Radicals’ Reunion: The Fifth of July at the Provincetown Theater

The Fifth of July is chronologically the last in Lanford Wilson’s trilogy of major plays about Missouri’s Talley family. The first act takes place on the evening of Independence Day in 1977, the second the morning after. Both the title and the timing point to a sort of emotional hangover the country experienced in the wake of the Vietnam War.

That timing is evident in the early-70s era music that greets audiences at the start of The Fifth of July, now at the Provincetown Theater through May 31, directed by David Drake.

We first meet Ken Talley (James Cerne), a Vietnam veteran who lost both legs during the war; he’s worried about going back into teaching—which would mean staying in the family home in Lebanon, Missouri, that he owns—or leaving to take on a more anonymous life in a city somewhere. His partner Jed (Ian Futterer), a botanist, is deeply invested in the family homestead, as he’s been planting and tending to the property’s gardens.

The usually quiet house is full of opinionated people, as visiting for the holiday are Ken’s sister June (Madelyn Barr), her 13-year-old daughter Shirley (Raea Ivey), longtime friends John and Gwen Landis (Nathaniel Hall Taylor and Sara Fitzpatrick), Gwen’s guitarist Wes Hurley (Andrew Clemons), and finally Ken and June’s aunt, Sally Friedman (Jen Zee). They’ve gathered presumably for the Fourth of July and for a memorial service for Aunt Sally’s husband on the fifth. Sally has been carrying the ashes around with her for too long… and still seems uncommitted to scattering them at all.

It takes a while to catch on to who’s who and what’s happening here—the first act is mainly confusing—but eventually the audience understands that Gwen, heiress to a copper fortune and aspiring country-music star, wants to buy the family home from Ken and transform it into a recording studio. She has her husband John’s support—we learn eventually that he’s Shirley’s father and wants custody—as well as that of Wes, who spends most of the play moodily playing his guitar.

The play’s tension comes from the interactions among Gwen, John, Ken, and June, who all shared a past of student activism and sexual experimentation at Berkley; but that closeness has been shattered and is most apparent in the gulf between Ken and the rest of the group—after Berkeley, he went to Vietnam. “I never knew why,” he says sadly, and that sadness isn’t really explored until well into the second act, mostly due to the sheer chaos generated by the competing personalities that have taken over his house.

Costume designer Thom Markee has done an excellent job of imagining clothing that befits the time (when most fashion statements were pretty much mistakes) and the personalities; his work in particular with Wes’ stoner character and John’s alpha male persona are well done. Christopher Ostrom has provided a set that is flexible but folksy, the perfect background for the firestorm it can’t quite enclose.

“We have to learn something from a folktale,” says one of the characters, and there’s a sense of that yearning throughout the play. Wilson has some conceptualization of what he wants his audiences to learn from his story, too, but aside from the somewhat tired message of looking ahead rather than back, it’s difficult to discern what that lesson might be. Still, one cannot fault the characters for trying to find it.

Photos: Bob Tucker, Focalpoint Studio

Review: Jeannette de Beauvoir