Walk into the Marx Theatre at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park for Mad River Rising and you’ll be in a different world: the hayloft of an ancient Ohio barn. (It’s an engaging design by Jeff Modereger.) The farm’s decline is reflected in this timeworn structure. Hand-hewn beams and planks don’t look as sturdy as they surely once were, and abandoned items litter the space — an old wagon wheel, rusted milk cans, a bike and a sled, some rickety bedsprings. A knotted rope hangs from the upper loft, something kids would have used for swings and jumping into the hay, which you can still smell. But there’s not much left, and precious little hope for a soft landing today.
Nevertheless, it’s where Angus Stewart (Robert Hogan) has landed. At 85, he’s as worn down as his barn and has just escaped from a nearby nursing home. Like the barn he intends to defend or destroy, he’s seen better — and worse — days. As a 7-year-old in 1937, he witnessed the tragic Ohio River flood that washed away most of his family’s farm. He played a central role in rebuilding and sustaining it, but now a new flood threatens his world — “a flood of machines, of new faces, of progress.”
His pragmatic daughter-in-law Marie (Sheila Tousey) has struggled to manage a property she doesn’t really care about and to cope with cantankerous Angus as he has deteriorated. His last stand — to prevent her from selling the property for new purposes — has dragged grandson Charlie (Grant Goodman), Marie’s nephew from Chicago, into the fray. Charlie has his own issues — a stressful business life and a collapsed marriage. But he strives to identify more palatable options for the old man, who’s sharper than he appears at first glance, although memories of past events and family members swirl around him.
Angus is an engaging character, a no-nonsense guy who cares about things more than he lets on. He has a dry sense of humor and the ability to have “lucid moments” that are surprisingly perceptive. Humorously, he has no patience with new-fangled gadgets like Charlie’s cell phone and iPad. In the hands of actor Hogan, Angus is vivid and memorable.
However, his story slips and slides. Mae, Marie’s long-dead mother (also played by Tousey), haunts the action and functions as a kind of alternate narrator, sometimes badgering and chastening Angus with her own insights about the past. Another ghost, Hopley Stewart (Terry Weber), Angus’s taciturn grandfather, never speaks of his life, clearly damaged by the 1937 flood. But he hovers in the background of many scenes, reacting to action in the here and now, sometimes even whispering into Angus’s ear. We also see Angus at age 7 (Ty Joseph Shelton), watching the flood and fearing for the lives of Hopley and other family members.
This is meant to be the product of a jumbled elderly mind — “What I see, there’s too much, everything at once,” Angus says. Sometimes it’s poetic, but often it’s distracting.
Just as the flood reshaped the farm’s landscape, so has Mad River Rising been changed. Playwright Dana Yeaton wrote this script two decades ago for a theater in Vermont where the story was set. It was produced by Blake Robison, now the Playhouse’s artistic director. He invited Yeaton to revise his play for Ohio in 2015. Robison staged the production.
Some of this relocation works, since aspects of rural Vermont and Ohio aren’t all that different and floods reshaped both locales. But the bones of the earlier story — such as recollections of Native American heritage — seem off-key. (Angus is wary of Mae and Marie’s “Canuck” lineage and attitudes, a concern and attitude I’ve never heard expressed in Ohio.)
So it’s not a perfect script. What
Mad River Rising is, however, is an elegiac portrait of a man whose existence was one with the land he lived on and cared for. “No one gives you land,” he tells Charlie. “You earn it, over time.” Hogan (the actor is 82) has embodied plainspoken Angus in ways that make us care. Charlie suggests that his grandfather talks to himself. The old man replies, “I may talk to people not entirely there, but I have never talked to myself. No point to it.” In fact, he speaks to us — loud and clear.
MAD RIVER RISING, presented by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, continues through Nov. 14. More info/tickets: cincyplay.com.
This article appears in Nov 4-10, 2015.
