British playwright Ella Hickson gets an American premiere of her sprawlingly ambitious and provocative play at Olney Theatre Center. Oil is a play written up as a “nexus of oil, economics, and power.” But if oil is the premise for this for the play, it serves less as a central character and more a backdrop, for me, to the powerful and disturbing relationship between two women, mother and daughter, who are tied together in curious incarnations over one hundred and sixty years. Through this central relationship, the arc of women’s changing roles and sensibilities is what fuels the work.
The play moves through time in a series of five extended scenes. Each one is compelling on some level, and the playwright takes you on a journey that keeps shifting vistas and perspectives as it challenges the audience to fathom meanings and make conclusions.
The play opens with a series of riveting images wrought by the design team. These folk play together like a superb jazz combo. Sound designer Kenny Neal opens the play with the howling wind. Daniel Brodie brings in swirling projections of snow-covered forests that we seem to fly over to land in 1889, where the opening moment establishes a man bearing the harsh elements and splitting wood. Lighting designer Colin K. Bills plays the opening in ice-age cool.[ezcol_1third]
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Oil
closes March 31, 2019
Details and tickets
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A brief scene ensues when the man’s very pregnant wife enters and, despite the cold, she seems the one hot thing in the landscape, achingly hot for him. But before we know too much about them, the scene shifts, by the projection curtain being drawn aside, revealing a wall of props. Scenic designer Luciana Stecconi has stacked chairs and other human detritus, like seismic layers of civilization, floor to ceiling. An altogether brilliant metaphor, as it turns out.
Enter the company of actors, representing an extended family, moving tables and props in preparation for their meager dinner. On one hand this scene is one of the most powerful in the whole play, representing the harsh world of farmers barely surviving winters in the cold dark. Their nerves are raw, and they are so crowded together there is no privacy either for conjugal intimacy or private thoughts. The image of the pregnant woman having to wash herself in a tub of icy water in the middle of a room for all to see is deeply shocking to our modern sensibilities.
But opening night, the scraping and pounding of props muffled the already difficult thick, somewhat ranging, Cornwall accents. This plus the “Lower-Depths” darkness of the world made this British-stoked play more of a challenge than it need have been. People were straining to understand. Settling and getting the timing down will solve several problems.
One of the strongest moments comes in this important scene when a mysterious stranger knocks on the door. The man, an American, has come to buy the land, and it turns out he wants to use it to store oil, the new wondrous commodity that will change the world. Cheaper and more plentiful than whale oil, he tells them and makes a little demonstration. With a match and a turn of the kerosene wick, the room lights up. Lighting designer Bills creates a piece of both stage magic and one that symbolizes the “turned on” world charged by the new technology of oil-light. In this moment, Hickson’s play coalesces.
The play shifts almost twenty years later to Tehran and challenges our ears further as it takes us into the clubby atmosphere of British colonialism with its clipped accents and imported cultural norms. “May,” that pregnant wife, has somehow found her way with her daughter, working as a maid in the new desert landscape. How she got there is not quite clear (or indeed if it is the same woman), but we think she abandoned her husband to escape the life-threatening circumstances of rural poverty, cruelty, and boxed-in threat to her identity.
There are more shifts in time and place for May, and it becomes ever more improbable that it can be one and the same person in this family of two females. But some of the characters, including Joss, the beloved husband, and William Whitcomb, the American (to whom she may or may not have run off ) keep reappearing (like ghosts,?) calling her back to crossroads in her life, where she might have made a different choice. From Tehran, we find May and her sixteen year-old daughter in a flat in Hampstead in 1970. Act II even catapults May into the future, first back to Baghdad then back to Cornwall.
Catherine Eaton plays May, and she proves in every shift of this character’s journey, to be more than up to role of this shape-shifting character. From uneducated, earthy, farm girl who lusts for life with every part of her grasping, hungry body, to working class scrappy girl out in the world of Tehran, to a suited, highly-educated and ambitious business woman, Eaton takes hold with a fire that compels us to go on May’s journey.
Where May ends up – as in the beginning so it will be at the ending – Eaton is almost unrecognizable. The scene, a bookend, is Hickson’s final coup de gras – a world not unlike Samuel Beckett’s post-apocalyptic vision.
