” Ammerman says, “This production is not an attempt to re-create a silent film,” but maybe he’s just joshing us. Life Goes On lifts its approach to dialogue directly from old movies. A character noiselessly but emphatically mouths a line, then the lights briefly dim and we see the words projected over the set, in diction and typeface identical to silent-film title cards: “To my daughter and her new life!” toasts Kim Shipley as a rich banker and owner of the play’s grand hotel. More obvious lines, like a terrified “Where is he?” need no translation.
As we watch the festivities, Ammerman — every inch the classical leading man at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival — proves to be a multitasking playwright and director. Life Goes On at first shows the wedding party and hotel staff in a swirl of simultaneous activities, from playing parlor games to sipping champagne on the sly. Jokes or plot points take center stage, but interesting little bits of business go on in the background, so we can follow whichever character we want.
The frivolity takes a melodramatic turn when the banker reads a newspaper that blares “MARKET CRASHES!” Seeing the actors react to the news, in turn, seizes our attention more than spoken words would. When the plucky young bellhop sympathetically watches the distraught banker, the play tugs at emotions more sharply than if we simply saw the banker brooding alone.
The bellhop (Lauren Gunderson) provides Life Goes On’s comic relief and resembles the meek, childlike roles of Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. Those actors brought a great delicacy to their movements, so casting an actress for that kind of physical comedy makes sense. In one sequence, the bellhop tries to light a cigarette, but her arm keeps moving the lighter away from her face, as if the lighter has a mind of its own. It’s silly stuff, but right in line with the genre’s tomfoolery.
A little of this kind of goofing around goes a long way, but Gunderson nails the bellhop’s mild-mannered, rubber-bodied expressiveness to make the role endearing, not annoying. If she imitates the Little Tramp from the neck down, Daniel Bayer copies Chaplin from the chin up as the supercilious desk clerk, rolling his eyes and twitching his handlebar mustache.
In the second half of the 90-minute play, the bellhop takes a blow to the head and has a dream in which the “unconscious” Gunderson remains on stage and Melissa Roy takes over the role. Ammerman takes the image of Depression- era businessmen leaping out of windows and makes an extended, darkly hilarious gag of it, to the bellhop’s dismay.
But though Life Goes On first paints the afterlife as just another wild party, the play becomes increasingly bittersweet as the dead prove unable to comfort the still-grieving living. When a live character tries to communicate with her deceased loved ones, the play clicks. Life Goes On’s notions of mortality wouldn’t hit so hard without the actors’ bloodless complexions or the script’s wordless interactions.
The show’s artifice occasionally feels mannered, and a couple of times we miss the lack of spoken exposition — I never figured out the last-minute revelations about the bride’s mother (Karen Whitaker). Fortunately, the cast brings a cheerful attitude to the show’s oversized emoting, while Mercer’s bouncy score cleverly incorporates snippets of old standards like “Ain’t We Got Fun” and “My Blue Heaven.”
With Life Goes On, John Ammerman offers more than heaven for silent movie fans by building to meditation on life and death in the spirit of Our Town. And by giving white-faced pantomime a good name, Life Goes On achieves a kind of miracle.