Profile Theatre devotes every season to the work of one
specific playwright, and the results are generally perfectly adequate.
Their current show is an unfortunate exception to the rule: A Few
Stout Individuals, the second full-length production in their John
Guare season, is absolutely excruciating.
It’s 1885, and Ulysses S. Grant (Tobias Anderson) is no longer a
shining Civil War general, nor a slightly-less-shining US President. A
bad financial deal ruined the family, and Grant is ailing, confined to
a wheelchair, and so drugged that he doesn’t know if he’s coming or
going. Enter Samuel Clemens (Thom Bray), with an offer to publish
Grant’s memoirs, restoring his name and his former wealth.
Unfortunately, getting around the distractions of the Grant
family—and Grant’s own haze of selective memory—proves
challenging.
It’s a true story, and a potentially interesting one—but
playwright John Guare wasn’t able to get his arms around it and wrote a
muddled, overlong mess. As Clemens tries to coax Grant’s memoirs out of
the old man, so we see Guare try to coax a commissioned script out of a
head stuffed full of ideas with no unifying thread.
It’s clear that everyone onstage is doing their damnedest to keep
the audience entertained—but Profile and director Pam Sterling
are no match for this ordeal of a script. Sterling has given her actors
direction they can’t or don’t understand, and they meander about the
stage with little regard for the characters they’ve slapped together.
True emotion and intensity are traded in for shouting, and the only
actors who seem to possess some understanding of nuance and subtlety
are Anderson and Bray—both of whom deserve at least slight praise
for their efforts. Bray, because he more-than-competently filled in at
the last minute after the original actor fell ill, and Anderson because
he spends most of the production in a wheelchair under a
blanket—and didn’t once fall asleep while the other actors were
talking.
Early on, Guare requested that Profile produce this play as a staged
reading, not a full production. It seems even the playwright knew
better, and Profile should have listened.