Wild Blessings: A Celebration of Wendell Berry, the sixth and final full-length work in this year's 33rd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theater of Louisville, is a gorgeously conceived tribute to the Kentucky farmer/poet/novelist/essayist renowned, as well, for his environmental concerns.
Adapted for the stage by ATL artistic director Marc Masterson (he also directed) and dramaturg Adrien-Alice Hansel, Berry's poems spring to dramatic life through song, dance, fiddle/guitar/dulcimer playing, and recitation by characters described as older woman and man (Helen-Jean Arthur and Larry John Meyers) and younger counterparts (Tracy Conyer Lee and Phil Pickens). Composer and hammered dulcimer player Malcolm Dalglish, who contributed original music and earlier arranged and recorded numerous Berry poems, also takes part. Dalglish's physical resemblance to a younger Berry is striking.
The stage pictures that result are breathtaking in beauty and simplicity as devised by video designer Donna L. Lawrence and augmented by stunningly effective lighting from Brian J. Lilienthal and sound from Matt Callahan on Michael B. Raiford's set. Looming over it are Lawrence's large-screen projections of fertile fields, shoulder-to-shoulder big-city street crowds, sunsets and flowing streams. In front is a large framed window showing significant details such as flowers, a tobacco barn, and tractor.
Berry's poems celebrate joy in hard work well done, love, marriage, friendship, stewardship of the land, order, grace, neighborliness, and the inevitable passage of time. No Pollyanna, however, Berry threads his work with earthy humor (a plowman's plowing extends to the minister's wife) and he rails against society's ills and ignorance in his "Mad Farmer" guise.
These "Mad Farmer" poems provide a gritty spine to the homespun verities Berry trumpets. And they turn out to be a prescient commentary on current economic and political problems, heartily applauded by the opening night audience in "Some Further Words" spoken by Meyers. To wit:
"Economics is not 'science,' nor information 'knowledge.' A knave with a degree is a knave. A fool in a public office is not a 'leader.' A rich thief is a thief An intellectual whore is a whore Ceaseless preparation for war is not peace I think an economy should be based on thrift, on taking care of things, not on theft, usury, seduction, waste, and ruin."
Berry, with his dedication to nature, might have been a latter-day Thoreau isolating himself at his Henry County family farm where his great grandfather's slaves worked the fields -- "I am owned by the blood of all of them who ever were owned by my blood," he says. But this thoroughly admirable man chose instead to engage with the world through his writing and speaking.
In a crisply powerful poem that serves as a prologue to what follows, musician Dalglish quotes these lines:
"To be sane in a mad time
Is bad for the brain, worse
For the heart. The world
Is a holy vision, had we clarity
To see it -- a clarity that men
Depend on men to make."
(Wendell Berry).
