Don’t let the title or subject matter behind the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s latest production, “How to Write a New Book for the Bible” scare you.
The play based on a diary that playwright Bill Cain kept while caring for his mother during her final illness. Many of us baby-boomers have recently or will soon be dealing with our aging parents’ final days and so may be inclined to shy away from a play dealing with material that sounds too morbid or close to unpleasant realities. Fight the urge.
Although the play is honest about details of the dying process, more significantly it is a loving and even humorous celebration of an ordinary family, providing valuable lessons in how to mourn.
As in his earlier plays (“Equivocation”, Nine Circles”), Cain, a Jesuit priest, draws spiritual significance from the details of daily life. But unlike them, Cain’s latest is a highly personal account to the degree that Cain has retained the actual names of family members. Thus the narrator is a Jesuit priest named Bill (beautifully played by Tyler Pierce) whose stoic resolve and the analytical distance he tries to maintain as a priest are punctuated by a son’s small irritations at his mother and their shared history.
Handily depicting other members of the Cain family as well as a host of doctors, nurses, physical therapists and so forth are Aaron Blakely as older brother and troubled Vietnam vet Paul, and Leo Marks as eternal optimist father Pete. But the true star of this show is stage and screen actor Linda Gehringer, who seamlessly transforms from youthful, stubborn Mary Cain to her cancer-wracked octogenarian self and then back again, as demanded by the circular structure of the play where past and present intermingle.
Interestingly, director Kent Nicholson chooses to depict Mary as her older self, whereas Pete remains the young man of Bill’s childhood, perhaps idealized by time and distance from Pete’s earlier death, perhaps the Pete that Mary fell in love with. We see Mary through the critical eye of a son who no doubt suffered from the accepted child rearing strategies of her era (Bill wryly remarks that he and his brother were ruined by “The Little Engine That Could”), as do we all. However, there is never any doubt that the Cains were a loving and supportive family and, in Cain’s view, the story of every family is sacred.
Cain’s portrait of his mother is lovingly detailed without being idealized. Less detailed but equally honest are his depictions of father and brother. Although onstage the most and the filter through which the audience views the action, Bill’s character is least clear, perhaps due to the difficulty of autobiographical objectivity.
Co-produced with Berkeley Repertory Theatre (where it recently enjoyed its world premiere), “How to Write a New Book for the Bible” is still a work in progress. In fact Cain was recently in Seattle to continue to refine the play. Although Nicholson and Cain have created many clever dramatic devices to convert the memoir into a play, the proportion of telling to showing is still a bit high, particularly in Act I.
Scott Bradley’s minimalist set with its multi-purpose furnishings features windows, lamps and even the Washington memorial that drop down as required but are always visible to the audience, clustered above like windows to the heavens. Alexander Nichols’s lighting works in conjunction to subtly suggest multiple settings from the doctor’s office to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Wall.
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