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Rinne Groff maps the dawn of TV
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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The Ruby Sunrise
By Rinne Groff. Directed by Oskar Eustis. Set by Eugene Lee. Costumes by Deborah Newhall. Lighting by Deb Sullivan. Sound by Bray Poor. With Julie Jesneck, Stephen Thorne, Anne Scurria, Jessica Wortham, Mauro Hantman, Fred Sullivan Jr., and Russell Arden Koplin. At Trinity Repertory Company through June 20.
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Groff’s worlds
This year, Trinity’s annual season-ending new play has particularly impressed the people who matter, including artistic director Oskar Eustis. As he says in the program notes, after he first read an unsolicited early version of The Ruby Sunrise, he startled his wife, who was also reading in bed, by throwing down the manuscript and declaring that he had a play to fill that coveted last slot. "Ruby combined three things I rarely see in one package: wonderfully rich characters and dialogue, fresh and innovative formal thinking, and political and historical consciousness," Eustis described by e-mail. "In a young [34] writer, the combination is breathtaking." The play also has its desired effect on Marc Masterson, head of the Actors Theatre of Louisville, which puts on the prestigious Humana Festival of New American Plays each spring. He called Eustis and asked if his theater could co-produce the play. (That made for three plays — half the festival lineup this year — having Providence connections. Kid-Simple, by Jordan Harrison, got a staged reading last year at Perishable Theatre, where it is currently running. And Gina Gionfriddo, whose After Ashley was the critical hit of the festival, polished her playwriting skills under Paula Vogel at Brown’s MFA writing program, as did Harrison.) A comedy, The Ruby Sunrise takes place in two time periods, one act apiece. It opens in 1927, when the teenaged Ruby runs away to her aunt on an Indiana farm. The brilliant girl loves to invent things and wants to create something that will change the world. What she comes up with is television. In Act II we are in 1952 and the "Golden Age" of television. The same actress (Julie Jesneck) now plays Elizabeth Hunter, who works in a New York TV studio under the pressure of McCarthy-era censorship. The other performers are Jessica Wortham and Russell Arden Koplin, and Trinity company members Anne Scurria, Fred Sullivan Jr., Stephen Thorne, and Mauro Hantman. Playwright Groff has a 1991 bachelor’s degree in theater studies from Yale University and a master’s in dramatic writing from New York University, where she is an instructor at the’s Tisch School of Art. Groff is a founding member of New York’s Elevator Repair Service Theater Company. She has written 10 plays, including three for children. Orange Lemon Egg Canary was presented at the 2003 Humana Festival. Groff has been in and out of Providence to attend rehearsals at Trinity, continuing to shape her play. She slowed down long enough to conduct a phone interview from her home in New York. Q: Oskar Eustis thinks that this is your best play. Do you agree? A: Sure. I feel really excited and proud of this play. Q: What has it accomplished, as far as you can see, that your others haven’t? A: Well, you know, it’s harder for me to say. They’re all my children, so I think it’s hard for me to say that one is really better than another. Because I love them all, of course. But I think that Oskar is correct. That this is a strange combination of my simplest and my most complicated play. It was very ambitious in its reach. It’s taking on different time periods. It’s taking on genius, in a way — there are people in this play who are touched by genius. So that always is a huge enterprise to undertake, to give language to very complicated thinkers. But at the same time that I’ve been dealing with historical periods, historical movements, technological information, all these kind of big, reaching subject matters, I feel the story is conveyed in a very simple and emotional way. Q: How has your Trinity Rep experience been? A: I can gush about my Trinity experience. It’s just been really blessed for me. My agent sent the play to Trinity Rep, and Craig Watson — who’s the literary manager — sent an incredibly supportive, nice letter. It was one of those letters that I saved, just because in a career where you experience so much rejection, it’s just so wonderful to get a letter of support, someone saying that they really believe in what you’re doing. But I really didn’t think that that meant they were going to produce my play . . . . Since then, Trinity has just invested so much in the development process. Bringing me up there to have readings, to work on the play, over almost a year’s time of investing in this play and investing in me. And the play has just grown and grown. Q: Well, Oskar does have quite a reputation as a dramaturg, for delving into the structure and intentions implicit in a play, which may not even be clear to the playwright. So his working on it in that regard was particularly helpful to you? A: Absolutely. I think his reputation as a brilliant dramaturg is completely deserved. Not only is he really smart, in terms of thinking about the play, but I think he’s really smart in terms of talking to playwrights. If I were to look back at all our conversations over this year’s time, I feel that he’s really good at asking the right question at the right moment. And that’s really what a dramaturg is doing, just asking the playwright questions to clarify things, asking them to think about things. I love the journey he’s taken me on. Q: Are you a writer who keeps revisiting the same themes, or do they range widely? A: The worlds that I deal with range pretty wildly. But, in a way, I think all my plays are about how to make a contribution to the world. How to keep on target toward your goal when so much seems to be pulling you away from your goals. And I think you can see that strain in a lot of my work. I have a friend who says that a lot of my work is about women trying to stave off despair. I don’t think that sums up everything . . . it’s not always women, but people trying to stave off despair and keep working toward their goals. — Bill Rodriguez
