"Such stories make the world," declares Emrys, the Merlin (Terry Edward Moore) of "Arthur: The Hunt," Jeff Berryman's lively second play in a cycle of dramas he's writing about the Once and Future King. Emrys refers to the story of a "hidden king" he's been seeding along the roads of 5th-century Britain, to offer hope to a country shattered by internecine warfare and foreign invasions.
Merlin's sustaining legends - starring a unifying hero who rises in a time of terrible need - still speak to us today; witness Neo of "The Matrix," and before that, Luke Skywalker in the first "Star Wars." Visionary mythologist Joseph Campbell called these enduring tales "Myths to Live By," and they're so hardwired into the human imagination, you can trace their archetypal forms everywhere in religion and art.
The continuing power of "the hero with a thousand faces" comes to mind because I happened to see "Star Wars: The Revenge of the Sith," the day after attending Berryman's play at the Taproot Theatre. It's pretty well known that George Lucas tapped into Campbell's paradigm of the hero's journey to juice up Luke Skywalker's evolution from orphaned kid to light-saber-wielding Jedi Knight, fighting to save a universe-wide Republic. That's why you'll find numerous parallels between Lucas' space opera and the story of Arthur, a nobody who, drawing the great sword Excalibur from a rock, becomes Britain's champion against invading barbarians.
"Arthur: The Hunt" plays out on a thrust stage, punctuated only by cliff, cave and a few levels of rock shelf to suggest alternate arenas of action. Costumes, by and large, run to earthy colors and textures, the kinds of wool, leather and fur that signal both Celtic practicality and connection to nature. It's sparest space for drama, heavily dependent on the actors' gifts for creating - and the audience's ability to embrace - a world conjured out of human dreams, passions, grace and, especially, rich language (voiced in seductive Irish lilt). In contrast, the action in "Revenge of the Sith" spans a fabulously furnished universe, enhanced by costly CGI effects, costumes, battle scenes, big-name actors, etc.
And surprising truth be told, Taproot's bare little stage was charged with the kind of authentic character and emotion, pity and terror, that Industrial Light and Magic's billion-dollar baby almost entirely lacks. Acting, script, narrative momentum: on every front, Lucas' great entertainment machine remains inert, unengaging, stalled, while "Arthur: The Hunt" crackles with energy.
In Berryman's play, the action / emotion is stripped down to the bone. The principals - quarreling King Cadwallan, Christian ruler Uriens, warrior-queen Gwen, Bledri/Arthur, storyteller Emrys and witchy Morgan - are both ordinary and larger-than-life, grounded yet shimmering with once and future mythic significance. Though "the people" are frequently invoked, a slaughtered poet mourned, really it's as though there's no one in the world but these dreamers, weaving necessary patterns out on "the edge of the world," to design Britain's birth as a nation.
In "Arthur: The Begetting," Berryman's first play in the cycle, Emrys (Merlin before Arthurian legend made him sorcerer) loved and was loved by Ygraine, Arthur's mother-to-be. She passed the gentle, thinking man over in favor of bearlike Uther, whose strength she knew would help sire a great king. Wandering Morgan is Ygraine's daughter by her first husband, who also was sacrificed on the path to Uther Pendragon.
Emrys as Arthur's Obi-wan Kenobi; Gwen, Arthur's future queen and betrayer; and Morgan, Arthur's "twin," the forbidden soulmate who will give birth to Mordred, a son embodying Arthur's darkside - each seeks the fabled "hidden king" in this second chapter in the saga. Both Emrys and Morgan - as well as Gwen, a queen who dreams of ruling Britain with Emrys - are gifted with The Sight, but it's Morgan, flesh to flesh with the passionate boy she's just married, who's struck by a shattering vision of the king to come, and her impending loss.
Sarah Lamb is very strong as Morgan, a witchy-eyed wild girl closer to nature than the world of her mother's political machinations. In her dark-red robes, then saffron-shaded wedding dress (legacy from her mother), she glows with earthy sensuality, left over from a time when goddesses were in the ascendant. But those colors also signal her relation to guilty Ygraine, blood necessarily spilled in the begetting of Arthur.
And Candace Vance's Gwen, red-haired warrior clad in green and brown, stands arrow-straight as a woman who fears no man, but sees her duty clear: to be Arthur's queen despite her sympathy for Morgan, her leaning toward Emrys. Both actresses own the stage; their characters are at the heart of the story that makes the world, as Ygraine was in Berryman's first chapter. They are the deep rivers through which striving men pass.
In the "Star Wars" cycle, Luke Skywalker's innocent affection for his twin Leia doesn't last long enough to become a significant issue, but Bledri (Sam Wilson) falls wholly in love with a part of himself he must renounce, a woman who haunts the "edges" of civilization, remnant of the paganism that has to give way to Christianity. Wilson rightly plays him as a callow, good-hearted boy not yet mature enough to fully measure these early losses. The "dolorous wound" that will unman him is yet to come.
But, for me, it's the character closest to being a director who's most compelling. Moore makes his Emrys a complex storyteller, given to doubts about the truth of the tale he wants folks to have faith in; seeing clearly what kind of ruler is needed while keeping other lesser candidates in play should there be no Arthur; grief-stricken at the pain for which he is responsible as he manipulates people and events in the hunt for Arthur.
Traditionally, Merlin's a melancholy figure. A mentor with roots in a Druid past, never entirely Christianized in the Arthurian cycles, he's got his fingers deep in matters of life and death. In a way - and Moore conveys this beautifully - Emrys must stand outside the action, barred from taking a leading role as lover or ruler, always the one entrusted with remembering and telling the story.
In "Revenge of the Sith," when a young mother dies giving birth to twins (Luke and Leia) destined to do battle with the forces of darkness, her passing is shockingly perfunctory, without tragic resonance. In contrast, the final "shot" in "Arthur: The Hunt" evokes real grief and terrible knowledge: Emrys bends over the weeping Morgan, Arthur's pregnant wife and half-sister. The two compose a pietà , sacrifices in the service of historic/mythic imperative. Here, at the end of the play, the awful cost of the hero's journey is palpable.
A New York Times article reported last week that movie attendance has significantly slumped in recent months, perhaps heralding a trend toward watching film classics at home instead of heading out to the multiplex for more mindless cinema. Filmmakers might do well to look for some alternate sources of energy - like the art and passion that powers "Arthur: The Hunt."[[In-content Ad]]
