Da!

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Da!
A presentation of the Sands Theater Center
2006-02-02
Article Written by: Charles Griffin

Da has came and gone. This reviewer saw it on the last weekend of the production. You might ask, why do a review? For one thing, we need to correct one impression from our last visit to the Sands Theater Center in the Cultural Arts Center, also the Art Museum of DeLand, at 600 N. Woodland Blvd. Last time we complained of the hard seating in the Black Box Theater on the second floor. It has a rather nice stadium-seating auditorium (with cushioned seats) on the north side of the building with no blocked views or sound problems.

Also open to the public, and included in the ticket, were two galleries of African-American art, the current exhibit of the Museum. Any sort of art you might like from modern abstract to traditional and primitive is on display. We especially enjoyed the scenes depicting the back-breaking work of picking cotton and other farm labor because we’ve been there and done that and are damn glad we don’t have to do it again.

The play, Da, is basically a memoir by playwright Hugh Leonard. The lead character, Charlie, is the author’s alter ego. Charlie’s present is played by Clark Adams, who recently was reviewed as Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner. Adams easily captures a conflicted man involved in the present but haunted, literally, by his past.

Da, of course, is a ghost. Charlie sees him just after the funeral in the old homestead. The ghost and Charlie wander back into memory and see his dead mother and his own self as a young man interacting and revealing all the problems between age and youth that occupy our own lives today. Nothing new under the sun.

Charlie is adopted. The mother is at great pains to make sure everyone knows, whether it embarrasses him or not. It is not a cruelty on her part, but her way of giving him an advantage in life by gaining him sympathy. Da seems a genial idiot, content to bluster and lie, spend his days working at a menial job with minimal benefits and a small home in the town. But the two of them surround Charlie with protection and love that he doesn’t seem to appreciate or understand until later in life – when all he has left is memory and ghosts.

In the end he tries to get rid of his ghosts by burning all the little bits of paper and bric-a-brac that ties him to his past. But certain kinds of love are greater than mere mortality. When Charlie is leaving his childhood home for the last time and says goodbye (and good riddance) to his father’s ghost, the old man replies, (and we probably paraphrase) “I couldn’t come to live with you in England before, but now that I’m dead, there’s nothing to keep me here, so let’s go.”

Now there’s a friendly ghost.

In addition to Clark Adams, the cast includes O’Kane Conwell as Da himself, who portrays a very lively ghost. Christian Read played the vain and hypocritical Oliver, who was a friend of the youthful Charlie, but less so of the grownup man. Thea LaCour plays Mary, an available young woman at one point in young Charlie’s life. Sally Daykin portrays the mother who is the grounding influence of Charlie’s youth. Pete Rougeux as Drumm, the philosophical boss and taskmaster who gives Charlie his first job and tries to encourage his being all he can be. Jenny Boyd as a prim and proper Mrs. Prynne, who represents the upper class employers of Da, himself. And finally, Dustin Gillis plays young Charlie as a pale and shallow youth who has more in him than he knows.

The cast is a very capable bunch that handles a wordy and eccentric play with few stumbles and without bogging us down in too specific an Irish dialect. If they had done the play with utter realism, the director, Gary Norris, would have had to stand alongside and flip cards with translations.

One small bit of awkwardness occurs when the grownup Charlie must play himself as a child in one scene. It seems odd that a nine or ten year old boy couldn’t be found to do ten minutes on stage. That teenaged-to-young-man Charlie is taller and bigger than adult Charlie is also somewhat offsetting, but forgivable.

Next up at the Sands Theater Center, A Golden Age From The Sands of Time, featuring music and songs from the great composers of the first turn of the 20th Century. Dates are February 10, 17 and 18 at 8 p.m. and 11, 12, 18 and 19 at 2:30 p.m. Call 386-7367456 for information and reservations.

A Disco Dance Party will be held at the DeLand Skating Center on Feb. 18. Proceeds will benefit the Sands Theater Center and the DeLand Museum of Art. Call the Cultural Center at 386-736-7232 for details.

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Da!