History’s Human Face

War, mass murder, revolution: Studies of even history's most sweeping events come down to the interactions between individuals. Playwright Lee Blessing has unflinchingly explored people who are caught up in the larger machinery of contemporary history, as in 1987's study of U.S./U.S.S.R. relations in A Walk in the Woods and the following year's appraisal of the conflict between the West and the Middle East in Two Rooms. Blessing's 1996 play Going to St. Ives explores the interaction between England and Africa via a British doctor and a patient who is the mother of a brutal African dictator. Next Act Theatre stages a gripping production of Going to St. Ives at the Off-Broadway Theatre through Feb. 22.

Ora Jones, an ensemble member of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, plays May N'Kame, the mother of a vicious man. She has come to England seeking treatment for painful glaucoma from Dr. Cora Gage, one of the world's best ocular surgeons (played by Milwaukee Rep Resident Actress Laura Gordon). Gordon and Jones deftly animate a tightly written two-act script. The production interfaces elegantly with a script that has the feeling of being both highly rational and emotionally poetic.

N'Kame and Gage play point and counterpoint in an elaborate debate that navigates from England in the first act to Africa in the second. Both actresses do an impressive job of finding real emotions in the loftier, abstract concepts of Blessing's script and turning them into the organic, flesh-and-blood reality of two people who have so much in common and yet so much distance between them.

Director Mary MacDonald Kerr has put together a very lean production with near perfect pacing that is animated by the simple stage dynamic between two extremely talented actresses.