Also this issue:

Anniversary Party
The Museum of American Glass at Wheaton Village celebrates 20 years of artistic wonders.
-Robin Rice

artquicks
More stuff going on this week...

Cities Without Citizens
-Lori Hill

An Artist's Workshop staged reading
-Juliet Fletcher

10-Minute Play Festival
-Andrew Parks

Blue Man Group

The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space Flight
A.L.T.: A Memoir

Songs For A New World
-David Anthony Fox

July 24-30, 2003

theater

Looking Over The President's Shoulder

All access: Alonzo Fields (David Alan Anderson) shows off the White House finery that was his domain for a quarter of a century.

by David Anthony Fox

At People's Light, there is a specter looking over Looking Over the President's Shoulder. John Henry Redwood, the distinguished actor and playwright, created the character of Alonzo Fields in James Still's one-man play in its initial production at the Indiana Repertory Theatre. Redwood was scheduled to repeat it here also, but he died just one month ago.

In the best theater tradition, the show goes on. David Alan Anderson has stepped into the role, which he understudied in the Indiana production. Anderson is a likeable actor in a Herculean part that, frankly, he has yet to make his own. There is a sense of tentativeness, visible especially because Anderson -- with a number of performances under his belt -- remains on-book. It's a continual reminder of Redwood, just as a lovely tribute in the PL&T program that describes Redwood's "booming voice and larger-than-life stature" also reminds us of what we're missing.

Anderson may yet rise to the occasion. Until then, our attentions are focused on Still's script, which could do with a little less scrutiny.

Looking is based on the true story of Alonzo Fields, who served as the White House chief butler for a quarter of a century and during four presidential administrations (Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower). This is, of course, the downstairs part of an upstairs/downstairs story, and there is an undercurrent of racial tension: Fields, an African American, is an elegant, educated and profoundly cultured man, who more than anything wanted to be a classical singer (he idolized Marian Anderson). Instead, circumstances found him relegated to a servant's job (albeit one in rarefied company).

In Still's play, the anger is momentary -- and the focus more anecdotal. A Roosevelt dinner party, we learn, might include scrambled eggs, sausage and creamed chicken and Eleanor didn't care if they all appeared on the same plate! (There goes the neighborhood.) Too many of Fields' insights feel cliched: Winston Churchill had "a dynamic personality that you could feel across the room." (Well, yes.)

We long to get beneath the surface, to have a more vivid sense of Fields' experience. But Looking Over the President's Shoulder suffers from precisely what must have made Fields such a fine butler: a supreme sense of tact.

Sadly, in the absence of richer storytelling -- or a grander central presence -- Looking feels inert, like a drearily self-improving museum exhibit designed for visiting schoolchildren. It might seem more at home in our new National Constitution Center.

LOOKING OVER THE PRESIDENT’S SHOULDER

Through Aug. 3, People’s Light & Theatre Co., 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, 610-647-1900.