Lou Harry's 'Balsa Wood' addresses festival's gratitude theme insightfully

Soft and easily permeable, balsa wood is not the material for hardy survival. It's enough to furnish a title

Jersey boy Lou Harry: Celebrating roots through theater

for a thematically apt short play in Lou Harry's penetrating Wildwood series — a homage to his New Jersey hometown. 

From the Garden State's dangling appendix up through the storied Asbury Park, the Atlantic shore towns in this alternately overpopulated and sparsely settled state offer a rich opportunity to study matters of identity, leisure, and the will-o'-the-wisp of permanence and the solidity of class structure.

"Balsa Wood" is another verse in Lou Harry's way of stage-saying greetings from Wildwood, "Hello America, how are you? Don't you know me? I'm your native son." 

It's a feature of this year's "Spirit & Place Festival," with its 2024 theme of gratitude. It concluded a weekend run Sunday afternoon at Indy Convergence's modest tent production on the west side, next to Super Tortas. Understandably, it lacks the production values and ambiance of Harry's 2022 stunner, "Rita from Across the Street." The audience is forewarned of the blasts from the refinery train just outside to the south; less warning was given, though also warranted, of the car traffic along West Michigan Street to the north.

You have to accept how well the essence of theater can be conveyed even with distractions, and the need to concentrate the stage picture under a tent, with limited, up-close seating. But for some of the vagueness of the following impressions, I can only blame myself. Arriving first under the tent, I chose a seat in the back, three rows from the action. I have an aversion to being superclose to stage action, which I failed to avoid several times at the old Phoenix Underground in the Mass Ave district. I almost got hit by flying food in "How to Use a Knife," yet I was steadily transfixed.

The source of such trepidation is a shoestring staging of "A Streetcar Named Desire" I attended more than 50 years ago at a cramped stage in a house basement near Atlantic City, where I was teaching school. To hear "Stella!" bellowed at you from ten feet away tends to create the wrong kind of impression, and any stage illusion is hard to maintain; yet it was a good performance. I was reminded of an old TV comedy sketch by Phil Silvers, in which, impersonating "Atkinson of The Times," he mistakenly found his way into what he thought was an off-off-Broadway production and spouted his impressions of a family's unrehearsed apartment life, thinking it was a drab, hyperrealistic new play. 

To cut to the chase: I should have sat in the front row Sunday afternooon. The necessary stage illusion was impaired by a limited view that was all my fault, as I leaned to one side or the other to catch a character's facial expressions. I would have found it more absorbing if I'd kept claustrophobia at bay. That, combined with some muting of lines due to the antiphony of rail and street traffic, turned the scenario of what one character calls "a random commune" into a somewhat random theatrical experience.

It was clear, nonetheless, that "Balsa Wood" encompasses Harry's patented wit and skill at quickly defining characters and establishing their relationships. He allows room for revelations that appear unforced and natural even when they surprise.That's a quality of theater that really tells.

Carrie gives a supportive hug to Robin.

Dena Toler, as  a Wildwood landlady whose deft, tender insight is greater than her management of tenant life, shines in narration and in ways of amplifying Carrie's personal trials. The troubled, guarded transient Robin (Tracy Nakigozi) had the right glowering mystery in the early scenes, but I wondered if more menace ought to have been conveyed. The character is a suspicious witness to the interaction between the practiced cynicism of Anda (Shelby Myers) and the relentless but somewhat desultory ambition of the talkative Dee (Kelsey Van Voorst). 

Robin is the character who has the most right to the gratitude that links "Balsa Wood" to the festival theme, but all four women partake in what they can get and what they can give. If that involves stealing a bicycle, so be it.  On the outside is the self-centered Carl (TJ O'Neill), who's out for whatever might be available from Robin. The loosey-goosey nature of resort-town life among young people is nicely scrutinized. 

Robin learns the best lesson, that all of us should take responsibility for building our own souls through sharing our stories; it's the stories that make us more than just persons, that grow our identities. The script, as I heard it, is not explicit about the debt of this insight to a great poet, John Keats.  Poetry, as practiced by aspirants to barebones contest prizes (one of Dee's schemes), is amusingly poked fun at in "Balsa Wood." But Keats, in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law often cited as his best qualification as literary critic, nailed the idea in 1819. 

"How then are Souls to be made?" Keats asks rhetorically. "How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them, so as to ever possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence. How but by the medium of a world like this?" The poet thus revises the conventional religious view of life as "a vale of tears" by calling what each of us goes through as  "the vale of soul-making." 

"Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?" Keats urged George and Georgiana Keats. The default position of intelligence is, as Robin sees it, a lonely position that only sharing of personal stories can break out of, generating the creative force needed to build a soul, even while passing through Wildwood with relative aimlessness.

That may be enough of a realization to supply a wellspring of gratitude. "Balsa Wood," for all its limitations as I saw it, points the way. 

[Photo of two actors by Indy Ghost Light]