Balm in Gilead
Balm in Gilead is over 30 years old, but Lanford Wilson’s experiment in applying cinematic jump cuts and cross talk to theater still delivers the goods. Like Elmer Rice’s Street Scene of 40 years earlier and Jonathan Larson’s Rent a quarter century later, Wilson’s play cross-sections New York’s lower depths. And though there’s energy in his anonymous junkies, drag queens, bums, dealers, and hookers, there’s no joy: this is not the stuff of Whitman. This is a world where “everybody lives off everybody,” as one character puts it, and the little love we see is soon snuffed out.
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Like Rice in his seminal Street Scene, Wilson carves out a seemingly random story, establishing a flow of humanity from which certain tragic souls surface. But Wilson’s streetwise, chaotic, irreverent action portrait is an even more uncompromising hymn to life’s walking wounded: the survival struggles of his dead-end denizens never fuse into the sentimental solidarity of Street Scene or the gutter concord of Rent. And because Wilson’s pitilessly exposed loners have no manifest destiny, Balm in Gilead seems less dated than the earlier or the later work. The sole ethic here is to get high, get laid, or get a roof over one’s head.
At least Ryczek’s grungy circus preserves the script’s mean kick. And some things don’t change: this production features patented Chicago rock ‘n’ roll acting. The 22 cast members take risks, even if they do resemble nice white kids slumming. (More disturbing, in the three productions I’ve seen there have been no black actors; what kind of New York street scene is this?) Matt Pavich’s overconfident Joe stands for a score of dangerous dreamers; his generic performance feels right, because Joe’s capricious life is interchangeable with many others.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Mike Llewellyn.
