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At first glance, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio appears unlikely as ideal material to be turned into a musical. A quasi-novel of intertwining short stories, published in 1919, after a lengthy gestation period in which the restless author moved out of his native Ohio, he set his sights on writing once he was seriously ensconced in the creative milieu of Chicago.  The book represented a literary and personal breakthrough for Anderson; yet for the rest of us, his stories-secrets, really, of a sort that Dostoevsky tossed off effortlessly, given the strong Russian stomach for tragedy-claimed a place for things not to be spoken about. Pederasty, older women yearning for young men, religious figures of authority deluding themselves about the temptations of lust, drinking, insanity, death: all of these private demons shape the small-town folk of Winesburg, few of whom can or will ever acknowledge their inner selves to anyone. Claustral, closeted, and clandestine-such self-doubts and self-loathings hardly constitute the romanticism of the lyrics to "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."

Yet Eric Rosen, the Artistic Director of the Kansas City Repertory Theatre, and his collaborators Andre Pluess, Ben Sussman, and Jessica Thebus, understand that the underneath elements of a musical can be dark, even frightening,. And that is apparent in their startlingly original production, which opened at the Kansas City Repertory Theatre on March 20. Good material comes from the most unlikely sources, as Stephen Sondheim has proven. Who could have predicted that the grim tale of a scalpel-swinging barber named Sweeney Todd would have produced so many beautiful songs? From Show Boat(racism on a plantation) to South Pacific (wartime racism), Grey Gardens (Jacqueline Kennedy's aging aunt and cousin who lived in a filthy mansion) to The Color Purple (the violent life of a Southern African-American woman), American musicals have added a unique extra layer to familiar (and unpleasant) material that deserves to be recognized in this liveliest of art forms. Auden might have written that no one was ever saved in a concentration camp by a poem, but a great singer who thrills an audience with "Ol' Man River" invokes an entire range of history, politics and culture in a single song-art's calling.

And so from the haunting opening, a train whistle cutting through a darkened wooden two-story set, the shadows of the roughly dozen actors who make up the citizens of Winesburg thrown in high relief, a feeling occurs that Rosen's creative team has found a way into this strangest of American classics. Strangely wonderful scenes are devised throughout the musical in a continuum of verve and nerve. The cast gathers around a bed pushed into the center, singing a repeated hum louder and louder, as an old man tosses and turns; suddenly, the singing stops, the singers withdraw, and the old man, known as The Writer (impressively acted by James Judy), stumbles forward to read from a notebook about "truths." 

In Anderson's prose it reads: "When the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were beautiful." Anderson's version continues: "It was the truths that made the people grotesques." Believing in their own truths, the alcoholic, the eccentric, the loner and the liar all wrap themselves in a fixed state, neither able to look back nor move forward. Grotesque, indeed: a view of individuals like statues or biblical characters frozen at the moment of sin. Rosen and his collaborators extend this eerie metaphor throughout the musical, from the scene in which the cast's raised arms recall wavering tree branches in a Washington Irving story (or a Tim Burton movie), to moments when the intricate walking-dance choreography halts, to the duets: the actors stand far apart from each other to emphasize their aloneness. 

The Writer introduces each character's story following Anderson's format in the novel: "concerning -," whereby Wing Biddlebaum's shaking hands and Enoch Robinson's artistic delusions and Rev. Hartman's wandering eye and the other characters' private grotesqueries are dramatized. One character in particular stands out: George Willard (Geoff Packard), the eighteen-year old son of a well-to-do businessman, Tom (Gary Neal Johnson), and a dying mother, Elizabeth (Leslie Denniston). 

George is Sherwood Anderson's alter ego in Winesburg, Ohio. The show's ending is a page torn from the author's own book of life; but Anderson gives his budding writerly self a dreamer's naïvité that separates him, just, from the other characters who cannot see past themselves. One recurring line George sings and then pauses, unable to continue, begins, "If only I could..." He does not finish it until the play's last scenes. Until then, as a cub reporter for the local newspaper who runs around asking people for news (which he then rewrites to sound grander), George is the musical's investigating angel; his flaw, though, is missing what is really happening between the daily exchanges of ordinary news-sometimes, as in his developing romance with a banker's daughter, Helen White (Ashlee LaPine), and a nervous more sexual awakening with an older teacher (Lesley Bevan), even when he is making his own news.

The songs have a Sondheimesque mood; they are interior monologues set to music. Remarkably, Rosen and company have enlivened Anderson's stark prose which was intended to be dreamy yet was also drab, e.g., [Enoch] "never grew up and of course he couldn't understand people and he couldn't make people understand him. The child in him kept bumping up against things, against actualities like money and sex and opinions." The songs convey something palpably human about Anderson's inexpressive characters, which read like robots of suffering. It is an achievement to take these turn-of-the-century characters and give them sympathetic shading so that sensibility which was black and white is now filled with the color of another century, where dreams appear differently in the telling but remain the same repositories of sadness and disappointment. 

This production at the Rep is neither reality musical theatre nor a new-age updating of the American Dream. Using much of Anderson's dialogue and action, Rosen stays within the original idea of a series of narrated portraits. It is when he and his production crew break through-as in Enoch Robinson's story, where a large frame drops and a group of actors playing New York aesthetes fill the empty space, posing in twisted tableaux that recall Thomas Hart Benton's figures (and then even more chilling, with their writhing fingers, a scene from Hieronymus Bosch)-that one senses Rosen is employing the fullest techniques of theatre. When the characters break into song in a stream-of-conscious way it sweeps along the theatergoer: the whole production is more than an attempted period musical or a postmodern revival-this is finer and closer to an operatic presentation. 

Sherwood Anderson was not the first writer to despise his hometown: Dante wrote The Divine Comedy to criticize his hometown rivals, and Joyce, though he left Ireland for good never ceased to write about it. There is still, I think, something quintessentially American about leaving home and then never leaving home, in a writer's mind, which has imprinted so much great literature on our psyche; perhaps it is because we founded our country as explorers, as runaways, as exiles. At the musical's end, George has seen through a glass darkly and what he has seen has changed him: it is time for him to leave. Through Rosen and his collaborators' imaginative reconfigurations and their hard-working ensemble's energy, George's leave-taking is not as heartbreaking as it might be. In keeping with both Anderson's and the musical's mysteries, the show ends not with a fake finalé but, rather, as it begins: darkness reigns, a train whistle sounds; only now George reveals a hint of a smile. 

     
REVIEW
Kansas City Repertory Theatre
Winesburg, Ohio
Directed by Eric Rosen
Running now through April 5 
Spencer Theatre 
4949 Cherry, Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-235-2700 or online at www.kcrep.org 

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.