August Howe (David Conrad), his wife, Cynthia (Janie Brookshire), and his sister, D.K. (Danielle Skraastad), can’t separate the past from the present and the future in Signature revival of Lanford Wilson’s THE MOUND BUILDERS (photo by Richard Termine)
The Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through April 14, $75
212-244-7529
www.signaturetheatre.org
In 1970, Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone / They paved paradise / and put up a parking lot.” That essentially sums up Lanford Wilson’s The Mound Builders, currently being revived at the Signature Theatre. One of Wilson’s personal favorites and winner of the 1975 Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, The Mound Builders is not an easy play, as evidenced by a Q&A following the April 4 performance, when the dramaturg and members of the cast were barraged with questions from the audience about what they all just saw, what it meant, and why the first act “meandered, meandered, and meandered.” But the players handled it all in stride, as they do the show itself. The Mound Builders takes place in February 1975 in Blue Shoals, Illinois, where Professor August Howe (David Conrad) and his right-hand man, Dr. Dan Loggins (Zachary Booth), are leading an archaeological dig after the discovery of a pre-Columbian civilization that surfaced as construction crews came in to build a new hotel and resort center. The story is actually told in a series of flashbacks, as Howe dictates a slideshow onto a tape recorder for his assistant, the scenes unfolding after he introduces them for the unseen “Diane.” Howe and his wife, Cynthia (Janie Brookshire), who has taken all the photos, are staying with their young daughter, Kirsten (Rachel Resheff), in a home owned by Chad Jasker (Will Rogers) and his family, who are in line to make quite a windfall from the new development. Also in the house are Dan’s pregnant gynecologist wife, Dr. Jean Loggins (Lisa Joyce), and novelist D. K. “Delia” Eriksen (Danielle Skraastad), August’s deeply troubled sister who has recently been released from an institution. As August and Dan continue to uncover remarkable artifacts of the past, they fail to connect with the present, as the jittery Chad makes moves on Cynthia, Jean, and a clueless Dan, and a thunderous rainstorm threatens to flood the area.
Dan (Zachary Booth) and Chad (Will Rogers) toast to very different futures in THE MOUND BUILDERS (photo by Richard Termine)
Part of the Signature’s Legacy Program honoring the tenth anniversary of Wilson’s 2002-3 tenure as playwright in residence, The Mound Builders takes a while to get going, but once it does, it becomes a compelling character study that explores people’s needs and desires, from love, money, and sex to fame, family, and just plain acknowledgment. The ricketiness of set designer Neil Patel’s somewhat ramshackle wooden-slatted house corresponds well with the fragility of the characters’ relationships with one another, as secrets rise to the surface like the ancient objects August and Dan are obsessed with finding. Director Jo Bonney jumps up the action in the second act, in which the house is curiously askew from its previous position, foreshadowing what is to come between the characters. Although Wilson’s legacy — the Missouri-born playwright passed away in 2011 at the age of seventy-three — is being better served right now by the Roundabout’s wonderful revival of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly at the Laura Pels, The Mound Builders is still a more-than-able production of a complicated play. By the end, the characters indeed don’t know what they’ve got till it’s gone, each of their individual paradises paved over, lost forever.