‘Dragon’ breathes life into romantic fantasy
by Eric Marchese
What would happen if a dragon were to alight upon earth, meet a human, and the two were to fall in love? Can such a romance endure?
This is the exotic territory of Jenny Connell Davis’ “The Dragon Play,” receiving a heady workout at Chance Theater’s recently opened second stage.
In its Southern California premiere, directed by veteran Chance director Marya Mazor, “The Dragon Play” is also brain-teasing. It can be cryptic – but it’s also starkly haunting, and richly rewarding for those who follow it closely.
The 2012 play unfurls two dragon-human stories in parallel. The first takes place “Now,” in an isolated house in Minnesota in winter. The lives of a couple (Keiko Elizabeth, John J. Pistone) are disrupted by an unexpected visitor (J.B. Waterman) from the woman’s past.
The second story takes place “Then,” 23 years earlier, in Central Texas in summertime. A teen boy (Gasper Gray) and girl (Elena Murray) meet and fall in love.
There’s just one catch, and it’s a whopper – the girl is a female dragon temporarily grounded by a broken wing.
As we soon discover, the stranger in the present-day story is also a dragon. Years earlier, he and the woman were in love. One day, he flew off, and she promised to wait for him – but after three years with no contact, she accepted the marriage proposal of a carpenter (Pistone).
Something of a parallel scenario is shown in the past when Dragon Girl (Murray) regains the use of her wing. Requiring unfettered freedom, she flies away, promising to return. In the eight years that elapse before her return, Loser Boy (Gray) matures, harboring doubts about her love for him.
Davis artfully uses the differences between dragons and humans to examine love, loyalty and commitment. One is the way time’s passage is perceived: While a handful of years can be substantial to a person, it’s a mere flash for dragons, who live to age 2,000.
The interactions of “teen” Dragon Girl (she’s 312 years old) with Loser Boy are mostly sweet and playful, creating a dramatically sound contrast with the tension and profound issues surrounding the older couple and the woman’s dragon ex-lover.
The drastic, life-changing course the Woman selected in settling down underscores two opposing lifestyles – one of security and certainty, but with no surprises, and one of excitement and glamor but without stability or family.
Dragon’s presence creates tension within and between all three characters. The Woman still hasn’t forgiven him for not returning sooner. He’s unhappy she didn’t wait longer. And the Man, while still in the dark, knows his commitment to his wife and to their lives together gives him something of an edge.
The “Then” and “Now” stories are connected, of course – but not necessarily in the way you might think. The play’s tying together of seemingly unrelated elements is evidence of Davis’ consummate playwriting skills, and the climactic revelation is a surprise worthy of a great episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
The fable-like nature of “The Dragon Play” is kept aloft by the script’s fanciful, often poetic dialogue and the use of generic names for the characters, much as you’d find in a fairy tale. The language generates imagery that revolves around the extremes of scorching fire and numbing, icy cold.
Elizabeth’s Woman is a study in self-reflection, struggling to choose what will satisfy her heart. She needs warmth from her physical surroundings but, even more so, in the form of emotional affection.
There’s a lot more to Man than meets the eye, and the stocky, bald-pated Pistone uses a soft Southern accent to imbue the role with external courtesy cloaking a core of keen perception – and a not-unreasonable demand of unwavering devotion from his wife to equal his own.
Waterman and Murray’s dragon personas are mercurial beings not easily defined through language. Waterman’s generally cool-headed Dragon shows flashes of intense yet controlled fury, and Murray’s Dragon Girl is an elegant and alluring but often mysterious creature.
Perhaps most affecting is Gray’s winningly ingenuous Loser Boy, who is still too young to have allowed life to scar him, and seems incapable of being permanently wounded, at least emotionally, by Dragon Girl.
Davis has invested her play with both the delicacy and brutality you’d expect of great literature. As seen at Chance, while “The Dragon Play” isn’t necessarily a great work of theater, what Davis does with her chosen material is something magnificent to behold.
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