One flank of 'Wild Horses': Jen Johansen shows mastery in one-actor show

Theater productions with a cast of one face skepticism from their potential audiences. "I like the stage for interaction among characters," the resistant playgoer may think. "Does theater really work if your attention is focused only on one actor through the whole thing?" 

Well, I don't know if it's just a trick of my memory or stems from my responsibility as a theater reviewer, but some of my most vivid recollections of local theater over the past dozen years come from one-actor experiences. I particularly recall the "Going Solo" series Indiana Repertory Theatre had going for a couple of seasons in 2010 and '11. That's germane to my eager anticipation of "Wild Horses," the current production at Phoenix Theatre.

Unusually and attractively, because I retain an indelible fondness for its IRT predecessors in "Lost: A Memoir" (Constance Macy) and "The Syringa Tree" (Jen Johansen),  both of the women starring in those shows now divide performances of Allison Gregory's play between them.

I will catch up with Constance Macy's interpretation next weekend. Saturday night I caught Jen Johansen's version in its premiere performance. The show is directed by Lori Wolter Hudson, and of course the excellent production team, alert to every nuance and sensory reinforcement,  is the same throughout the run. There must be a fascinating story behind how offstage best friends who also have a rich performing history together will manage the inevitable comparison of their performances in the same show in the same production.

As narrator of "Wild Horses," Jen Johansen looks back on early adolescence.

Johansen expands upon the gift for mimicry she brought to "The Syringa Tree," which is also a coming-of-age story, but one in which awareness of a girl's milieu comes more slowly, as a privileged white South African learns something about the sharp social divide she benefits from. In "Wild Horses," the mimicry covers a wider range and has to fall into place at a more rapid tempo. The nameless heroine of the Phoenix show is drawing upon a set of specific memories from her early adolescence beyond the suburbs in south-central California in the '70s. 

The precision and detail of Johansen's performance Saturday was always linked to bringing into focus the delayed vitality the girl grows into after cobbling together a messy way out of a family crisis and social aimlessness. That said, one of the less welcome aspects of seeing just one actor in front of you for 80 uninterrupted minutes is a distracted admiration for the preparation that must have been necessary. 

I say "less welcome" because the more you're tempted to focus on the "wow!" factor in a solo performance, the less you're fully engaged with the story. The perplexity is that you still feel wholly involved in the story when it's so expertly conveyed, as I did. But the threat of being distracted by the wonder of it all remains. I'm thinking of the anecdote about a famous violinist who once said that whenever a post-recital backstage compliment would run along the lines of " 'you must have worked really hard on that,' I knew I had given a bad performance."

Fortunately, Johansen projected a keen sense of spontaneity and freshness in every line delivered and posture assumed. Each gesture, vocal inflection, facial expression was fine-tuned. To mention just one, as the narrator instructs the audience not to share a secret, Johansen's eyes sweep laser-like across the theater: a quadruple "take" and dead-serious warning. It's a great laugh line that is not a line at all.

This kind of effectiveness pours out in a reminiscence that brings before us the girl's parents, friends and a couple of brothers starkly different from one another in how they handle teenage obsessions and conflicts. In a nutshell, contrary to the opening of the Rolling Stones song of the same title, childhood living is not easy to do — not when your family is dysfunctional and the rest of the world surrounding you is too mysterious and even threatening to take into account comfortably.

At length, the horses come into the story almost accidentally, although we know from the start the narrator is hoping to win the top prize in a horse-naming contest with which a local radio station is trying to cement the teen demographic it aims at. Spoilers abound here, because every twist of the story involves a revelation that "Wild Horses"' audiences deserve to be surprised by. I'll just point to the fact that horses are a well-ridden symbol of freedom for Americans. 

Equine symbolism is rich in both high and popular culture to the point of cliche. A much-anthologized poem from this play's era — "The Blessing" by James Wright — concludes a chance rural encounter with a couple of ponies, much gentler than what the girls in "Wild Horses" go through, like this: "Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom."

Suffice it to say the horse-enabled "blessing" in this play, though freighted with likely disaster, is essential to the triumph "Wild Horses" presents after its wild ride through hilarity and despair. Becoming a self-declared "freedom taker," not a freedom fighter, is the blossoming the mature woman knows she earned long ago. Johansen conveys that emergence convincingly because her performance has put across so well the funny/sad turmoil required to get there.