Doing time

Our Country's Good is a noble failure

by Bill Rodriguez

Theater audiences like to congratulate themselves on their good intentions, like throngs at political conventions applauding high-minded speeches. Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good was well-received in London and New York in 1991 and since then has gotten widespread staging largely from its well-constructed purity of effort.

The Brown University Theatre production, directed by Peter DuBois, can't rescue the work from the nobility of its intentions. Based on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker, the story is about how several prisoners at an Australian penal colony in 1789 locate their better natures as they spend five months rehearsing a dramatic production. An irony is that the play, George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, is a comedy of manners a world away from their experiences. An aborigine stands in mute accusation now and then, reminding us of the Dream Time that his culture saw the world being, which parallels the less ambitious dreams that plays are.

Second Lieut. Ralph Clark (Taylor D. White) is the kind but prim officer put in charge of mounting the production. He falls in love with the shy Mary Brenham (Nehassaiu de Gannes), who portrays the demure center of the play-within-the-play. Their chemistry is convincing as she is ennobled by his expectations of her and he gains humanity by loosening his grip on society's prim strictures.

But the female prisoner that the action most revolves around is the spitfire prostitute Liz Morden, played with a feral intensity by Lizzy C. Davis. The well-intentioned Governor General of the colony (Jonathan Emerson Kohler) wants to "redeem her humanity," an effort that Our Country's Good is saying art can accomplish when society and the criminal justice system have failed.

There are other effective characters in this production. One of the most convincing is Jonathan Fortmiller as Ketch Freeman, who is torn up by being forced to hang other prisoners. Two other performances in particular demonstrate the potential of the play to move us. As Major Robbie Ross, Joshua V. Scher not only maintains a convincing Scots accent but carefully keeps Ross's temper on simmer even in innocuous exchanges. That allows him to underplay a crucial later scene, when Ross breaks up a rehearsal in order to haul off three prisoners for hanging, a powerful yet controlled display of seething retribution. Similarly, the character of Midshipman Harry Brewer (Robert Carl Erickson III) has an underlying manic edge as he tries to get hard-hearted prisoner Duckling Smith (Lisa Arkin) to show feelings for him. But Erickson is allowed to play the anger so broadly throughout, that by the time of Harry's big blow-up scene, he has nowhere to go but into scenery-chewing excess.

There are many ways for this play to fall apart, although the Providence College staging a few seasons back showed how an honest throughline can keep it all taut. First of all, Wertenbaker sets up a sweeping Brechtian commentary that prompts cool detachment, with some actors playing both officers and prisoners. That distancing can work against the emotionally charged relationships that the playwright has constructed for our empathy. (This remoteness is established with a vengeance at Brown: some emotionally significant two-person scenes take place not in the intimacy of stage center but rather in waist-high back-wall cutouts, like televised talking heads.)

For its part, the set design, by John R. Lucas, continues to chill things off. Instead of the usual ragged ambiance and decrepit ship's hull, we get a single tall stairway stretching sideways on the wall, reminding us of the distant elegance of home. But since that realm is now only in their memories, it would be more evocative for us all to confront the ragged squalor of their present setting and leave images of England to the imagination.

Imagination is the currency here, after all. When it seems counterfeit, no amount of fast talking will convince us otherwise.