Faulkner’s Bicycle
Faulkner’s Bicycle is a play about all the means people use to escape their lives, and about the ways in which those means inevitably fail. Though that sounds frustrating and painful, and indeed constraint is the watchword of the evening–the space is tiny, and the house manager urges the audience to withdraw any errant feet from the aisle–the result is actually quite freeing. Heather McDonald’s characters may not get anywhere, but as Faulkner trumpets at the end of The Sound and the Fury about his characters, “they endure.” In Rivendell Theatre Ensemble’s production as in Faulkner’s novel, that endurance is lovely to see.
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Don’t be put off by the setup, which sounds like a joke: a family of women in 1962 in Oxford, Mississippi, become involved with their famous, famously eccentric neighbor. Faulkner has given up writing to spend his days ambushing the ladies of the town with tossed crab apples and his nights riding his bicycle into the local pond. Faulkner (Kent Reed) has writer’s block, as does the younger daughter of the family, Jett (Mary Cross), recently returned home. Mama (Diane Dorsey, splendid as always) is well on her way to complete senility, and older daughter Claire (Tara Mallen) spends her time caring for Mama and rereading Faulkner and Jane Eyre.
And if we end up in the water–whether like Mama in the bathtub or like Claire and Faulkner in the pond–that’s an opportunity to cleanse ourselves and start fresh. Jett hasn’t mastered this: faced with her incontinent mother shivering in her own excrement, Jett freezes, crying, “I’m not good with messes.” Claire’s sane and comprehensive reply: “Who is?” While the others follow the instructions of the gospel song, wading in the water for redemption, Jett sits on the shore with her toy boats waiting for the perfect vehicle to take her to “God’s celestial shore.” She’ll wait a long time, because as Mama announces, “Between a little grief and pain, and nothing, I’ll take grief.” Mama may be fading, but she remembers that those are the two choices.
