REVIEW: A fragmented script handicaps 'The Land Southward'

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There’s a lot that's good in the Springs Ensemble Theatre’s production of “The Land Southward,” which runs through Feb. 26.

There are many fine performances. The costumes and other tech support is great. But ultimately, the evening is undermined by the script’s structure — a collage of moments, high-concept set pieces and some educational material in the guise of a story.

Mormons Joe and Maggie Anderson (Jeremy Joynt and Carmen Vreeman) live in Utah in the 1950s. They’re happy — practically giddy, in fact, with the promise of the big family to come.
“Just four or five” children, Maggie says.

But the testing of nuclear bombs in Nevada wreck havoc on their dreams and those of everyone in their small town. Babies are stillborn. Children die. Thyroid cancer and leukemia spring up in numbers never before seen there.

Modern audiences won’t be surprised that the government won’t accept any responsibility for the troubles. Although they told their own soldiers — Marines like Joe, in fact — that their ill health was due to sunstroke, they knew it was radiation sickness. As playwright Darcy Hogan tells it, military big wigs even scheduled the detonations, which they called “shots,” for days when the wind would carry the radiation elsewhere.

Hence the term “downwinders.”

Parallel to the Anderson’s tale is Liz’s (JaNae Stansbery) modern day quest to expose the truth, which even now is positively shocking. She takes down the story of May (Sallie Walker), a Mormon who survived the devastation only to outlive her entire family.

There’s no doubt that this is rich and necessary ground for storytelling. In fact, two hours of the Anderson’s journey could have been pretty compelling. But many young playwrights seem to take their lessons from film, which can meaningfully pull off millisecond scenes, non-sequitur imagery and time-jumping story structures.

So it is with Hogan. She fractures her central notion — that not speaking up can have terrible consequence — with a collage of imagery, out-of-left-field set pieces (a game show called “You Bet Your Life,” for instance) and snippets of human stories and facts.

By the time it’s done, my strongest impression was faint taste of a take-your-medicine tutelage on the horror of nuclear bombs.

Joynt, who also starred in SET’s production of “Coronado,” turns in a marvelously layered performance as the beleaguered Joe. He crafts his character’s journey from blind trust to bitter disappointment with feeling and believability. I really care what happened to him.

Same for Vreeman, who offers her strongest local performance heretofore. She creates a Maggie that is deeply appealing, practically dewy with hope. That kind of sunny outlook would be easy to phone in, but Vreeman wasn’t seduced into cartoon imitations of emotion. It felt very much like the real thing.

Jude Bishop, who plays multiple characters under the moniker Man, is dazzling in his facility to not only move from one to the next, but to clearly delineate them in the minds of the audience. His Mormon preacher was my favorite: A man self-satisfied with his place in the cosmos and dangerously impatient with any disturbance to that certainty.

Stephen Siebert and Michele Abplanalp, who played Boy and Girl, were similarly fun to watch.
Stansbery and Walker delivered tepid performances, although both had their moments. I wanted to see more variety in their portrayals, more depth. Often I just didn’t believe important emotional peaks.

I’m sorry that the best parts of this production, which was directed by Jason Lythgoe, were lost in an experience a lot like flipping through a friend-of-a-friend’s photo album. There’s a story to be told, but you might not care what it is by the time you’re done.