On Sundays Gothamist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in New York and reviews of recent books and performances. The judgments expressed below are entirely those of the author.
It’s easy enough for everyone to condemn slavery as it existed in the past, on a large scale with whole tribes shipped across the Atlantic to perish on New World plantations, or when it involves children in sweatshops or women lured away from home and forced into the sex trade. Under such circumstances, it is patently obvious that the idea of “owning” a person is despicable and should be swiftly and harshly dealt with. But plenty of people who might agree with that may nonetheless harbor feelings of ownership of others in their life – friends, lovers, offspring, and the like. And unless something happens to twist or magnify the effects of those feelings, for the most part they go unremarked and don’t do much harm. But when the heady sense of ownership does get out of control, as happens in John-Richard Thompson’s thought-provoking new play Angel Mountain, one realizes how wrong it is on any scale.
The main story takes place decades ago, but is framed and narrated by a young doctor (Abby Royle) who has just returned to her home town; on her first house call, to Michael Alden’s place, she finds that instead of his brother being sick, as she thought, he is dead – and that’s just the start of a sequence of discoveries that are a lot more than she bargained for. Most of them come as she reads a journal Michael has written about his family history: just after WWII, Tom Alden (Arthur Aulisi), a music lover, mathematician, and widower, is living with his younger son Bard (Danny DeFerrari) in a grand old farmhouse amidst a cherry orchard; Michael (Noah Trepanier), his older son, just home from lackluster Army service. The friction between the men due to trouble past – the dark secret of the mother’s death – and present – an energetic, vivacious French-Canadian woman, Angele LaMontagne (Jessica Dickey), comes to work for them as a maid and, inevitably but unfortunately, enchants them all – structures the thickening plot. Tom (played by Aulisi with great nuance and multiple shades of feeling) is clearly deeply unhappy and determined to take it out on his sons, particularly Bard, who he has tortured so much by an aggressive, active neglect over the years that Bard, who was already a bit “simple,” has gone somewhat off his head and come to think he can capture souls via a disturbing method I won’t reveal here. His and Tom’s loneliness, and Michael’s sense of failure, of being stalled in life, combine to make for a rather unhealthy combination when Angele enters the picture. Their language quickly incorporates the unmistakable vocabulary of possessiveness that inspired the opening lines of this review, setting up a rapid descent into tragedy whose consequences one hopes the audience, at least, might learn something from, even if most of the characters are beyond relief.