Megan Graves as the daughter Amy goes on the journey with her and is a terrific foil for the mother. Graves delivers a faceted portrayal, first as a delightful spunky and precocious eight years old (Tehran,) then a snarky, rebellious, and horny teenager (Hampstead,) and then a brittle, angry young woman whose world is being upended because of the greed and witless shortsightedness of her mother and her generation. Truthfully, I liked Graves better in her younger incarnations, in part because the later writing began to reduce her to a mouthpiece for political rant and ravings that drifted into identity politics, resulting in stuck vocalizations and repetitions that bordered on incessant hammering.
As the play progressed, the exploration into this central relationship of mother-daughter got increasingly confused and disturbing. Were we supposed to think May made the wrong choice leaving the husband she loved and with whom she experienced a deeply satisfying physical and mystical bond? Or were May and Amy most liberated when they were alone, going solo as it were “between white sheets” without emotional encumbrances? Certainly the last scene, where they sit like Beckett’s Didi and Potso, full of resentment and retaliation, but with only each other to find (little) comfort, suggests something bleak.
Director Tracy Brigden has reined in the raging powerful themes of this in a way that reminded me of Ben Hur’s massive ride with horses at the Coliseum. She rises to every challenge, creating taught pictures in each scene while letting the ambiguities and contradictions of the play remain what they are.
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The company of actors are likewise to be highly commended. Chris Genebach is simply wonderful as Joss, the rough-hewed husband, who in one moment bullies his wife and the next defends her and reaches out for her, whom he calls his “beast,” with passionate and genuine longing.
Many of the actors play multiple characters, and some weigh in speaking different languages. It’s becoming more of ‘a thing’ in this multi-cultural, multi-linguistic world, and I’m for it, especially when the players have done due diligence and deliver with such fluidity their lines as these actors have. Maboud Ebrahimzadeh is mesmerizing in both roles as “the stranger who knocks,” first entering as an American entrepreneur investor in the new energy, oil. Later, as a Libyan OPEC negotiator, he is tough and incisive, and, whatever political stripe you are on, you can’t dismiss the character’s voice, which may indeed prove history is on his side.
Sarah Corey fills in the worlds well, playing a farmwife in Cornwall, then an Iranian catering maid, and finally a Libyan woman struggling to survive war and care for her family while remaining a friend to her western and woefully naive modern Joan-of-Arc. Tuyet Thi Pham first enters somewhat quietly, playing first what I believe is an almost silent indentured “oriental” servant in Cornwall. Later, she creates a star turn, when the worlds are reversed in the not-too-unlikely future, as a Chinese entrepreneur bringing a new energy source harvested from the moon, clearly ruling the world in the next power-shift cycle. Both create strongly-etched characters.
Christopher McLinden does not specialize in languages but rather takes on with exemplary fashion the un-likable but all too recognizable male characters – Thomas the slightly reptilian-brained brother of Joss, whose motivations seem split between finding a bottle and honing in on other men’s wives if only for an ogle. As the Naval British officer assigned to Tehran and upholding the Colonials, McLinden nails the unleashed entitlement of a certain class of white males, one moment haughtily pulling rank and class, and the next exhibiting unleashed libido.
Claire Schoonover as the Matriarch makes a hair-raising and all too-brief character come to life. Eric M. Messner creates a sympathetic if powerless younger brother to Joss. Sam Saint Ours, the “rookie” of this team, slinks around as a horny adolescent, and is totally convincing. I began to feel sorry for this type of young men growing up and just not up to the new world where women have sharpened their brains and nails to fighting strength.
This play delivers some real punches and much food for thought.
Oil. Written by Ella Hickson. Directed by Tracy Brigden. With Sarah Corey, Catherine Eaton, Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, Chris Genebach, Megan Graves, Christopher McLinden, Eric M Messner, Tuyet Thi Pham, Sam Saint Ours, and Claire Schoonover. Scene Designer Luciana Stecconi. Costume Designer Michael Krass and Robert Croghan. Lighting Designer Colin K Bills. Sound Designer Kenny Neal. Projections Designer Daniel Brodie. Produced by Olney Theatre Center. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.
