Performances: A Twilight Performance of Spoon River Anthology (The Late Laureates of Laurel Hill ) (No Future Showtimes.)

Pulling up the rear in this edition of the Phillyist Philly-Live-Fringical-of-Arts Diary series we celebrate the ultimate Halloween pre-game. Just in time for CVS' pre-pre-trick-or-treating candy fest comes a reading from the dead in a place of the dead with a cast and audience pretty close to death themselves (I jest, of course. Respect your elders kids!)

A Twilight Performance of Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters strikes me as an unpretentious man. In his Wikipedia biography (the only sure source of credible common knowledge), the top quote attributed to him reads: "To put meaning into one’s life may end in madness."

Though his earlier years where filled with death, he seems bred to see the lighter side of life. He was preoccupied with satire, did biographies of Twain and Whitman, and in one of his best known works, shat on the hypocritical lifestyles of turn-of-the-century suburbia. Spoon River Anthology sounds like it was a scandalous read in its day, what with its insinuations that getting rich off the back of Indians was a bad thing and that some women actually want to have sex, all in the still-dark format of a series of posthumous monologues. Shit, for a well-known forty-something turn-of-the-century lawyer, the boy was pretty badass is you ask me.

Perhaps it's this realization that made the Laurel Hill Cemetery reading of his work so tragic. You really didn’t get much for the twenty bucks your friend and reporter, thankfully, did not have to pay. The short pieces often seemed to stop before they had even begun, and overall, the acting seemed wooden and forced. There were a few exceptions. Lisz Baron was funny, in character, and sincerely crazy as Eveleigh Loos, the town beggar, lover of booze, sex, and storytellers. And it was pretty there, what with huge valley surrounding the Schuylkill just beyond the stage of Laurel Hill Cemetery gravestones and the purple twilight looming above.

I don’t know – maybe I’m biased. It was a, how would you say, mature crowd of folks, mostly friends and family of the equally-ripe cast. And if you ask me, they seemed a little too impressed with their Iraq war and Philadelphia shootout references stuffed awkwardly into the original text. By the second giggle when a dead “lady of the night” talked about her “cold white bosom, treasonous, pure and hard,” I realized that this was basically the late middle aged equivalent of a elementary school play. Serious and proud, but ultimately made more for those involved than those watching. Whatever. In the end, the cast seemed to have a time of it, the friends hugged and smiled and poured a glass of picnic wine and your friend and reporter got to walk around a beauty of an old-time cemetery. I had passed it all my life and never gone inside. Who but a crowd of frolicking old people giggling about boobies to finally lure me in. Thanks Mr. Masters!