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It seems fitting that The Ruby Sunrise should be a play about invention, because it’s as inventive as anything you’ll see this side of Alan Ayckbourn or Tom Stoppard. Not that it’s as calibrated as the former or as intellectually heady as the latter. In the end, this new play by Rinne Groff — a production of Trinity Repertory Company and Actors Theatre of Louisville in the second half of a doubleheader world premiere — seems more ingenious than substantive. It is, however, clever and full of heart — as is Trinity artistic director Oskar Eustis’s high-spirited production, which unfolds on a set by Eugene Lee in which Americana meets origami. A meditation on all-American ingenuity that begins in 1927 in an Indiana barn where a fanatical young farm girl sets out to invent television, Groff’s play hops to a live-television studio of the 1950s, the medium’s so-called Golden Age, to focus on the creative and romantic collaboration of a beleaguered writer and a "script girl" determined to get her unsung mother’s story told. Of course, the young woman’s mother is the thwarted inventor of the earlier drama, whose tale is eventually recorded live in black-and-white by old-time TV cameras, in a version watered down by commercialism, censorship, timidity, cliché, and the McCarthy blacklist. The play’s dovetailing is deft and, as it moves from weatherbeaten heartland to Philco Television Playhouse, its conveyance of period atmosphere expert. But it’s not entirely clear what Groff is saying. As near as I can figure, it’s that compromise is, if not ideal, inevitable. But is it really better to have one’s dream distorted than to have it blow up in one’s face? Whatever Groff’s overarching intent, she has put together a fascinating story, the seed of which is that of little-known inventor Philo Farnsworth, who had a "Eureka" moment regarding television electronics while mowing a farm field. Groff turns Farnsworth into a scientifically and mechanically handy teenage girl named Ruby, who is positively on fire to invent TV. Having escaped an abusive home in Kentucky, she turns up on a distrustful, alcoholic aunt’s Indiana doorstep with a scheme fostered by Popular Mechanics and the notion that TV might change the world. Among her insights: the boob tube will put an end to armed conflict because "who could bear to see war right in your own living room?" After you mop up the irony of that, you can return to the high-energy spectacle of driven, overall-clad Ruby — who in Julie Jesneck’s rendering has more energy than Reddi Kilowatt — trying to build a cathode tube out of radio parts and pilfered lab equipment as Henry, Aunt Lois’s agriculture-student boarder, falls for the evangelical tinkerer. Henry, a polite, not-overly-ambitious 20-year-old who sees "fairies" rather than bioluminescence in fireflies, just wants Ruby to slow down long enough for romance. Evidently he succeeds, at least in the short run, or we would not have the second part of The Ruby Sunrise, in which the focus shifts to television production assistant Lulu, who has a natural instinct for the nascent medium, and writer Tad Rose, whom she seduces into co-opting her mother’s story (which did not end happily), with an eye toward its persistence rather than its despair. In the process, Lulu has to stare down both while attempting to protect her monument to mom from the thousand callow exigencies that conspire to take the sheen off television’s Golden Age. At the climax, Groff’s two tales are fused, as we watch Ruby’s story filmed on the studio stage, defanged and with a bimbo heroine, dripping formulaic hope and looking a lot like Lassie. That’s a lot to get your arms around, but the Trinity/ATL production has long arms. Eustis stages both the naturalistic and the TV-studio sections of the play with a nod toward the latter, with stagehands bustling in and out to fold and rotate Lee’s complicated set and help the actors with Deborah Newhall’s apt farmland and ’50s-chic costumes. And the actors do a fine job of juggling flesh-and-blood character with period archetype. Jesneck is a bit maudlin as a promising young actress brought low by the blacklist, but her Ruby is a vulnerable, twitching whirlwind for whom such routine acts as sitting down and smacking open the barn doors are small explosions. As Lulu, Jessica Wortham manages to incorporate both Rosalind Russell cool and the impetuous shadow of her mother. Stephen Thorne is touchingly square as Henry and subtly superficial as the ’50s actor who plays him. And 25-year Trinity vet Anne Scurria dines out on the double casting, morphing from cynical, broken-hearted Aunt Lois to imperious faded-star-reduced-to-television Ethel Reed, clad in tight leopard and holding her cigarette as if it were a scepter. In these capable hands, Groff’s play is never less than entertaining. But like Ruby’s fever dream of television, it aspires to be more.
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