George  Weinberg-Harter

San Diego Arts

"Permanent Collection" at Mo'olelo Performing Arts Co.

The Spoils of Morris
By George  Weinberg-Harter
Posted on Feb 23 2008
Last updated Feb 27 2008

Thomas Gibbons’ very interesting and timely play "Permanent Collection"(2003) is – in the familiar and sometimes misleading phrase – based on a true story. One thinks of Henry James at a dinner party hearing the germ of the true story which grew into his novel "The Spoils of Poynton." Having apprehended just that fruitful seed of an idea, the novelist neither wanted nor needed to learn more.

Gibbons similarly picks, chooses, and transforms details and hints from the ongoing saga of the real life Barnes Foundation and the controversy surrounding its superb collection of predominantly French Impressionist art. When the rich philanthropist Albert Barnes died in 1951, he bequeathed control of his Foundation to Lincoln University in Philadelphia, founded as an African American college in 1854. Things went well for decades. But during the 1990s a new president of the Barnes board tried to extend the outreach of the Foundation and increase public access to its collection, which had been strictly limited by the terms of Barnes’ will, some provisions of which were then reversed in court. An organization ironically called Friends of the Barnes Foundation which then rose up to challenge his actions was labeled as racist by the black board president, leading to lawsuits that brought the Foundation (despite the estimated two billion dollars value of its collection) to the verge of bankruptcy. Currently, the Barnes Foundation plans to relocate to central Philadelphia, abandoning its secluded headquarters and gallery originally located on Albert Barnes’ former estate in an outlying town. (Think of the Huntington collection in San Marino, California.)

Gibbons’ play concerns a very similar fictional foundation, renamed the Morris Foundation, with an equally circumscribed collection of largely French Impressionist art. Gibbons tweaks the details and chronology to illustrate his play’s central thesis: that whenever the subject of race is injected into a dispute in America, other aspects of the argument tend to submerge in controversy.

The historical horrors of racism in the United States and its still deadly ongoing effects cannot be overestimated. The cloud that the lingering aftermath of those outrages may throw over a relatively elite quarrel such as the Barnes affair may be lamentable in a strictly limited sense, but judged against the devastating social storms and human wreckage of slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, and racial discrimination in this country, it’s like the proverbial tempest in a teapot.

But Gibbons brings that underlying dangerous personal note home in his opening scene, where (in this involving Mo’olelo production, sensitively directed by Seema Sueko) the newly appointed black director of the Barnes Foundation, Sterling North (Walter Murray), quietly narrates the story of driving his Jaguar to his first day in his prestigious new position. Murray’s muted and understated presentation proves nonetheless powerful (and far more effective than the actor’s sometimes tendency towards declamation elsewhere). With no special dramatics, Murray delivers the monologue in a calm manner that barely conceals a growing subtext of tension and indignation (empathetically conveyed to the audience) as North’s dignity is strained nearly to the breaking point when a cop pulls him over for the unstated offense of DWB (Driving While Black). When "Is this your vehicle, sir?" proceeds to "May I see your registration?" North reaches slowly and deliberately into his coat pocket for the document (just as he has particularly instructed his seventeen-year-old son to do also) so as not provoke any triggerhappy response from the "officer" (as he carefully addresses the policeman).

Shocking enough for a sheltered white audience, this sort of thing is no surprise – indeed, practically an everyday occurrence – for blacks. Such incidents, leading to a horrifying chain of events, were a plot crux of the recent film "Crash" (2004), as well as of the novel, film, and musical play "Ragtime," where Coalhouse Walker’s humiliation at the hands of firemen for the offense of being a Negro driving an automobile a century ago also has eventually tragic consequences.

In "Permanent Collection," the self-possessed North defuses the situation and even skillfully manages to put the racially-profiling policeman in his place. But other subtle pitfalls lie in store for North as he begins administering the Morris Foundation. Now that the audience is attuned and sympathetic to North’s reasonable racial sensitivity, it is not hard to share his concern when North notes that only a tiny corner of the gallery’s large Eurocentric permanent collection is devoted to African art, while the bulk of Morris’ other excellent holdings of objects from that continent are kept in storage. (Museum’s are often like icebergs, with most of their treasures hidden away in basement depths.)

North’s attempt to give these African holdings more public prominence provokes a series of confrontations, misunderstandings, and rash statements that end up endangering the Foundation and altering the lives of the play’s characters. There are no villains. More than one character pleads "Put yourself in my place." But, in the end, the cumulative effect is clearly to see the concerns of the three black characters as fairly reasonable, and to find the perceptions and reactions of two of the white characters, howsoever well-meaning, as frustratingly obtuse. (The opinions of a third white character, however, remain something of a mystery inside an enigma.)

