Chesapeake

Play (1999)
by Lee Blessing

With Georgia Lyman (Kerr)

Kerr (Georgia Lyman) is a performance artist who has issues about Therm Pooley, a conservative legislator who opposes support for her kind of art. Through explorations of her dream life, and through further, more metaphysically adventurous, extensions of her personality, she probes her relationship to this policy and to this character.

This imaginative play starts out with a political position and a premise – that a performance artist of a courageous bent who ran up against a hostile policy wall established by reactionary legislators would need to take up theatrical arms against it. From that starting point this play goes off into wild and unexpected dimensions, exploring the interpersonal ramifications of the combative relationships involved, and the unforeseen degree of psychic intimacy that gets generated by the conflict.

In addition to Kerr, played evocatively with virtuoso inventiveness by Georgia Lyman, the characters involved are Therm Pooley, his assistant, his wife and his dog. Lyman embodies all of them beautifully, giving them distinctive voices, stances and outlooks.

Lyman and the director, Doug Lockwood, have created a wonderfully entertaining performance with minimal props and settings. A few lighting and sound effects supplement the action which Lyman creates single-handedly with imaginative gusto.

The play itself is a beautifully wrought improvisation that starts with the politics of art and ends in a transcendence of politics via artistic imagination. It is difficult to say more than that without giving away crucial elements of the plot, but suffice it to say that Kerr’s personality and identity adapt in a way that brings her closer to the object of her derision.

Lyman is really brilliant in this role – it is a tour de force for her. And she and Lockwood together have devised a fabulously interesting entertainment based on Blessing’s ingeniously wrought template.

– BADMan