Gidion’s Knot

Play
by Johnna Adams

With Olivia D’Ambrosio (Heather Clark), Deb Martin (Corryn Fell)

Heather Clark (Olivia D’Ambrosio) is a fifth-grade teacher who, at curtain’s rise, is obviously overcome by something. She is visited by Corryn Fell (Deb Martin), who turns out to be the mother of Gidion, one of Clark’s students who has written a controversial and unsettling essay for which he has been suspended by Clark. This fifth-grade parent-teacher conference provides the basis for this knotty and unsettling play.

It’s hard to say much more about the plot without ruining it, but, suffice it to say that the mundane setting is a starting-gate for an emotionally complex journey. Like many tragedies, this one pits two polar perspectives against one another, making their clash seem inevitable, with serious consequences.

There is something very down to earth about the setting of this play, which makes its Pinteresque abstractness particularly jarring. Pinter’s settings are often very down to earth as well, but we know, after a certain amount of experience with his work, that entering the household of a Pinter “family” involves entering a realm of oddly exchanged greetings, uncomfortable pauses and a prevailing sense of vacancy that permeates an otherwise familiar locale. Similarly, the schoolroom of Gidion’s Knot invites an immediate naturalistic interpretation, but, once one gets the sense of what is going on, that space becomes much more unsettling unfamiliar, like a Pinter household.

So, at first, I was not quite sure how to absorb the long pauses and sense of distance exhibited particularly by D’Ambrosio’s Heather Clark. At the outset, before Corryn Fell, the parent, enters, all she can do is pace and say “Oh, God” repeatedly. When Fell enters, Clark withdraws into a protective shell and a kind of narrative desert, speaking haltingly and distantly, seeming oddly displaced, emotionally and psychologically, from the natural setting.

The superficial naturalism of the setting therefore becomes only the first line of access to this play, which, packs a considerable amount of drama into its eighty minutes.

Though it might be reasonable to question some of the narrative choices which force the underlying tragic setup (Why wasn’t the school psychologist consulted before Gidion was suspended?), one comes to see that the seemingly trumped up plot devices serve to intensify and focus the conflict. That amplification of the narrative compounds the elements of the tragic in rapid succession, steadily positing the two main characters against one another. The teacher, conventional and protective of the rest of her class stands clearly against the mother, daring, poetic, and appreciative of the vulnerability and extremity of her son’s form of expression.

Interpreted more naturalistically throughout, the production might have more simplistically offset the teacher’s restraint from the parent’s forceful probing. In this somewhat more abstracted and more surrealistic interpretation, the teacher comes off as impermeably distant until her veneer is finally cracked, which takes some time, enabled finally and ironically by a thematic interjection about the teacher’s ailing cat.

Though it takes some adjustment to get in the groove of a performance which has some of the behavioral oddity of a Pinter play while bringing along all the trappings of a naturalistic schoolroom drama, there is, in its short duration, a progressive development of appreciation for the deep dilemma set up by the
interlocking vulnerabilities of the two main characters.

Both actors give very different, but interesting, interpretations.

Olivia D’Ambrosio provides the primary Pinteresque spin in her intentionally contained, halting representation of the teacher. Seeming at once overwrought and impervious, she manages to convey a sense of the institutionally absurd and the personally tragic in one fell swoop.

Deb Martin, as the parent, has a talent for gestural caricature which, despite the serious undertone of the play, gives an interestingly bizarre comedic flavoring to an otherwise tragically untenable narrative trajectory. Its ironic stance, in light of the heartbreaking circumstances, demonstrates a kind of heroism, representing, as well, a kinship to Pinter, whose characters, confronting unmanageable, dumbstruck, worlds, often only have irony as the nobly courageous option.

– BADMan