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As Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre's fifth season winds towards closure, it continues to reveal through its penultimate offering - 2002's Mappa Mundi by Shelagh (pronounced like the American "Sheila") Stephenson, directed by Bob Paisley - increasing maturity and depth. This is perhaps the best casting I have seen, to date. Allan Boardman (as Jack Armstrong), Katie Gilchrist (Anna Armstrong) and Hughston Walkinshaw (Michael Armstrong) are particularly solid.

So, what would the map of your life look like? Not your family tree...but the map of "you"? Reflecting on that map, would you like what you saw? And what might Schrödinger's Cat, parallel universes and the particle-wave theory have to do with that analysis? Such are the end-of-life reflections that face 76-year-old Jack Armstrong - and reflections that make Mappa Mundi more than the average thinking-person's dramatic comedy. I don't know how one admits to being a quantum physics aficionado without sounding either geekish, pretentious, or both - but this play certainly pushed all the right buttons for me.

Rejecting a handful of books loaned to him by Father Ryan (Alan Tilson), Jack settles on the one dealing with the mind-bending theories of the universe in order to try to put his own life into perspective. Rather than drawing comfort from religious texts, or Father Ryan himself, Jack seeks to find solace in the concepts that deal with alternative states of existence:  Schrödinger's Cat being at once alive and dead; sub-atomic structures that exist as both particles and waves; alternate realities and universes arising from the infinite number of outcomes from any single event. As utterly unrelated as those may seem in the context of a story about a lonely, dying man, Stephenson's impressive script - under Bob Paisley's solid direction - comes together with cosmic believability.

The impressive thing about Stephenson's writing is that the play is very much about the "usual" end of life reflections one might expect of someone like Jack: Was he a good husband? A good father? A good person? What - if anything - awaits him in the afterlife? If he could take something back, or do something over again, would he? And, if so, what would it be? I suppose one could criticize the sheer depth of Stephenson's sub-atomic analogies, but I would rather praise her for being willing to assume an intelligent, well-versed audience, while at the same time taking care to put just enough context around such arcane concepts to allow even the less-quantum-inclined theatre-goer to grasp their relevance.

Wrapped up in all of this is the central mystery (which, ironically, has nothing to do with the afterlife or Einstein or cats...) about why Jack seems so reluctant to embrace his white daughter's black fiancé, Sholto (Mykel Hill). Is Jack just your garden-variety racist or is there something deeper going on? As usual, I risk ruining an excellent theatre-going experience by revealing too much, other than to say that things are definitely not what they first appear to be.

Through the course of the play, we see Jack - played with impressive depth by Allan Boardman - attempting to come to grips with his mortality (as the play opens, we learn he has maybe three months to live). In doing so, he eventually manages to conquer ghosts from his past (with the help of Sholto's mother, Portia, played by Donette Coleman), and this allows him to more easily accept the reality of Anna's impending interracial marriage to Sholto. Granted, there are glimpses of outright racism - but as one gets to know Jack better, it becomes increasingly evident that these are more likely light-hearted teasings at Sholto's expense, rather than anything sinister or hateful. And the revelation Jack admits to Portia goes a long way towards explaining what at first could easily be mistaken for racism.

The ensemble worked near-perfectly, and I was especially mesmerized by the endearing curmudgeon that Boardman brings out as Jack Armstrong. I could barely take my eyes off of Katie Gilchrist as Anna Armstrong - the unique combination of her carriage and excellent British accent revealing a startling similarity to a young Kate Winslet.

Hughston Walkinshaw's Michael Armstrong (Anna's brother) held his own against the strong main characters, and his dry, comedic wit was well-timed. Overall, the British accents (and Donette Coleman's Caribbean accent) held up well, with but an occasional hint of "American" and "Midwest" slipping through in Sholto and Jack, respectively.

During the opening minutes there were a few noticeable timing problems with dialogue, where the characters would step over each other, but everyone recovered well and once they hit their stride things smoothed out nicely. Similarly, in a few instances I felt that Alan Tilson's Father Ryan delivered his lines with an overly static posture that could have benefited from a more natural presentation.

Set Design (Bob Paisley) provided an excellent palette for the story's backdrop and was visually engaging on its own, with the actors making good use of the available space. Having read the script ahead of time I was particularly curious to hear how the play's opening "soundtrack" would be conveyed - "wild fiddle music plays, African drums, Northumbrian pipes...the music is at once familiar and strange, a mix of English traditional, Irish, African, Asian, Eastern" - and composer Thom Proctor captured it as well as I could have imagined.

To this point in Season 5 Mappa Mundi is by far my favorite MET production (season finale "The Light on the Piazza" opens May 20), as it brings together in one effort the best this resilient theatre has to offer: diverse repertoire, dedication to quality, excellent core and outside talent, resourcefulness, unbridled artistic passion, and a "tangibility" that gets lost in the area's larger venues.

Reflecting on the map of its own half-decade existence, MET should be very pleased with what it sees. Unlike Jack Armstrong, they have little need for cryptic feline thought experiments in order to validate itself:  MET is clearly alive, vibrant and well.

REVIEW:
Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre
Mappa Mundi
by Shelagh Stephenson
Directed by Bob Paisley
Runs April 8 - April 25 (Reviewed Friday, April 9)
MetSpace
3614 Main Street
Kansas City, MO  64111
For tickets call 816-569-3226 or online at www.metkc.org

Cover photo: Hughston Walkinshaw and Allan Boardman in the MET'S "Mappa Mundi" Photo by Bob Paisley.

By Christopher Guerin

Traditional and New Classical music, and Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Christopher Guerin holds degrees in Music Education, Music Business, and Music Theory & Composition, the latter from the University of Massachusetts (Lowell) College of Music where he co-founded the college's Composers' Guild, and, in 1985, won the Artin Arslanian Composition Award. During college, he also obtained some musical theatre experience as a member of pit orchestras for Threepenny Opera and My Fair Lady. Since 1989, Christopher has been in the very non-artistic corporate sector, where his creative energies have been put to more mundane endeavors 

Christopher credits his musical motivations to his late father, who was concertmaster of the Springfield (MA) Community (pre-cursor to the city's current Symphony) Orchestra and performed popular music on radio in the 1930s. Christopher began his classical training in 1972 at age 10, began teaching at 16 (continuing to take private students throughout college), and traveled extensively with a youth orchestra - including to New Zealand in 1980. After college, and until 1989, Christopher focused on the business end of music as a successful sales manager for one of New England's largest music chains.

Over the past 20 years, Christopher's expertise has focused on medicine as a life risk underwriting officer for a large Midwest insurance group. His past duties included responsibility for risk underwriting in Pacific Rim markets where he traveled extensively to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand and Burma. Time permitting, he has continued to compose intermittently throughout this period. Christopher is married to Paula, a fellow musician he met during college, and together they have "composed" their magnum opera in three very creative children - an architecture student (go K-State!), an aspiring classical pianist, and a budding writer/journalist. He and his wife relocated from Massachusetts to the Kansas City area in 1997.