 How
do you start your life as a Bolshevik and end up a Catholic?
South
Bay
playwright
Cathal Gallagher
asks that question in "Malcolm and Teresa," his absorbing new
play having its world premiere at the Historic Hoover Theater in
San Jose, presented by Quo Vadis Theater Company.
The Irish-born Gallagher, now a
South
Bay
resident, is the author of ten plays. Much of his work deals with
questions of religion and spirituality.
"Malcolm and Teresa" tells the tale of an atheist on a spiritual
quest. The play follows the life of leftist British journalist Malcolm
Muggeridge, who came of age at
Cambridge
University
in the 1920s when the college was an incubator of radical political
thinking that spawned sympathizers to the idealistic values of the new
Soviet political system.
In 1933, when the Manchester Guardian sent its reporter Muggeridge to the
Soviet Union, he stumbled upon Josef Stalin's intentional political strategy to starve
to death several million Ukrainians and other Soviets.
That experience wrecked Muggeridge's communist buzz. His stories about the
famine ostracized him from such trendy Soviet sympathizers as George
Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Jean-Paul Sartre, Upton Sinclair and Theodore
Dreiser.
Years later, as a host for BBC television, Muggeridge interviewed a
then-unknown
Calcutta
activist named Mother Teresa, who worked with millions of famine victims.
Her way of experiencing the tragedy of global famine became an influence
on Muggeridge's own spiritual journey.
"Malcolm and Teresa" is
a play for thinking people. It deals with big themes. How, the atheists
ask, can there be a God in a world in which millions of people starve to
death?
On the other hand, is education alone enough to teach people right and
wrong, without any guiding spiritual belief? What is the relationship
between spirituality and social activism?
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"Malcolm
and Teresa" flashes back and forth in time between the BBC studios in
the 1960s and Malcolm and Kitty Muggeridge's
Manchester
parlor room in the 1930s. There are also episodes in
Moscow
and
Calcutta
.
In some ways its simplistic structure, a mix of expositional and dramatic
scenes, feels like the genre known as story theater.
Occasionally the play revisits issues without pushing them forward into
new territory, such as in multiple accounts of the left's reluctance to
look at Stalin's murder program.
But because its thematic issues are so big, in the end "Malcolm and
Teresa" manages to be both charming and engrossing.
Gallagher is an old-school guy, and the scenes from Muggeridge's
Manchester
household in the 1930s feel like scenes out of the British and Irish
family living room dramas of the first half of the 20th century. This is a
very interesting piece of 20th century British social history.
Quo Vadis' world premiere is a grass-roots community production. In
director Dennis Marks staging, actor Kevin Kennedy successfully sells an
empathetic Muggeridge. Diana Hoffman portrays his spiritual interlocutor
Mother Teresa.
Other characters include outspoken wife Kitty Muggeridge (Mimi Ahern), who
sees herself as "more red than Malcolm." Patricia Cross is
effective as Beatrice Webb, Kitty's communist sympathizer aunt, who cuts
off relations with Malcolm after his reports on the famine.
Muggeridge friend and spiritual catalyst Alec Vidler (Dan O'Connell) is
the Anglican priest who describes his Christian socialism as a program in
which he is "to preach the gospel and vote Labor."
"Malcolm and Teresa" is the story of a spiritual quest. I'm
giving this three and half stars out of four, because the big questions
that the play asks overcome the staging limitations that often go along
with community theater.
If you want an unusual evening that challenges you to think, check out
"Malcolm and Teresa."
Rating: Three and a half stars |
