Storm warnings: 'Natural Shocks' juxtaposes two types of very bad weather

Sometimes the high pertinence of the  director's program notes gets in the way of how a play feels as it goes along in front of you. Clearly, "Natural Shocks" is "about" domestic violence and gun carnage, as Southbank Theatre Company's artistic director Marcia Eppich-Harris and production director Eric Bryant point out in print.

But as Lauren Gunderson's one-act, one-actor drama unfolded on opening night Thursday at Fonseca Theatre, I was caught up in both the literal and metaphorical significance of the approaching tornado that has caused Angela, an insurance agent of lofty accomplishment and, in her private life, an abused spouse, to shut herself away in her home basement. 

Angela reenacts long-ago dialogue with her controlling mother.

Carrie Ann Schlatter, as I've noted in past reviews, conveys in every role a sympathetic connection to audiences, no matter how odd the character she portrays. The oddness is often a crucial part of that rapport. It may even be heroic, as it is in the pioneering figure of Henrietta Leavitt, the astronomer she played in another company's stunning debut, "Silent Sky."

Here she handles the playwright's style of addressing the audience through what seems to be an uninterrupted soliloquy. The drama, to a large extent, is between Angela and spectators who are not there in the basement with her, but Southbank patrons looking on. 

Early in the show, Angela admits an affinity for lying, because "lying makes things easier." We gradually find out even that is a lie and that lying often makes things harder. But Angela's truth emerges— painfully through an appalling narrative about her marriage in which she self-corrects the image she has initially projected. 

Still, we are meant to believe that she actually loves her work, that she is emotionally as well as intellectually invested in her insurance career. She fantasizes teaching the world a subject she calls "risk literacy." So few people are able to assess the amount of risk likely to be incurred through a particular course of action, she says persuasively. She was among them when she defied her late mother's advice against marrying the man who has wrecked her private life.

Natural disasters have increasingly become part of the unmet challenge of risk literacy. Climate change has called into question where we settle and how we protect our decisions about home. Nature's capriciousness complicates the rationality we work to apply to those inevitably partial judgments. Their parallel is the risk assessments most of us make when it comes to domestic partnerships. This is why I think focusing on domestic violence as a theme to sell this show minimizes the balance between natural and man-made shocks upon which "Natural Shocks" achieves its difficult poise. 

The play's title (and a basic part of what Angela has to say) comes from Hamlet's central soliloquy, perhaps the most famous speech in the

Angela's disorderly home basement is her refuge.

Shakespearean canon, opening "To be or not to be." Angela tells the audience that the melancholy Danish prince is not considering suicide, as is commonly assumed. This view was also proclaimed by Harold Bloom in his slim meditation on the play: "Hamlet: Poem Unlimited" (2003). The soliloquy turns out to be examining two unpalatable alternatives, exactly the fulcrum upon which the seesaw of insurance decisions rests.

In Hamlet's case, as Bloom puts it: "Being, or consciousness, is given the choice: suffer stoically, or take arms against the sea, and thus end sooner, consumed by the currents whose great pitch constitutes a height our enterprises cannot attain."

I don't think "Natural Shocks" recommends a particular course of action, certainly not one that is feasible. I recall that French commentators on Shakespeare, hemmed in by their received notion of dramatic proprieties, have focused on the phrase "taking arms against a sea of troubles," suggesting that Shakespeare should have written "siege of troubles." My quarrel with Eppich-Harris and Bryant is that the larger meaning of Angela's struggle recommends battling a siege of troubles, which unrealistically opens the possibility of victory on the ostensible battlefield. On the other hand, that may be the only avenue for hope: "to hope, till hope creates, from its own wreck the thing it contemplates" (Shelley).

I credit Gunderson, and Schlatter's performance under Bryant's direcction, for imbuing this besieged character with an intimacy and charm that cannot prevail against untenable circumstances. The most evident of them is meteorological, underlined by show's sound and lighting design. But unfortunately, she is set up to be more a victim of weaponized human rage. 

We come to see our nonstop exposure to Angela's perspective as a deathbed speech, against which we have no more defenses than Angela does against her fate. As Bloom writes elsewhere: "Hamlet can seem an actual person who somehow has been caught inside a play, so that he has to perform even though he doesn't want to." It may be that actuality in "Natural Shocks" that tempts emphasis on the play's market value as a call to action against domestic violence. We can only wish good luck to that effort, though it is not the primary reason to see this show.

[Photos: GhostLightIndy]