I found H. Michael Walls thoroughly convincing as a speaker and seat-of-his-pants philosopher... in all but one crucial aspect.In some biographical one-handers about artists or celebrities, the performer is there and we're not (Robert Morse as Truman Capote, alone in his penthouse, talking into a tape recorder). In others, the performer invites us in (Julie Harris, as Emily Dickinson, inviting us into her house to sample her pound cake). In others, the performer plays a performer who performs for us (Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, James Whitmore as Will Rogers, Avery Brooks as Paul Robeson), and we pretend that we're a theater audience during the McKinley, Coolidge or Eisenhower administrations.
In John Pielmeier's Willi at the Arden, H. Michael Walls, as philosopher/ mountain climber/ Outward Bound executive Willi Unsoeld, asks us to believe that we're a theater audience at the Arden in Philadelphia in 1996. Never mind that Unsoeld died on a mountain top in 1979. We're watching a performance that's pretending to be a performance -- well, not a performance but a motivational lecture-demonstration, the sort of thing that plays to corporate executives at regional sales conventions.
Judging by Walls' performance, Unsoeld was one hell of a motivational speaker, philosophizing about being "in touch with the sacred" via nature. And he has some fascinating stories to tell, not the least of which was his climb, along the treacherous west ridge, to the summit of Mount Everest with the first American expedition.
And I found Walls thoroughly convincing as a speaker and seat-of-his-pants philosopher. (This was a pleasant surprise: when Walls played Thomas Eakins some years ago for Novel Stages I didn't believe his philosophizing about art for a minute).
I believed him completely here... in all but one crucial aspect.
The key to Unsoeld's evangelical credo about mountain climbing is that we have become alienated from our bodies and our "selves" because we're alienated from nature; that the experience of nature is so mysterious, so powerful and so fascinating that it cannot be put into words; that intense experience, to the point of putting your life at risk, is a path to discovering your bliss. He argues repeatedly that words cannot substitute for experience; to prove his point he even drags an audience member onto the stage (a foundation executive with one of the Arden's principal funders the night I saw it) to do a simple physical trust exercise.
But the play's format, and Aaron Posner's production, stand in the way of the audience getting Unsoeld's point. The performative fiction of the evening is, ironically, too complete. Walls is introduced to the audience (by a theater intern, after a subscription pitch) as though he were Unsoeld. He shows us slides of the real Everest expedition, of Unsoeld's real climbing partners, of Unsoeld's real daughter, of Unsoeld's real frost-bitten toes, as though they were his.
But of course Walls isn't Unsoeld. They're not his slides. They're not his toes.
In traditional theater (when it really works), actors convince us that they are actually experiencing something. In Willi, I believed that Walls was thinking Unsoeld's thoughts and believing Unsoeld's ideas. But, through no fault of the actor, I never believed that the experiences he was telling us about were his. The production's pretense of verite could only take me so far; but it couldn't get me past the basic theatrical artifice of an actor playing a role.
As Unsoeld tells us, there's simply no substitute for real personal experience.
-- Cary M. Mazer