Forget the “one ring to rule them all.” At the Wells, at least until this show ends on Nov. 6, theatricality rules.
And what, pray tell, do we mean by “theatricality”?
No inkling of an answer?
(Please imagine “pray tell” and “inkling” in the voice of the South African-born Oxford don John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1892-1973, who published “The Hobbit” in 1937 and the “Ring” trilogy in 1954-55, and with C.S. Lewis belonged to a men’s literary group called the Inklings.)
We mean some low-tech, highly imaginative stagecraft and agile acting. “Theatricality” is the elusive answer to every fantasy fiction fan’s question: “How do they plan to pull that off on a stage?”
For an audience accustomed to Peter Jackson’s cinematic, computer-generated miracles, how will the Virginia Stage Company manage to conjure Gollum (played by half-masked Anna Sosa nicely hissing, “My Preciousss!”)? How will VSC create visible/invisible hobbits, dwarves, elves, goblins, wolflike wargs, giant spiders and a dragon, without simply projecting a CG film on the theater’s back wall?
Director Billy Bustamante recognized the problem early on and went for an unexpected answer. He punted the fantasy football by saying, as noted in the playbill, “My duty was not to fulfill expectations but to challenge them.” He’d been handed, pre-pandemic, a serviceable stage adaptation by Greg Banks — one of a dozen dramatic and/or musical efforts to capture Tolkien for the stage (not to mention the scores of adaptations for radio, ballet, opera, TV, gameboards, computer games, Lego sets, etc.). Banks uses tried-and-true story theater techniques: One main narrator, in Bilbo Baggins (youthful but assured Jeffrey A. Haddock), occasionally addresses the audience but steps right back into the current temporal flow, sometimes all within one line.
Bilbo shares plot-precipitating duties with the forward-and-backward-seeing wizard Gandalf (the perspicacious Alana Dodds Sharp), plus nine other double- or triple-cast dwarves, trolls, elves, goblins and even humans — some played by Equity pros (Ryan Clemens as Balin, for example) but others by stalwart young actors from the Governor’s School for the Arts, which is “right next door” to the Wells, as Producing Artistic Director Tom Quaintance mentions in his curtain speech. (Note: GSA is on a talent tear. A different, equally gifted batch of GSA students just starred in “Grease” for Virginia Musical Theatre at the Sandler, in Virginia Beach.)
The plot Gandalf semi-engineers is a simple series of perils: One reluctant hobbit and 13 dwarves overcome trolls, goblins, spiders, wood elves, underground imprisonment, and one big fat dragon, with the goal of winning a lost kingdom and vast treasure of silver and gold. But there’s nothing simple about the Tolkienian ethics being hammered out on this forge. More on that to come.
And so, director Bustamante went for a stripped-down, unmasked theater-walls set (bare except for a giant circle, remarkably reminiscent of the one just used, albeit differently, at Virginia Opera’s “The Valkyrie.” Coincidentally, Tolkien despised Wagner.) Onstage, Josafath Reynoso left us a stripped-down remnant of his very own staircase from the VSC’s most recent production, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” with lots of nice hiding shadows beneath it and space for wooden boxes and benches for later use in Bilbo’s house party, to serve as ponies and such.
For cool lighting, especially those shadows and a swell invisibility effect, credit Christina Watanabe, and for cool sound effects (especially Gollum’s voice) thank Steven Allegretto.
And while we’re still at it, how does one do low-tech, theatricality-inducing costuming? Jeni Schaefer went for a well-worn L.L. Bean timeless/timely outdoor look, accented with a hooded cape, if you’re a hobbit, and touches of bare arms and leather for a dwarf king such as Thorin (the talented and tall-for-a-dwarf Thomas Hall).
Thorin becomes a key role when it comes to Tolkienian ethics — the aspect of this production of most interest to adults who may have outgrown an interest in monsters. Both Bilbo and Thorin are on a quest to learn trust in themselves and in others. As Gandalf advises her struggling students, “You don’t need magic. You have each other. That’s more important than magic.”
Bilbo, of course, is ever the reluctant hero, who longs throughout for his armchair and hot cocoa. He perks up, however, once out in the world and given his “bad boy” sobriquet of “bandit.” (We suspect he always had a touch of larceny in him.) Thorin begins his learning quest with intentions of sharing his treasure with all his allies but finds himself consumed by mistrust and greed that lead, as they often do, to death and destruction: here, the Battle of the Five Armies. And for what? Gold, pride, paranoia?
Critic Jes Battis suggests that Tolkien knowingly mixes his genres — epic, romance, pastoral and fantasy — while also using his different species metaphorically. The hobbits represent “colonial subjects” invariably misjudged by others despite being our “primary lens” for seeing Middle-earth. The elves represent “written culture”; the dwarves are “industrialists”; and here in “The Hobbit” the rarely appearing humans of Lake-town are “failed interlocutors.” Thorin admittedly doesn’t give them much of a chance to succeed in that role.
Thorin’s fate and the “socialist” solution to wealth distribution are something expert Tolkienians already know about, and theatergoers should have the chance to see for themselves. That doesn’t relieve us of the nagging sense that some species (say, goblins, trolls, wargs) are definitely less worthy of life than others. Save the wargs?
Until then, let the questions flow ...
“Does the VSC’s hobbit have oversized bare feet (like his Harfoot cousins on TV’s ‘Rings of Power’)?”
Since you mentioned TV, you’ll have to buy a ticket to answer that one.
“But how do they create a giant spider and a lethal flying dragon for theater?”
Would you believe it’s all done with bendable foam rods and trash bags? Plastic sheets are used a good deal as well. (A move to cloth might better suit the aesthetes and environmentalists among us.) Watch for the eagle rescue by air. That and the giant spider are my particular favorites.
One principle — theatricality — to rule them all.
