The intimate studio theater musical never gets as much attention as bigger shows. People come from a long way away and pay ridiculously large sums of money to sit very far away from traveling shows with big casts and huge budgets. It can be impressive seeing all those people and all those costumes and everything, but it’s largely quite empty. There isn’t the kind of power in that that there is with smaller musicals. Umbrella Group Theater is staging a really emotionally powerful, little one-actor musical in one of the most intimate spaces in Milwaukee as it hosts Timothy Huang’s The View From Here.
Doug Clemons plays a man who has moved to Manhattan. He’s written a novel. He’s living alone. He’s looking to sell the novel. We never see him with anyone else. As the audience, we are the fourth wall in his tiny, little apartment. There’s a window and a fire escape. A wall that gradually fills with prose written on scraps of paper. Opposite the window, Paula Foley Tillen plays piano. Bill Seaman is on trumpet.
Clemons is heartbreakingly exposed in an unfurnished room. The only thing to share the space with him there aside from his loneliness is the music. It’s a very operatic kind of solitude he’s engaged in. He sings of his struggles in trying to get published in a big, unforgiving metropolis. As his unseen audience, we are there to listen to his tragedies and frustrations. Clemons is heroically fearless here. 70 minutes and he’s the only one there to deliver this entire story. Seaman plays a couple of characters through trumpet alone and Tillen is there in piano accompaniment, but for the most part, it’s just him up there. For 70 minutes without intermission it’s just him and this story of a man trying to find himself. Really powerful stuff.
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The piece itself is roughly a decade old. It’s dealing with a story from probably slightly longer than ten years ago. It’s what the program refers to as “the not too distant past.” Odd that a piece as new as that feels a little bit like historical drama. Part of the deal here is that Clemons’ character has moved to New York to try to get published as a novelist. He’s walking around looking for an agent with a physical copy of his book.
While there IS romantic heroism in trying to move to New York to make it big as a novelist, it seems a little foolish. Nowadays you write and get published and the literary agents come to disappoint you. Maybe I’m reading a bit too much of myself into the plot, but going out to New York to be disappointed by literary agents (rather than allowing them to disappoint you) seems kind of strange and backwards. This WAS a different era, though. I know this line of distraction is me being disingenuous to the center of the conflict. It’s not really about being a writer at all. It’s about being human.
The View From Here is a story about who we are when we’re alone. Director Kelly Doherty was sharp to have found this struggle at the heart of the story. She and Clemons are delivering a story about a journey into discovering the most important things at the heart of human endeavor. We quickly learn that the protagonist is up against a deeper need to find himself. It’s a journey of solitude that matches the kind of solitude that any writer faces. Clemons makes it very organic and emotionally engrossing.
Umbrella Group Theatre’s production of The View from Here runs through Feb. 28 at the Soulstice Theatre on 3770 S. Pennsylvania Ave. For more information, visit Umbrella Group online.
