Circus of Pain

Sometimes things just come together: The right script finds the
right bunch of actors, the right director knows how to harness them all
together, the theater is precisely the right shape and size, and the
audience is full and generous. The room starts to hum and you forget
time’s passing. Only once you’re clapping do you notice that your
foot’s fallen asleep.

Elephant’s Graveyard, at Balagan Theatre, is one of those
productions—which, frankly, is a bit of a surprise. Since its
formation in 2006, the company has wandered up hills and into ditches
(its production of The Spinning, an “original S&M love story
musical written in iambic pentameter,” in 2007, was the kind of searing
disaster that tempts one to swear off theater forever), but this
production is the first time Balagan has stood on a mountaintop. In the
bar before the show, the bartender told a patron that the play was
“like being stabbed in the heart.” She wasn’t wrong.

Nothing radical or groundbreaking happens in Elephant’s
Graveyard—just meticulous, fantastic storytelling by a
midcareer playwright (George Brant), a young director (Jason Harber),
and a pack of veteran fringe actors. The script—based on a true
story about a traveling circus that, in 1916, stumbled into gory
disaster in a muddy Tennessee town—is, like the best art,
microscopically specific with echoes that radiate outward across time.
It conjures a world with its own atmosphere and terrible internal
logic. It’s mesmerizing.

The star attraction of Sparks Circus, led by a frustrated but
ambitious ringmaster, is Mary, America’s largest circus elephant.
Sparks brags that Mary is three inches taller than Jumbo. When the
circus comes to town, it stages a promotional parade. Everybody in
Erwin, Tennessee—the young and the old, the white and the
brown—turns out to watch. Then something awful happens, setting
off a story that I shy from telling because I want you to see this
play. And I want it to give you the same pleasure it gave me. Learning
what happens, and how, and how the 13 characters understand what
happens in different ways, is the primary pleasure of Elephant’s
Graveyard. It’s an old trick, but it works.

A wooden boardwalk runs across Balagan’s long, shallow stage with 13
actors split into three camps: six circus people (ringmaster, clown,
elephant trainer, et al.) on one side, six townies (the marshal, the
preacher, a local housewife, et al.) on the other, and a railroad
engineer in the middle. The circus people describe the gap between
their sparkly, presentational surfaces and the muck of their lives. The
ringmaster, a world-weary and resonantly smoky-voiced Michael Blum, is
trying to keep up with his competition. The clown, played by a menacing
Chris Bell, his face stretched into a rictus, snarls sardonically about
hard labor and heartbreak.

The depressed townies have their own problems: The sensitive
preacher (Samuel Hagen) can’t find parishioners, the housewife (Joanna
Horowitz) is driven to distraction by Erwin’s persistent yellow mud,
the local steam-shovel operator (a wild-haired and wild-eyed Ryan
Higgins) drinks his tedium away. The townies need a diversion in the
worst way, and the circus needs their bored desperation. They all get
what they want at a terrible cost.

Ray Tagavilla, as the elephant trainer, is the show’s secret weapon.
The bulk of the tragedy hangs on his shoulders and he keeps the pathos
tightly reined in, signaling devastating emotions with a tiny pause or
a flick of his eyes. Tagavilla is a miraculous physical actor: So
controlled and crisply specific, he allows no room to doubt his
character. He rejects the presentational razzle-dazzle that rots so
many performances, and he’s allergic to mugging. His performance as a
tic-riddled office worker in Washington Ensemble Theatre’s recent
production of The Mistakes Madeline Made was a paragon of
restraint. Almost any other actor would’ve turned the character’s
compulsive gestures into cheap, Seinfeld-style caricature.
Tagavilla made them both pitiable and charming. He has only a
supporting role in Elephant’s Graveyard—but during the
play’s tragic conclusion, he sits upstage in the dark, quietly weeping
while other actors speak into the lights. The audience weeps with
him.

The production has flaws: The best actors are understated, just
telling their stories, but a few—like Sharon Barto as the
kid—stray into a cornball, gee-willikers burlesque of
their Podunk characters. And the script contains one pedantic,
spell-breaking monologue by the marshal about the awful effects of
American willpower.

But the total effect of the production is symphonic in its emotional
variations on a tragic theme. Elephant’s Graveyard buzzes with
truth about the consequences of misunderstanding, the invisible but
enormous gap between artists and their audiences, and the infernal
beauty of vaudeville. It is the best thing Balagan has ever done.