REVIEW: "ZACK AND ADA"

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Posted: October 10, 2009 - 12:03 am

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Before the action begins in “The Courtship of Zack and Ada,” a pair of interlocutors played by Lindsay Lamar and Dakota Younger come out and argue about whether what we’re about to see is an historical play or a romance.

It’s the latter, a very light romantic comedy filling 60 minutes or less -- into which a bunch of history has been inserted causing the whole play to last nearly two and a half hours.

Perhaps that’s inevitable given the infinite layers of detail, people, relationships and incidents that make up history. Playwright P. Shane Mitchell acknowledges as much in program notes where he admits he was cool to the proposal to write a play about statehood. He only decided to try it after he recalled a personal anecdote from the late Jerry Harper, whose mother, Ada, married millionaire Zachary Loussac, the mayor of Anchorage, in 1949.

David Haynes is well-suited to the role of cheerful, chummy, level-headed Zack, as good hearted a mensch as ever graced Anchorage. Ada is played by Heather Sawyer with convincing depth. They are likeable and credible, with lively hopes but no illusions. It’s their story that we care about here, a story of woo, doubt and, ultimately, finding the courage to love despite differences of station, age and a possibly cloudy past.

While hardly profound, it’s still the great story of the ages and we never get tired of it. The fact that Loussac ranks among Alaska’s greatest movers and shakers is interesting, but sort of beside the point – like the fact that we watch this play in Cyrano’s theater, right next to the former dress shop that Ada rented from Zack.

Blaze Bell and Frank Delaney play a range of actual personalities who intersected with the Loussacs, publisher Bob and Evangeline Atwood, politician Bill and Neva Egan among them. They present these varied parts adequately but with an unfortunate sameness. (The exception is the way Delaney eerily, and maybe unconsciously, reflects a bit of Ernest Gruening’s prim shuffle.) The roles may have been underwritten or at least underdeveloped as a matter of authorial oversight. However, they are subordinate to the leads and both actors are able to make their theatrical point when called on, as when Evangeline gives some practical dating advice to Zack.

Lamar and Younger, on the other hand, are intentionally over-the-top, interacting with the audience, giving out stars to those who correctly answer history questions, getting progressively drunk, sniping at each other, laughing at their own jokes and stepping in to flesh out scenes with assorted unnamed characters. They amuse, but they also distract from the core tale of boy-meets-girl. Never more so than when they recount the saga of Alaska from the purchase to statehood with rapidly-delivered dates and details.

These didactic episodes, however lighthearted in delivery, plod, which seems endemic to the form. The back-story monologues are where even Shakespeare’s historical dramas drag like a long chain on a lost dog.

The attempts to dramatize historical developments, showing rather than telling, work a little better, as when Zack lets something drop about his "meeting with the boys" in the middle of a tete-a-tete with Ada, for example. And if the theater piece alters the records for the sake getting through the material in less than three weeks, it’s a minor matter. Mitchell notes that the play “is a work of fiction BASED on historical fact. In certain cases some artistic license has been taken.” That’s something audiences accept when they buy their tickets, just as we accept that we’re watching actors, not the actual personalities named in the roles. (The interlocutors’ explanation of how we should suspend our disbelief is more expendable plodding.)

Different parties might argue loud and long about some of the grander political assertions that get made; the lay-up to statehood was phenomenally complex and Loussac was generally among the subtlest of politicians. And some scenes – the shooting of a lobbyist in front of Bill Egan in 1958 – well, if that happened, it never made it into any of the papers that year. There are also incidental anachronisms, several concerning the state of telecommunications in Anchorage prior to statehood, that are unlikely to ruffle anyone except extreme old-timers.

The really interesting history here comes from previously unrecorded personal tales that Mitchell has been able to ferret out, anecdotes known to friends of Jerry Harper’s but barely whispered by Zack and Ada’s circle of other movers and shakers during their lifetimes. In the play Ada is depicted as being a bit round-heeled. “Zack and Ada” may be the first public confirmation that she was twice-divorced, not the “Widow Harper” that the circle protectively projected when introducing the mayor’s bride.

The inclusion of such intimate details helps us care about Zack and Ada. So do some of Mitchell’s lines. Toward the end, Ada asks the aging Zack why he loves her. He talks about how much he loves the ice cream and red wine they always enjoy at the end of a day. “It’s sweet and it mellows me.”

“So you love me because I have ice cream and red wine with you?” says Ada.

“No,” he says. “I love you because you ARE ice cream and red wine.”

The corny line made every eye in the house a little damp. The “Awww” that came from the crowd as sincere a display of acting-audience connection I’ve witnessed in a while. I would have liked to see more of this, perhaps more exploration of the loneliness of two single people and the illumination that follows their discovery of each other.

Maybe real history isn’t about politics at all. Maybe it’s about how a boy can meet a girl and sometimes it all turns out.

“The Courtship of Zack and Ada” will continue Thurs. – Sun. through Oct. 25 at Cyrano’s, 413 D St. Tickets are available at centertix.net.

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