The Pleasure Principle

Ok, I’ll admit it: I’m a sucker for the drama department at Hendersonville High School. I can always count on their fall play to be one of the most exciting, surprising, and genuinely theatrical shows of the season, and this year’s offering is no exception.
This unexpected phenomenon started a few years back, when HHS produced Edward Gorey’s bizarre collection of random sentences passed off as a play called “Helpless Doorknobs”. Only Heather Malloy’s recent “The Many Deaths of Edward Gorey” has threatened to overtake that production as the most wonderfully inventive re-imaging of the spirit of Mr Gorey ever seen. I loved it.
I loved even more 2005’s ingenious re-thinking of an antiquated French play, “La Dispute,” a sort of allegory about two couples in a years-long pseudo-scientific experiment to study love and fidelity, as well as the nobles who commissioned and are watching the experiment. It was delightful and enchanting and earnest and moving, and I still hold it up with NCSC’s “The Syringa Tree” as one of the very the best shows of the season.
I regret to say that I had to miss last year’s reportedly post-noir Nancy Drew-meets-the-Hardy Boys concoction.
This year, I caught the possibly ill-conceived revival of a play they competed with earlier this season, an original piece called “The Pleasure Principle”. For the record, I only say “ill-conceived” because the performance had a slight air of a play who’s life had peaked during it’s first run, and this was a sort of post-show performance that couldn’t quite muster the oomph of the original run, especially not with a largely listless and rather small audience, comprised mostly, it seemed, of people who had probably already seen the show, and were now, a bit like the actors, returning dutifully, but not wholly enthusiastically.
But be that as it may. The show itself was beautiful and flawed and engaging and bizarre, and great, even on a slightly off night. Described as a “surrealistic fantasy,” it was based partially on the writing of Sophocles (Oedipus Rex), the theories of Sigmund Freud (especially the Oedipal Complex), and the political activism of the Zapatistas. The mix is odd, and does not always make literal or immediate sense, but they don’t call it surrealism for nothing.
Our hero, Edmund, played by Turner Rouse with his reliable mix of sincerity and wonder, is a 16 or 17 year-old student whose parents are going through a divorce, and whose sister Tista (Arie Romstadt, a convincingly child-like narrator, without being cloying) talks in the third person and sometimes shares his visions of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, played with a thuggishly Johnny Depp scowl and giant blue sombrero and black moustache by Katie Bailey. He also sees visions of Sigmund Freud and of is led of course to the inescapable destiny of killing his father and marrying his mother (who happens to share wardrobe choices and names with his girlfriend.)
The overarching theme of Destiny (and the idea that if one is destined to do something, it ceases to matter if it has already happened, or will happen at some point in the future) ties the disparate ideas together visually as well as thematically; the very cool set consists of a few key furniture pieces, all askew on the stage and painted white, with bits of the face of a black clock showing up on each piece. Behind the action are two painted flats, also blanked white, and if the two pieces were ever put together, a single giant clock with sharply black Roman numerals would be formed.
Like the other HHS shows I have seen, one of the highlights of the play is a bold visual beauty. The design elements were meticulously thought out and executed, both by the designers and builders and by the cast’s interactions with them. I loved that the brother/sister pair had an artfully correlated blue/red color scheme, for example. Possibly the most striking image was the use of a giant red flag, first as a long banner proclaiming some absurdist version of a universal/revolutionary truth, and then as an impromptu full-body wrap—part swaddling cloth, part shroud—for Edmund, who of course, also joins his sister in some sort of optical degradation, as prophets and other seekers of the truth must do (just ask Sophocles or Tony Kushner, or even Shakespeare).
Perhaps most importantly, throughout all the absurdist double talk, the visions of ballet dancing revolutionaries, a marriage that is also a divorce, death that is also life, blindness that is also clarity, and other potentially confusing contradictions, the cast maintains an essential sense of ensemble, with each member not just pulling his or her weight, but actively pushing the play forward with bold, sweeping leaps of imagination and trust in each other. It is truly inspiring to see young people so dedicate themselves to making the play a powerfully actor-driven event, one that finds beauty in the everyday, in the extraordinary, and of course in the absurd.
This is complex, confusing, and engaging story telling, presented by a fearless cast. If every high school in the country had a drama program as creative and daring as the one under Todd Weakley’s care at Hendersonville High School, the state of the American Theatre would be in spectacularly exciting hands.
--Willie Repoley