The Image Theater is interested only in new plays, and has since its founding in 2005 produced about 44 plays, mostly by writers who live in Massachusetts or, better yet, right in Lowell. And this world premier is presented quite logically in the upstairs common-room of The Old Court Irish Pub in Kerouac's home town.
There are cans of Budweiser and a couple shots of Jack Daniels involved, of course, but Jerry Bisantz has captured the volcano-like flow of Kerouac's rhythmic, excited prose. He has moments with his mother (June M. Sweet), with the workman-father (Jack Dacey) who always advised a Real Job instead of the writing, and with the beautiful but mad real hero of "On The Road" --- Neal Cassady (Steve O'Conon). And this last party is interrupted several times by phone-calls from Jack's unrecognized daughter Jan (Amber Daniels-Cook) --- whose plaintive request "Let me use your name" he finally agrees to only when she admits she, too, wants to write.
Wellington Breves has captured a shadowy memory-play atmosphere for this trip through memory. Bisantz steps easily from present to past and back, now discoursing directly to the audience at his party, now blazingly angry at Ken Kesey's hippies whom, everyone says, were invented in Kerouac's novel. He mentions in passing having written thirty novels, only a few of which, and one in particular, are still remembered.
This loving handful of time, at the end of a fame he never felt he deserved, has been brought to delicate life by Ann Garvin, co-founder of the company, in her first direction of a full-length play. Her touch is gentle, so that every character shares Kerouac's subtext of an end to everything. It could be a sad play, but she has underscored the zestful observer's eye that made Jack's autobiographical books worth the reading. And her co-founder Jerry Bisantz responds to her direction with the best performance of his career.
There are plans to take this play into Boston for yet another production, but if you can make it to Lowell this week-end, The Old Court is the place to be.
Love,
===Anon.
( a k a larry stark)
