Roaring Back Into the 20s

By Benjamin Oren | Wednesday, May 27, 1998

There is something about sin that captivates America. Drinking, smoking and sex have been eternally frowned upon by parents, yet have continually been immortalized by their children — every generation has had a group that has done it the best. Generation X had the Brat Back, their grandparents the Rat Pack. But it was our great-grandparents who were the lucky ones. They just didn't have mindless movie stars or tiresome crooners to worship. They had authors, artists and wits who debated and mingled over bootlegged liquor in the finest bars and homes in New York City.

They were an intellectual elite who defined the Roaring 20's by speaking their mind and sharing it with the world. Yet they were still the poster children for the Lost Generation. Why?

The Little Eyases Ensemble Theatre (LEET) attempted to fill the hole left by the Jazz Age's intelligensia in their first stage production, Boom: The Lost Generation which ran from May 1 through May 17 in Manhattan's CSC Theater. However, whether or not they succeeded in doing so pales in comparison to their hypnotic presentation of 1920's America.

LEET, formed in late 1997, is a thirteen-member troupe founded by Dartmouth graduates Marsha S. Blake '96, Aliza Waksal '96, David Harbour '97, and Caleb Scott '97, along with recent graduates from Brown, Northwestern and Boston University.

In this first collaboration, they wrote and directed a play based on the literature and letters of some of the most prominent intellects of the first quarter of the twentieth century. However, the seamlessness of the show gives it the appearance of a finely tuned piece of art crafted by veterans of the New York stage.

The plot centers around the interactions of such greats as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, and Dorothy Parker at the posh parties thrown by New York City's golden couple of the era, Gerald and Sara Murphy.

The show begins with the entire cast on the peninsula-like stage shouting out what the Roaring 20's were and what it meant to the new generation and then, BOOM, the audience is allowed to enter their world.

We meet F. Scott Fitzgerald (Harbour) as he talks with the 'dean of American editors,' Maxwell Perkins (Geoffrey Molloy) over the print size and cover design of This Side of Paradise, while all Perkins wants to discuss is the actual content of the novel.

Fitzgerald's head soon swells to enormous proportions as he will stop at nothing to remind everybody, especially his emotionally disturbed wife, Zelda (Blake), that he is 'the highest paid short story writer in America.'

We meet Gerald and Sara Murphy (Stephan Guarino and Waksal), the ultimate hosts, who are so meticulous that their clothes match the entrees. We meet Dorothy Parker (Jessie McCormack), the caustic and insecure wit, who has the most terrible of crushes on the fair Mr. Murphy. We meet Harold Hart Crane (Scott), the openly homosexual poet who receives little respect from the aristocratic Fitzgerald and the testosterone-filled Ernest Hemmingway (E.T. Ganias), but falls into the arms of Peggy Cowley (Kate Arrington).

We meet these people, we watch these people, and we feel for these people. LEET pulls these giants of the 1920's intelligensia out of the pages of history and returns them to the three-dimensional human beings they once were, perhaps even adding traits the authors themselves didn't know they had.

The acting all around was superb, but Harbour simply stole the show with his performance as F. Scott Fitzgerald. Presenting him as insecure yet pompous, extremely masculine while questioning his manhood, and as loving but loathful, Harbour gave the audience a Fitzgerald who wasn't just a symbol for his generation, but rather a tortured soul capable of abusing the ones who tried to love him.

Much of this is played out in his dysfunctional relationship with Zelda, as it appears that Fitzgerald drove her in and out of mental institutions with his constant beratement and reminders that he is the only member of the household allowed to write. Harbour and Blake's scenes at the climax of the play were truly powerful, as their once intimate relationship quickly evaporates when Fitzgerald questions Zelda's dreams and goals. She has nowhere left to go but the asylum.

The stark stage designed by Fred Kolo contrasted nicely with the liveliness of the cast. The set consisted of a dance floor, a lofted stage with an office, and an even higher scaffold where the eccentric Thomas Wolfe (Andrew Welsh) spends most of the play. Black drapes the background, which helps to angelically illuminate the actors, whose wardrobe is mostly a bright white.

Boom: The Lost Generation is a giant first step for the fledgling Little Eyases Ensemble Theatre.

It takes on a larger-than-life subject and presents it in a larger-than-life way, while simultaneously deconstructing the psyches of the most influential people in modern American literature.

It allows the audience to begin to understand why these people were so lost — although they were the creme de la creme of a generation filled with promise, they were ultimately confused about how to fulfill it. Hopefully LEET's future productions won't lose the energy and excitement of Boom and will be bold enough to carry on the creativity and spirit of adventure that marked their predecessors.

(For information concerning future LEET productions, call 212-358-3449)

Roaring Back Into the 20s

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