One Flea Spare
Playwright Naomi Wallace may be one of the few awardees whose work merits the popular nickname of her MacArthur fellowship: the “genius grant.” Her remarkable plays combine Brecht’s confrontation of the audience with Ibsen’s brutal realism and Chekhov’s comic sense of inevitability, tempered by a contemporary irony reminiscent of Maria Irene Fornes in her mysterious, intelligent metaphysical dramas.
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Wallace’s plays have recently begun to see more American productions; certainly Chicago companies have taken up the challenge, with mixed results. It’s hard to balance the politics and sex in Wallace’s roller coasters. Her inventive, powerful theatrical seductions, shouted and moaned with melodramatic passion, easily give performers an adrenaline rush. But subtler strategies are necessary to give audiences the same high–we have to be taken by surprise, led step by step to Wallace’s often cruel insights.
Wallace’s story certainly supports this interpretation. In One Flea Spare four characters are trapped in a quarantined house, waiting out a month of isolation until they’re declared free of the plague. The aristocratic owners, Darcy and William Snelgrave, live a passionless marriage because of an accident that left Darcy scarred. Their frustration is hidden behind strict propriety, a contrast with the exuberance of the lower-class pair, the sailor Bunce and servant girl Morse, who sneaked separately into the house thinking it was empty. While Darcy, Bunce, and William establish a manipulative, lustful triangle, the teenage Morse plays the precocious child, turning their relationships into a game of living dolls who act out her traumatized idea of show-and-tell. In effect each character comes of age–either through orgasm or a sudden, unexpected discovery of the power of dominance and submission–in the face of the black death.
Nonetheless, there are some excellent performances. Marilyn Dodds Frank, although young for the role of Darcy, is particularly skillful, giving the character a hungry playfulness that makes her sexual and emotional release poignant and bracing. Liesel Matthews shapes Morse into an uncomfortable cross between a wounded child and a master manipulator. Matthews, known for her work in the films A Little Princess and Air Force One, is so natural that she makes Wallace’s ornate stories seem plain–an interesting choice because it also makes Morse’s creepy acceptance of death and the dead as playthings seem ordinary. Joe Sikora’s Bunce is so good-hearted that the man’s uncanny insight into the psychology of his fellow captives seems almost harmless and his power self-protective–even his cruelty has an ironic whiff of kindness.
