Dec 14, 2005
Sean Mitchell: 'Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates' runs aground navigating the serpentine route of the nation's foreign exploits
The American theater has not given us many large and lasting plays examining the roots of our nation's often interventionist foreign policy, but Robert Schenkkan has tried to fill the gap with "Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates," now at the Mark Taper Forum. That's Euphrates, as in the river that runs through Iraq to the Persian Gulf. In Schenkkan's ambitious and absurdist time-traveling scenario, the fabled American explorers are re-routed from their original mission to reexamine the uglier aspects of Manifest Destiny, as witnessed on battlefields in Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq.
For anyone familiar with historian Stephen Ambrose's popular books saluting the heroism of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, this is something altogether different: a darkly comic meditation on whether the Anglo exploration and appropriation of the continent was just the first manifestation of a benighted and racist imperial power. Or, that everything went downhill starting with Jefferson, the slave-owning president who sent these misunderstood heroes up the Missouri and, eventually, so to speak, to Baghdad.
Maybe. But unfortunately this provocative conceit proves to be less convincing onstage than the idea that Lyndon Johnson was a Texas-born Macbeth ("MacBird"), for example, during the years of the Vietnam War -- if one searches for an antecedent in American political satire.
Schenkkan is a serious writer, as he showed in "The Kentucky Cycle," the brutal six-hour epic of Appalachian history produced at the Taper in 1992 and subsequently awarded the Pulitzer Prize. But his attempt to imagine Lewis and Clark as the unwitting exponents of America's cruel and misdirected purpose doesn't grow into much more than a fanciful notion, solemnly ironic and fitfully funny.
Directed by Gregory Boyd, the longtime director of Houston's Alley Theatre, "Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates" begins with Lt. Clark (Jeffrey Nordling) on a bare stage, standing somewhere outside of time, apologizing to the audience for what is to come -- in effect for what he and Lewis hath wrought in their 1804-06 Mission of Discovery. The idea is introduced that a full accounting of their expedition and its meaning was never completed -- until, perhaps, now.
For anyone familiar with historian Stephen Ambrose's popular books saluting the heroism of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, this is something altogether different: a darkly comic meditation on whether the Anglo exploration and appropriation of the continent was just the first manifestation of a benighted and racist imperial power. Or, that everything went downhill starting with Jefferson, the slave-owning president who sent these misunderstood heroes up the Missouri and, eventually, so to speak, to Baghdad.
Maybe. But unfortunately this provocative conceit proves to be less convincing onstage than the idea that Lyndon Johnson was a Texas-born Macbeth ("MacBird"), for example, during the years of the Vietnam War -- if one searches for an antecedent in American political satire.
Schenkkan is a serious writer, as he showed in "The Kentucky Cycle," the brutal six-hour epic of Appalachian history produced at the Taper in 1992 and subsequently awarded the Pulitzer Prize. But his attempt to imagine Lewis and Clark as the unwitting exponents of America's cruel and misdirected purpose doesn't grow into much more than a fanciful notion, solemnly ironic and fitfully funny.
Directed by Gregory Boyd, the longtime director of Houston's Alley Theatre, "Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates" begins with Lt. Clark (Jeffrey Nordling) on a bare stage, standing somewhere outside of time, apologizing to the audience for what is to come -- in effect for what he and Lewis hath wrought in their 1804-06 Mission of Discovery. The idea is introduced that a full accounting of their expedition and its meaning was never completed -- until, perhaps, now.