Traveling clan

Anthony Clarvoe's journey to the West

by Carolyn Clay

By Anthony Clarvoe. Directed by Oskar Eustis. Set designed by Christine Jones. Costumes by William Lane. Lighting by Geoff Korf. With Mauro Hantman, William Damkoehler, Elizabeth Quincy, Timothy Crowe, Phyllis Kay, and Anne Scurria. At Trinity Repertory Company, through May 11.

Anthony Clarvoe has written several original plays and adapted The Brothers Karamazov for the stage. Now he has adapted his own family history in Ambition Facing West, an interwoven drama of three generations that examines both the immigrant experience and the immigrant personality. "We are the ambition people," a Croatian-American father tells his teenage daughter -- willing to sacrifice all in pursuit of opportunity and learning.

The sweeping yet smallscale work -- which was commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum five years ago, when Trinity Rep artistic director Oskar Eustis worked there, and is having its world premiere, under Eustis's direction, as part of the Providence New Play Festival -- begins in 1910 on the Dalmatian coast, where a "farm boy" is defying his brute father by learning to read. His co-conspirator is a Catholic priest, who is nursing him through Jason and the Argonauts. A next generation, negotiating the gravel seas of Wyoming, will be equally besotted by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It all boils down to the same thing: get the raft and get moving.

That, at least, is what Clarvoe's people do. His grandfather emigrates from Croatia, eventually becoming a union organizer of coalminers in Wyoming. His daughter, the playwright's bright, aggressive mother, moves to California and eventually to wheeling and dealing with the Japanese. As a fillip of metaphoric closure, she winds up, when oil is struck there in the 1980s, doing business with Zagreb. But Ambition Facing West is not just a family album cum immigrant recruitment poster. Alternately passionate and acerb, the play examines the arguments for staying where God put you and the rootlessness that comes with being born into "the ambition people," a nomadic tribe that gallops from one land of opportunity to the next. It is also, on a glibber level, a play about parents and children.

Clarvoe braids his three stories, and most of the actors play two roles, so it takes a while for the play to get going. One minute we're on that Croatian beach, where young Stefan is tugged like a rope between a beckoning recruiter of new Americans and an obstinately unschooled but loving mother who doesn't want to lose her only son. The next, we're in 1940s Wyoming, where young Alma juggles book learning with first love and wonders where her driven, tight-lipped father comes from. Fast-forward and the caustic whirlwind who is the grown-up Alma is touching down in Tokyo, cutting business deals on a cell phone as her own son, desperate to break the cycle of ambition, tries on the trappings of a Buddhist monk. "Your grandparents pulled themselves up out of the earth like Mr. and Mrs. Potatohead!", Alma admonishes. Now Joey wants to return to it.

Indeed, earth and water are important aspects of Ambition Facing West. The dirt floor of the stage is ringed by a circle of gravel and then a moat (in which, in the opening scene, the white-clad daughter of a ship owner floats a boat, in marked contrast to her elemental surrounds). Young Stefan takes some of the dirt with him when, after a violent confrontation with his mother, he vamooses to America. Of course, Stefan's sentimental attachment to his roots in poverty and ignorance doesn't last. Years later, during World War II, he admits to his daughter, in a powerful scene, that his Balkan relations are probably Nazi abettors. "Is that what we're made of?' she inquires. To which the older Stefan thunders, "You are made of Cream of Wheat and Bosco and science books. They wouldn't recognize you. You are from the future!"

Eustis directs the mostly fluid production, giving fair weight to the play's primal, poetic, and comedic aspects. One caveat: the scene in which young Stefan knocks his mother into the water registers as fumbling, youthful pique. It is only later that we come to understand it as a defining moment for the character, who at that moment turns his back on a milieu of male violence.

The performances are well-honed, though it's hard to reconcile Elizabeth Quincy's questioning, blond-tressed overachiever of the war years with Anne Scurria's biting businesswoman of the '80s. Timothy Crowe, as the older Stefan, delivers a performance that bristles with contained emotion. Mauro Hantman is earnest as the youths, and Phyllis Kay does a strident, albeit funny, turn as Alma's crippled, vehemently Catholic Italian mama.

Parts of Ambition are workmanlike, and the character of Alma needs to be fused. But at its best this new work is complicated and powerful. Among the quotes included in the Trinity program as "notes from the playwright" is a passage from a 1780 letter written by John Adams to his wife Abigail. "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy . . . in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." Clarvoe is of the generation offered to the arts, and he has done his predecessors proud.