When I first met Aunt Dan on the page, it was clear to me that she is passionate and bold, and that she lived her life with an almost violent intensity. I absolutely fell in love with her free spirit—with her Victorian blouses and nineteenth century men’s caps—and I was drawn in by her worldliness and non-conformance to societal rules. Aunt Dan seems to let every moment of her life on earth have its richness. I knew upon my introduction to Aunt Dan that getting to know her was going to be both a treat and a challenge.
Lemon recalls so vividly that some of Aunt Dan’s favorite memories included a week long rendezvous with a married man eating decadent foods and hardly leaving the bed as well as that pivotal moment of falling in love with a woman sitting stark naked on the sofa sharing the secrets of her life. And just as I was enjoying learning about this interesting woman Lemon calls Aunt Dan, (though of no relation), I was stunned to find this whole other complicated layer. Something took Aunt Dan off guard, shaking her inner being and coloring the rest of her life–and that something makes her fight hard to give everything she can to Lemon while destroying a very close friendship with Lemon’s mother.
As I got further into the play, it became clear to me that this “wordy” play, as some critics have complained, is rather a complex set of images, thoughts, powerful moments and truths—and though on the surface there’s no action in the play, I’ve learned that the action is in these characters’ hearts and minds—the evolution of the thoughts and emotions is the action.
As I sat with Aunt Dan, taking her on word for word, her firm concepts on war blew me away. I became afraid of letting myself become this woman on stage. She faces the heart of conflict and the ugly truths of war dead on and sharply asks “what about the things that would have happened the next day if the bomb hadn’t been dropped?” She tears downs critics and journalists who mock our country’s leaders, saying they would be begging for help if they found themselves in the middle of the jungle facing the enemy. She continues to say that these critics and journalists are cowards who never had to make such weighted decisions and instead they live this great way of life that is only possible because of our country’s leaders making grave choices. Her intense views on Henry Kissinger’s role in the Vietnam War simply shocked me. I do not share the same views as her, or at least I didn’t think I did at first—and this has been challenging to me as an actor. How am I supposed to let awful images pour out of my mouth and with such venom? And such things that people argue to this day are war crimes?
In preparing for rehearsals, I sifted through the events of the Indochina War leading to the Vietnam War and read through excerpts of the book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. But then I found that reading the black and white of the war still distanced me from the core of emotional truth that Aunt Dan harbors towards Henry Kissinger and why she so strongly believes in preemptive war. My homework has had to become more visceral, looking at images and reading personal accounts of Vietnam and even the atomic bombs dropped in WWII. The more I search to the find the truth in what Aunt Dan’s saying, the more I understand where she’s coming from—and that scares me beyond belief. War is happening right now, but that doesn’t cross our minds as we’re sitting in Starbucks. I don’t know, it makes sense that I was initially stunned by some of Aunt Dan’s ideas, but they started to make sense. She says “if there are people attacking our friends in Southeast Asia, you and I don’t have to go over there and fight them with rifles—we just get Kissinger to fight them for us . . . all these other people use force so we don’t have to, so we can sit her in this garden and be incredibly nice.” I had moments where I felt uncomfortable by how much I could begin to understand her perspective. I have to think–if we believe our friends in another country are being murdered by power hungry people who are confiscating our friends’ farms and raping their children, why wouldn’t we fight to end that? And if there are only one or two countries where this is happening, why would we wait until the number of countries we’ll have to fight are twice the number we’d have to fight now?
This piece is wildly intimidating–as Wallace Shawn states and doesn’t shy away from, evil triumphs in this play. It’s as if the actor and audience is asked to let their mind ponder darker thoughts of what would happen if we truly were outright killing for power. I am thankful that director Matthew Reeder dedicated the entire first week of rehearsals to discussion, table work, and several full read throughs of the play. We started to dissect and digest this play from the onset, and as we put this play on its feet, the questions and discussions didn’t stop.
This play takes us through some very dark and murky places, but I have to say I am captivated. I read something somewhere that if it doesn’t scare you, it’s not courageous. I am sitting here right now so thankful for BSTC’s courage, my fellow cast member’s courage, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the audience take this journey with us.
–Brenda Barrie
Voltaire is quoted “…the safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.”
The play, Aunt Dan and Lemon, brings together a cast of characters and a small audience for an intimate evening of provocative thought that teases at the very fringes of propriety while maintaining an intriguing tension between the innocence of self denial and the perversions of influence and yet at times, also confronts you with the obscenity and the brutality of life at its lowest base.
The engaging lilt that Ms Ward-Hays uses to draw you into her seemingly genteel and enclosed world of self denial and self indulgence is like tasting the sweet licorice of absinthe that gradually distorts the lines between right and wrong and ends by leaving one with the bitter taste of deception and feeling the pangs of guilty regrets to seduction and submission. The contrapuntal tones between the two main characters serve as perfect oppositional rings – where the introverted and reclusive life of a young Lemon is wonderfully balanced against that of the older Aunt Dan whose extroverted nature and own innocence is layered underneath a lifetime of many secrets and illusions of influence.
Lemon and Aunt Dan are like two birds, one is the caged bird of adolescent immaturity that has forsaken an adult life of freedom to live her days in a gilded sanctuary and the other is a free bird who is however caged by her desires and locked to her secrets of indulgence.
Bravo to the cast and Mr. Wallace Shawn!