… gleaming multi-facets …
When Hot L Baltimore premiered in 1973 at Circle Repertory Theater in Greenwich Village, it quickly became an award-winning landmark, bringing heightened awareness of New York City’s burgeoning off-Broadway theater scene, and endowing it with a newly recognized distinction. If you’ve never seen it, the current production by T. Schreiber Studio is an excellent chance to get to know this legendary play. What an evocative title!
A group of archaeologists and others attached to them are holed up in and around what’s referred to as a modest, rustic cabin — but the set presents us with a vast lodge — engaged in excavating a series of mounds in Illinois left by pre-Columbian tribes. Early in the play our sympathies fall with them, as high minded scholars seeking to advance knowledge about an early civilization, led by the august Professor, August Howe. But the play is clever in that the self-interested local, a macho brute of a guy, Chad Jasker, who wants to make his fortune developing the land, gains on our sympathies, or at least our understanding, at the same time that we are learning more and more about how crude and self centered he is.
How many plays have been written as family sagas centering around who gets the house! It all goes back to the Greeks, e.g. Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The question is right up there with who gets the girl or guy.
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