Writers, Writers, Writers

Almost all writers are advised to write what they know at some point in their training and careers. Et voilà! We get works with writers as protagonists, and here at Edinburgh Fringe some are more theatrically successful than others.

In A Paper Orchestra, the stories are autobiographical. Michael Jamin admits that though he’s had a successful career as a television writer — his credits include King of the Hill, Beavis and Butt-Head and Just Shoot Me — the work wasn’t feeding his artistic soul; he wrote only what he was paid to. His wife Cynthia encouraged him to write something for himself, and the result was a series of personal essays that were collected into a book titled A Paper Orchestra that is now being presented as a one-man show where Jamin presents two of those essays.

The first recalls his unpleasant, forced time spent learning judo as a child. “How am I supposed to put the belt on? It has no loops.” The second focuses on a hoarder neighbor, “Undead Fred,” whose creepy house his daughter Roxy wants to photograph after Fred actually does flee his mortal coil.

As they’re currently being presented, the stories are well-crafted and full of detail, but they lack theatrical lift and seem better suited for the page than the stage. Jamin also needs more vocal energy and presence; his entrance currently feels tentative, giving him a tough hill to climb for the remainder of this gentle show.

Equally gentle is A Writer’s Mind from Exeter University’s Theatre with Teeth, and ironically, more teeth are what this show needs. In Tate Giller’s sweet, sentimental show, a writer is reading from a collection of his stories, but even from what looks like a published volume, he struggles to remember the endings of each of his tales.

The stories are performed in Wes Anderson presentational style, only British, and the cast of nine is game but wildly uneven in terms of performance. Dead air often stops the show in its tracks, and timing too often feels off, all of which undermines the strong qualities this production carries: creative staging (particularly wonderful are the stagehands clad all in white who feel like story cleaners, if such people existed), abundant mirth, and a heartfelt ending.

Possibilities abound yet for this play; in moments where characters seemed to have a mind of their own and exert their own agency, theatrical promise beckoned.

Fortunately theatrical fireworks explode when Diane, the successful short-story writer in The Moonshot Tape (the first part of Who We Become, a trilogy of rarely staged one-act plays by Lanford Wilson) returns to her hometown in Missouri to clean out her childhood home now that her mother has been moved to a nursing facility. A student journalist from Diane’s high school alma mater has come to interview her, and in so doing dredges up memories that Diane had heretofore kept private. As staged, the audience becomes that journalist, absorbing everything Diane has to say about writing, and nothing is out of bounds: “Do whatever it takes.”

Diane drinks freely and continuously during the interview, saying “You’ve caught me at a low ebb.” As glass after glass gets drained and refilled, Diane gets more detailed and direct with her responses. She’s not happy to be home, but she does want to set the record straight, and accurately, even if it reveals parts of herself that would be better off kept private. “Never underestimate the power and excitement of revenge,” she says, and more than once. Diane has been able to capitalize on the miseries of her childhood via her writing, but she carries no illusions that the writing has actually saved her in any way other than financial.

Wilson was a great American playwright who isn’t as well-known across the pond as he should be, but here he is done great, honorable service by Margaret Curry, who gives a phenomenal, transfixing performance as Diane. Curry perfectly straddles the line between simmering anger and the kind of cathartic euphoria that comes only when darkness meets the truth of light. So powerful is Diane’s monologue that the audience exhales at the end of her interview with relief even though it is now unwittingly implicated and involved.