UPLIFTING: “Primary Trust,” the final play of the season at McCarter Theatre, is about renewal and community. From left are DeShawn Harold Mitchell as Kenneth, and Peter Bisgaier, in one of the three different roles he takes. (Photo by Mikki Schaffner)
By Anne Levin
In Primary Trust, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Eboni Booth that closes out the season at McCarter Theatre May 8-25, actor Peter Bisgaier plays three different roles. To his delight, none of them are villains.
“As a 50-year-old white man, my place in the theater nowadays is often to play not very nice people,” said Bisgaier, whom local audiences may recognize from his work with Pegasus Theatre Company in West Windsor and, later, Bordentown; and Passage Theatre Company in Trenton. In Primary Trust, he plays a banker, a bookshop owner, and a third character he leaves for audiences to discover.
“I have a history of playing, in the best case, someone who is overwrought and bossy, and in the worst case, someone who is quite racist or awful,” he said during a phone interview last week. “So playing characters who are nice and supportive is great.” more
I’ve always been interested in poetry and poets that show up in unexpected places. And, as happened recently with another national recognition month, I’d forgotten that April was National Poetry Month. Even so, given my sense of poetry as a gift not necessarily confined between the covers of a book, I inadvertently signaled the subject this month with pieces featuring a great poet named Charlie Chaplin (who W.C. Fields, a poet himself, called a “ballerina”); a lesser known “disappearing” poet (Weldon Kees); and the greatest of them all, on the stage or the page or in the air, William Shakespeare. The one sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s I know by heart is from his essay “The Poet”: “The people fancy they hate poetry, and they are all poets and mystics.”
Even before I read about those advertisements in Edward Tenner’s new book Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays on Unintended Consequences (American Philosophical Society Press $34.95), my interest in vintage cigarette ads had been stirred by a Broadhurst Theatre Playbill from 1934, three years before May 6, 1937, the day the Hindenburg crashed and burned on landing at Lakehurst N.J. Naval Air Station, killing 35 of the 97 passengers. By specifying the proportion of fatalities, Tenner leaves it up to us to assume that most of the victims were in the smoking lounge at the time (“under 7 million cubic feet of flammable gas”), a possibility underscored by a pointed reference to satirist Bruce McCall’s drawing of a Hindenburg prospectus showing a skeleton in an officer’s uniform asking elegant passengers, “Zigarette?”
I’d agree with Agee if I hadn’t just seen Fields at his flinching, cringing, fumbling, pugnacious, masterfully disoriented best in the 1926 silent The Old Army Game, which also offered actual visual details (cars, stores, streets, small town America) to compare to the period recreation in Paramount’s recent series 1923. Given Chaplin’s immense popularity in those days, it was interesting to watch his 1923 silent feature The Pilgrim alongside Taylor Sheridan’s brilliant prequel to Yellowstone at a time when theaters all over the country, including one in Billings, Montana, would have been screening the latest Chaplin. And since The Pilgrim opened in New York in late February 1923, I’m taking the liberty of installing it in a Times Square movie house on the day that 1923’s embattled heroine Alexandra Dutton arrived in America.
