Theatre Review —

Long Wharf Explores Hurlin’s Views Of Time And Life

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — In 1994, a 74 year-old Iowa farmer, who had lost his driver’s license after becoming virtually blind and who had no access to public transportation (there was no airport or bus terminal within 80 miles), was determined to visit his older brother who had been felled by a stroke. Rather than depend on the kindness of strangers, he hitched a trailer full of supplies to the back of a second-hand 1966 John Deere riding mower and proceeded to drive the 250 miles to his brother’s house in Wisconsin, staying entirely on the shoulder of the road. Travelling at a top speed of five miles an hour, the journey took him 41 days.

This real event attracted the attention of many, including the filmmaker David Lynch, who turned it into a non-macabre Disney movie called The Straight Story, and also the many-faceted Dan Hurlin, who used it as the basis for an impressionistic opera exploring the nature of time and life. He not only wrote and directed this story, he is now performing in its current Long Wharf production.

In appreciating or understanding The Shoulder, several points need to be understood. Mr Hurlin is fascinated by the implications of the way time must be slowed down in order to travel that far at such a slow pace. He uses the situation both as the motivation for reflecting backward into the past — the farmer remembering his youth, and recalling his beloved wife, who died of cancer — and also as a trigger for reflecting on the changes that have taken place over recent decades, including the decline of the American farm and the small town in the face of rampant development and pop culture commercialism.

Finally, he uses it as a vehicle for talking about AIDS, a disease for whose victims life becomes all too short, and who are thus robbed of their time.

Mr Hurlin also explores the way that for every old person, his youthful persona that once was still exists within the life of his memory. He has chosen to incarnate that memory by having the main character played simultaneously by two actors. Allan Kellar is the gruff, crusty, purblind old man, and Doug Marcks is his youthful past. They don’t dialogue as characters — they must be understood

 as one person — but the duality allows for musical counterpoint and harmony as they sing the same words in different voices.

Finally, being an actor of considerable comic gifts, Mr Hurlin takes on the parts and voices of everyone the old man encounters on his picaresque journey, from the indifferent optometrist who informs the farmer that that he is going blind and there is no cure and no hope, to the bubble-headed airline reservation clerk who cheerily advises him it would be cheaper and easier to drive from Iowa to Wisconsin. This humorous element, which is reminiscent of bits on A Prairie Home Companion, seems at odds with the essential gravity of the theme. While Garrison Keillor is able to unite these components effectively, they feel disconnected here, as if Mr Hurlin did the funny bits because he knows how to be funny (which he does).

The staging is intriguing. The road is represented by a long sheet of divided blacktop highway, stretching across the stage and disappearing into the ceiling. Antique toys are used effectively: small trucks cruise silently along. A patchwork mural of endless fields serves as a backdrop, and lighting designer Tyler Micoleau does amazing things with walls of color. The intense blue of an Iowa sky changes to mauve to gold to dark gray, all to great dramatic effect.

And then there is the music. Mr Hurlin recruited his friend Dan Moses Schrier to write the music for this opera, apparently giving him the challenge of evoking the spirit of a lawn mower, in all its incessant repetitious drone. I admit to not being a fan of minimalist or atonal music, so perhaps I did not appreciate it as much as it deserved. However, I can’t help wishing that a work which has put so much effort into capturing the essence of the Midwestern heartland and the nuances of Americana which are so distinctive to our national culture could not have drawn more on traditional American country and folk music for its themes.

(Performances of The Shoulder continue through November 21. The box office at Long Wharf can be reached by calling 203/787-4282, for information concerning show times and ticket prices.)