Apr 10 2003

Jill Jackson tells her life story from a sparse set that reflects her small-town roots: it's a little tattered, a little religious. But our attention is drawn to an ever-changing altar cluttered with the icons she's accumulated on the way to who she is. Jackson relates a story that reflects her entire life cycle, beginning with the crafty child who observes the workings of a crowded parking garage for a while before switching keys so her mother's car can exit in front of a long line of others, toward the prize of a yearned-for spaghetti dinner at Shoney's.

It's not that she's bad, she explains to a nun, just curious. This curiosity, coupled with the striving toward a spiritual understanding of the world she inhabits, makes her quite the Renaissance woman. She grabs her guitar to let you in on the rousing rendition of "Georgia on My Mind" that kept the boys at a rowdy biker bar where she had contracted to play from tearing her to shreds. Later, as an actor, she is forced to act with a snake called "Evie" and comes to cherish Evie so much she keeps her.

As the story progresses, we see a woman who never seems to stop striving. What sets this story apart from others is her seeming inability to take the modern road, the smooth superhighway toward the bankrupt city of Blame that seems to be a favorite stop on everybody's roadmap in the haughty 00s. It's just life, a very compelling one, presented "as though God is writing a cosmic comedy and you're the main character."

There are moments of tragedy in her story, of course, but we see them not as dead ends to a wasted life, but along with life's little triumphs, we are presented with an artistic texture that grabs our attention and holds it.

When the play ended I walked over to the set to look at the pictures on the wall, one of the little pleasures of small theater. There was a picture that leapt out at me, one that just about every religious person in Illinois found too compelling to keep off their paneled walls during the time of my youth: The old man sitting at his table behind a crust of bread, work-ravaged hands clasped in solitary prayer. The picture was always a reminder of a now-forgotten saviour who implored us not to be like the "hypocrites who pray loudly on the street corners," but to pray in private: "When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

With today's drumbeat of blame, religion's backtracking toward selective misreadings of the totalitarian rules-list of Leviticus, we are reminded every once in a while by intelligent folks to take stock, to pay attention not only to the shouts of riled-up throngs thirsty for the blood of perceived sinners, but to the silences that force us to look inwardly and take stock of who we are and where we're going. See (and take) A Long Drink of Silence at your earliest convenience.

A Long Drink of Silence plays at the Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter Street
between Powell and Mason, San Francisco.

Dates: April 4 - May 11
Times: Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 pm, Sundays at 3:00 pm
A Long Drink of Silence Website
Tickets at Ticketweb.com

~ by James Martin

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