Review: The Diviners
** RATING
By Mark Collins
May 24, 2007
LAFAYETTE — Playwright Jim Leonard's 1980 work The Diviners is a beautifully rendered story. It's also a deceptively difficult play to produce.
The Theater Company of Lafayette's staging of the subtle, heartland drama — directed by Ed Schoenradt — features some good scenes. But the production doesn't build enough momentum, preferring instead to float lazily downstream.
The Diviners is set during the Great Depression and is filled with colorful, unsophisticated characters scraping at the Indiana dirt to get by. Men spend the time working with their hands and cursing President Hoover. Women fuss over each other or lament the fact the town hasn't had a church since the old one burned down years ago. Entertainment consists of digging worms for fish bait or recounting terrifying stories from the Bible.
What makes The Diviners a tricky play is that among the townsfolk of Zion, Ind., there's precious little conflict — the stuff on which good drama is always built. Instead, Leonard crafted a story in which its two main characters — the play's two diviners — carry conflict deep within themselves.
C.C. Showers (Jared Wilson), a preacher-turned-drifter, is running from some untold past when he wanders into Zion, looking for redemption. He befriends Buddy (Geoff Bangs), a mentally challenged boy who once had the gift of divining water for farmers, but who lives with a terrifying fear of water in the wake of his mother's drowning.
This is a delicate story that requires what sparks it can generate to come from the performances. Not helping things is Brian Miller's stage design — a series of square-cornered platforms constructed at different levels, all painted a neutral grayish color. It plays against the story's earthy feel, and the actors looked cramped and conscious of their footing during much of the show.
Bangs, the young actor who takes on Buddy, shows lots of promise. He captures Buddy's innocence and excitability — whether it's in making a new friend or fighting against taking a bath. He's fearless in the scenes that require vulnerability. But Bangs gets caught in the distracting habit of constantly shifting his weight on stage. Buddy's childlike simplicity is already in the lines; we don't need to be reminded of it by constant motion.
Wilson gives a more grounded performance as Showers, the good-hearted man who's lost his faith. The implied chemistry between Showers and Jennie Mae (Rachel Doyle), Buddy's 16-year-old sister, is missing, though. And Buddy's father, Ferris, played by Russ Orr, needs more authority.
At last Saturday's performance, the audience at the Mary Miller Theater enjoyed much of the folksy humor that's captured in Leonard's script. Scenes between farmhands Melvin (Augustus Schmitter) and Dewey (Adam Walker) were especially effective.
But, overall, the play doesn't build like it needs to and the final, tragic moment doesn't break open the flood of emotion as it should.
Contact Camera Theater Critic Mark Collins at 303-473-1369 or BDCTheater@comcast.net.