Theatre in Review: Helen and Edgar (Under the Radar/Public Theater)

	Edgar Oliver. Photo: Sara Stacke

"Mother always used to say to us, 'Beware of Savannah!'" So says Edgar Oliver at the beginning of his one-person show, in which Southern Gothic mannerisms spread out through the Anspacher Theatre like an outbreak of kudzu. Actually, Edgar and his sister, Helen, would have done well to heed their mother's advice. "Never were there three more lost children: Mother, Helen, and me," he notes, in a statement that just about sums up his youth.

Helen and Edgar is an account of growing up crazy in one of the South's craziest cities. Even so, Louise, their mother, stood out from the crowd. For example, she never bothered to keep house. Oliver describes the "roaches ambling up and down the wall" of the kitchen, adding that, what with the "ancient piles of dishes rotting in the sink," the insects never felt the need to roam elsewhere in the house. At one point, when the oven failed to work, a repairman was called; his diagnosis: The oven was clogged with dead roaches.

Louise also routinely expelled old friends from her home, accusing them of spreading vile rumors about her. Convinced that assassins were coming for her and her children, she would wake up the children and drive all night. At other times, when taking them to visit their grandmother and aunt, she would keep a Seven and Seven cocktail on the dashboard for moral support. She well may have needed it: Louise, a painter, returned from her honeymoon to discover that her mother had destroyed all of her works. Apparently, her mother felt that it was time to put aside such indulgences.

I mention Louise's honeymoon advisedly, for, as Edgar notes, "It never occurred to me to ask what a father is or why we didn't have one," adding that he decamped long before the children could remember him. This left Louise to a life in appalling proximity to her children, sleeping in the same room with them, spending evenings with them in their unclean home playing with her "gypsy witch cards." She would ask her children, "I'm not like a grownup, am I?" Not even close, Louise.

Helen and Edgar isn't so much a narrative as it is laundry list of eccentricities; Louise's behavior is so fey that the text makes the wispiest Truman Capote story seem like Mickey Spillane in comparison. There is Louise's self-described "foolishness," a bizarre rite centered on her handbag and its contents, complete with ritual statements. There are the episodes of tears followed by rages, in which she would run outside in the front yard and claw the air. There is her romantic obsession with a local man who dresses like a vampire and drives a cream-colored Italian car. And there were the annual summer jaunts to Baltimore and Washington, DC, so chosen because they were the only cities to which Louise wasn't afraid to travel.

There's no question that Oliver is a persuasive writer -- I particularly treasure his description of his grandmother's "laudanum calm" -- and I'm willing to bet that, on the page, Helen and Edgar is a most evocative memoir. In the theatre, however, the lack of any dramatic tension is glaring; nothing really happens until the last few minutes, when the siblings plot their escape from this hothouse existence. Also, Oliver may not be his own best narrator. At first, his undefinable accent -- it sounds like a brogue, by way of the former Yugoslavia -- combined with the deep tones of a veteran funeral director, makes him a compelling presence. (As children, Edgar and Helen were sometimes asked by mystified citizens of Savannah if they hailed from Transylvania.) But the way he uses the same rising and falling cadence for every single line of the text has a lulling effect that once or twice brought me to the edge of nodding off.

The text is occasionally broken up by projections, by Aaron Howard, of Louise's paintings and family photos. The paintings, done in a deliberately naïve style, are charming, even if they confirm Louise's amateur status. The director, Catherine Burns, has worked with Oliver before, which suggests that his on-stage persona, including his lack of eye contact with the audience, is deliberate.

As the performance I attended made clear, Oliver is a performer with a devoted following, and it's likely that Helen and Edgar will be best enjoyed by them. For the newcomer, it is rather like attending a reading at a bookstore. Sometimes the power of the author's words compensates for his deficiencies as a stage figure; sometimes not.--David Barbour