John Tessmer plays Paul Barrow, a disgruntled Foundation arts administrator, with a glint in his eye that immediately foreshadows the uncompromising loggerheads he will come to with North. Tessmer’s manic grin gradually crumbles into an aggrieved grimace as Barrow’s stance against any changes in the gallery’s display of artworks hardens into a kind of fanaticism. And Barrow is nearly provoked to violence by North’s accusation that his high-minded aesthetic justifications only make him "a better class of racist."

Tanya Johnson is very appealing as North’s young African American assistant, Kanika Weaver, brought with him to the Foundation from North’s previous workplace. At first delighted to be instructed in artistic matters by Barrow, Weaver represents a younger and more hopeful generation of black professionals who have encountered far less racial discrimination in their own lives and are able to enter into much easier and more natural relations with white friends. (North perceives his own social interactions with whites, despite superficial bonhomie, as essentially hollow.) But Weaver’s own youthful openness leads her into perilous naivety and some eventual disillusionments.

In the nearly stereotypical role of an insidiously prying newspaper reporter named Gillian Crane, Debra Wanger provides a bit of sly fun, with notebook or recorder always at hand, her newshound ears perked for the tiniest betraying verbal slip that could lead to a Big Story. It’s not as if what Crane does is in any way illegal, immoral, or even amoral. But ... well. As a newspaperman once told me: "If you don’t want to see it in the paper, don’t do it or say it."

The third black character, played with well-calculated reserve by Valerie J. Ludwig, is Ella Franklin, for many years, until Sterling North’s arrival, the sole African American administrator at the Morris Foundation (a detail North is swift to observe). Ludwig’s Franklin, who appears mild and easygoing in the first scenes, gets to show some surprising (and highly satisfying) steel and authority at the play’s conclusion, when she becomes also the third black character to dump some unpleasant and much-needed truths upon Barrow’s sorry white head.

And the third white character is a spectral visitation by the Foundation’s great founder Alfred Morris, eccentrically played by Joe Powers with a drooping moustache and a bushy head of greying hair that, with the addition of a courtly Southern accent, suggests the ghost of William Faulker. Powers’ Morris strolls Mussorgsky-like amongst his exhibited pictures, an unseen visitor from beyond the grave, sometimes giving vent to amusing little tirades that air his idiosyncratic and iconoclastic views on art and art museums. And sometimes the ghostly Morris will seem to eavesdrop on the conversations and arguments of the living persons in the drama. But listening to the earthly mortals, he gives no hint of having any particular attitude towards their sublunary squabbles. He only casts a cold eye upon them, with the Olympian detachment which befits his otherworldly status.

The character-enhancing costumes are designed by Michelle Hunt. And Lindsay Jones’ sound design provides several interesting music cues which challenge one to puzzle out how they relate to the play. A passage from Debussy’s "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum," for instance, was quickly deciphered as an oblique glance at another facet of French Impressionism.

The transparent walls and empty frames o f David F. Weiner’s scenic design deftly suggest a maze of veiled rooms and receding galleries full of unseen pictures, with shifting focus created by Jason Bieber’s lighting design. Only one dominating painting is actually represented within a frame: a replica painted by artist Edmond Piffard of one of Cezanne’s several views of Mont Sainte-Victoire – an impression of an Impressionist. In fact, such a Cezanne does exist in the Barnes Foundation collection – but it is not specifically this one, the original of which hangs in a Paris collection. That Cezanne painted several views of this mountain makes the painting an emblem of the play’s conflicting viewpoints.

"Permanent Gallery," with its special case hightoned culture clash, suggests that despite some hopeful contemporary signs and over-optimistic predictions, America’s long history of racial inequity is not yet even close to a just resolution. A candid look at social statistics (income, education, health, incarceration) will show this. This perishing republic may still need another hundred years to get its poor self together – barring further social storms and catastrophes. Have mercy!

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM PAGE ONE HERE

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM PAGE TWO HERE

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM PAGE THREE HERE

Venue :10th Avenue Theatre, 930 10th Avenue, San Diego

About the author: George Weinberg-Harter George Weinberg-Harter has been active in San Diego theatre since childhood, appearing in many local stage productions as well as doing graphic art for them. He has helped start theatre companies, authored and co-authored a number of plays produced locally and is a co-founder of the Fellow Calligraphers of San Diego. He is a member of the Actors Alliance of San Diego, the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle, and the San Diego Press Club, which has presented him with its 2007 First Place Excellence in Journalism Award for Drawing or Illustration.
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