By Manning Harris
Early in his career Tennessee Williams made the following statement in an essay: “Great theatre is an international thing. Like great music and painting it is a world property, but more particularly than any other medium of art it has a way of speaking directly from the heart of one people to the hearts of others and so breeding a sense of the one real community, which is the community of common human impulses, needs and longings.”
It’s probably too soon to call Alliance Theatre’s production of Melissa Fay Greene’s 1996 book “The Temple Bombing” great theatre, but there is no disputing its timeliness, power, and importance to the world in 2017. The play will run through March 12; it opened last Wednesday after several days of previews.
Let’s cut to the chase with a synopsis provided in the theatre program: “On October 12, 1958 an explosion wracked the The Temple on Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta. The response to this bombing shaped the character of Atlanta—led by The Temple congregation itself under the leadership of Rabbi Jacob Rothschild and his wife, Janice Rothschild. This play, co-commissioned by the Alliance Theatre and The Temple commemorating The Temple’s 150th Anniversary, proudly questions the power of fear and protrays the rocky path of courage.”
In 1958 the Civil Rights struggle was well underway, and the response to this act of terror by Dr. Martin Luther King and his constituents and the support of Rabbi Rothschild and Mayor Hartsfield cemented an important bonding in the fight against bigotry and intolerance (and also illustrates perfectly Tennessee Williams’ above comment).
“The Temple Bombing” was developed in association with New York’s Tectonic Theater Project and written and directed by Tectonic’s Jimmy Maize. You may recall Tectonic’s outstanding play and HBO television production “The Laramie Project,” dealing with the 1998 murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard. Incidentally, Mr. Shepard died exactly 40 years after the Temple bombing.
Meredith Ries’ set design and David Bengali’s projections are a fascinating mélange of people, places, events, and objects that make the piece visually arresting. In extensive program notes you can read about documentary theatre and what Tectonic calls “Moment Work,” in which the actors begin rehearsal before there’s a completed script and “they work without an end goal in sight so they can discover together where the story lies theatrically.” Maize goes on to say a goal is to make narratives “that are much more visual, experiential and impactful.”
The show is aided greatly by a first-rate cast including Amari Cheatom, Danielle Deadwyler, Ann Marie Gideon, Eric Mendenhall, Caitlin O’Connell, Lee Osorio, Ric Reitz, Justin Walker, Todd Weeks, and Minka Wiltz. Most play multiple parts; you may recognize some of Atlanta’s best actors here.
Despite the enormous importance and historical significance of the subject matter, the play is not particularly dramatically compelling. One factor may be that since no one was (thankfully) hurt or killed in the blast and we never discover the perpetrators of the act, there’s not a lot of what you’d call rising action. We’re dealing with historically important facts, but not any overpowering emotionality.
In Tectonic’s “The Laramie Project,” there was a victim, friends of the victim, powerful testimony, a trial, and two discovered killers. All of this grabs an audience in much more visceral way. In “The Temple Bombing” we are presented with a 90-minute piece of real Atlanta (and world) history. It’s grimly fascinating and worth seeing, but Ms. Greene’s book will probably offer more enlightenment.
For tickets and information, alliancetheatre.org.
