Athol Fugard's The Blue Iris at the Fountain Theatre

Comments (0) By Steven Leigh Morris Thursday, Aug 30 2012

Sachs' meticulously rendered production features a trio of impeccable performances. These include Schultz as Sally's ghost, who arrives as though via tornado, chattering and desperate, before she's sucked away by that same wind tunnel, to explain the meaning of her painting, and of how in painting it she failed to convey that meaning.

Then there's Higgins as Robert, and his fastidious, lumbering search for his own meaning amidst the remains, his world-weary eyes, the sonorous, aching tone in his voice. Hill's Rieta offers a spritely foil — she's as impatient as she is pained. Their joint decision, the only decision in the play, is whether she and Robert, both tramps and Platonic lovers, should stay or go, together or apart. And there's an allegory in that, too, about circumstantial bonds and inexorable isolation. The play is saturated in allegories.

PHOTO BY ED KRIEGER

Morlan Higgins and Julanne Chidi Hill

Location Info

Map

Fountain Theatre

5060 Fountain Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90029

Category: Music Venues

Region: Out of Town

0 user reviews	Write A Review
Save to foursquare

More About

To fully appreciate The Blue Iris, however, one might look beyond Thomas Hardy's poems to W.B. Yeats' poetical drama Purgatory, also set by the remains of a charred house. Purgatory also studies a man grieving for his late wife, trying to release her from purgatory. She, too, paces between life and death, listless in her travels beyond existence. The other character in Purgatory is the man's son, representing a hope for the future that stands on the brink of corrosion.

Both plays wrestle with how past and future can possibly travel any road together. And yet they do, as they must, as they always have. The ensuing, combustible emotions are what provide the fire of our most timeless poems and stories, where writers such as Yeats and Fugard ache to fathom the unfathomable.