There are few sets as enduring as that of the American diner. It’s never quite gone out of style and never quite stopped being synonymous with a kind of brash, lonely Americana. A little exotic, maybe, to a UK audience, but as the lights went up on the set of UMDS‘ It Speaks in American, the set was familiar. We have all been here before.
As have the five characters of the play, of course. Stuck as they are within ‘Levi’, what appears to be a miserable backwater town in the middle of an unclear rural landscape. Desert, maybe, in Montana.
There is firstly Malcom, server and wannabe preacher. An endlessly energetic performance from Owen Gunn, Malcom’s character is convulsive, overloud, and overwhelming, his aggressive evangelising matching the bold commercialism of the diner he works at in an unsubtle irony.
The target of his ranting is teenage communist Leon – Isaac Clifton styled like a twenty-year-old DiCaprio playing at Dean – who is apparently protesting the diner in the name of the great cause. Handcuffed to a table, Leon awaits trial from the sheriff-like figure of Truman (Harry Wopat), who would much rather be an astronaut. The lethargic, if persistent, defence is provided by Sammy (Angus Gordon), a softspoken local workman. The final judge is, of course, Leon’s mother Eleanor (Claudia Pope), owner of the only business in town (a billboard factory) and all-American capitalist ideal.
It is clear from the outset what writers Danial Grady and Masie Nichols are getting at. A collage of archetypes from the US of A at the height of its most memorable age of iconography during the Cold War, thrown together in the most American setting imaginable to argue and bluster at one another until they begin to go round and round in nonsense circles.
It’s a striking premise, charming in its set up and well executed with quick, witty writing and cohesive movement through the narrative – for the most part. The story slowly unfurls further, becoming overtly supernatural as it becomes clear that these characters are not dramatically archetypal, but rather stuck in their roles within their own world.
Details from their lives seem to have gone missing, either from their memories, or from reality, and as they struggle to hold on to parts of their identity, the play itself fractures into small scenes of separate movements and vignettes. Here the cohesion between one scene and the next can feel rough, but not so much as to reduce the effect of the narrative.
Each character has time to contemplate their own perspective, their accounts coming together to present the audience with a bleak picture of a half-unreal town. Ruled over by an unseen force that slots each individual into a role that they play as long as they remain unaware, before the whole world is reset and the parts redistributed among them. At the heart of the story is the factory owned by Eleanor, behind the doors of which lies, according to Leon and Sammy, something terrible.
It’s a captivating story, half metaphor and half supernatural thriller, made better by little flourishes of absurdity. Baseballs fall from the sky routinely in Levi – much to the excitement of Truman who, with a kind of endearing earnestness, calls them stars. There is also Malcom’s dream of being a movie star like Gene Kelly. It’s not quite clear whether his dynamic rendition of ‘Singing in the Rain’ is actually a fever dream – though it certainly feels like one for the audience – but it’s certainly memorable.
One standout performance was Angus Gordon, holding his own in an extended monologue as Sammy reflects on the nightmarish reality of Levi. His restrained emotion gives Sammy the distinct feel of something like a Steinbeck character, grounded in rurality – another cut out from the American literary canon of course, but one with great enough weight to give him real depth and feeling.
Set design and construction, as well as the consistently impressive and effective use of projected screens and pre-recorded video footage, are the highlights of this production. The videos and sound design in particular worked to make the eeriness of Levi come to life, and to solidify the nebulous ideas of a time loop and a supernatural evil.
It Speaks in American, with its evil factory that only makes billboards for itself, its diner-pulpit, its baseball-stars, and its rotting, blasted countryside, is not exactly subtle. It doesn’t really need to be, though: it’s a patchwork existentialist play that forgoes a structured plot or story to paint a vivid picture of the entropy of Americana.
Layered cutouts from the literary and visual canons of the most culturally influential country of the last century are mashed together until they become meaningless in a town where something that might be the actual devil from the bible lives in a factory and speaks, well, American.
