UA’s production of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July was truly a testament to the acting and directing talent which the University of Alabama has to offer. In putting on a show, which centered almost solely on the relations between the characters and the way they represented their respective generations, the burden of this performance was laid squarely on the shoulders of director Seth Panitch and his extremely well-chosen cast. And the results were superb. Chris Hardin’s portrayal of Kenneth Talley as the main character was quite an achievement, as he dealt with depicting a character who had been reduced to prosthetic legs in the Vietnam War. His was a character of immense complexity, as he symbolized the side of America which was reluctant to believe in a war with no apparent virtue, but which was just as reluctant to question or turn away from America in a time of despair. Hardin does an excellent job of creating a character who is never really sure what he believes in, but who is always glad to accept the imminent possibility of the future. Playing his counterpart was Megan McNerny as Ken’s sister June Talley. June's character was completely fed up with everything about America’s situation in Vietnam, but now has nothing to hate, and appears highly strung-up in the fact that she no longer has the magnificent scapegoat of Vietnam on which to rest all her anxiety. McNerny does well to capture the sarcastic and somewhat cold nature of someone whose beliefs have been overridden. Her interactions with Ken and with daughter Shirley Talley, played by Anastasia Munoz, are the driving force behind the emotional side of a play that often appears comical on the surface.
This comical element of the play is driven in most part by Munoz as Shirley, a difficult role which Munoz takes powerful hold of and truly steals the stage with. Shirley represents the profound balance between the amazing precociousness and yet individualistic childishness that are associated with her generation. Amongst people caught up in the past and in death, she is a bumbling whirlwind of progressive ideas which truly have no stability. Munoz captures the character brilliantly, delivering comedic moments which leave one waiting for her next line. But for as stongly as she impresses us with the lighter side of her character; the harsh reality of her symbolization of the generation in which she grew up is a deeply frightening prospect. She longs to mean something, but has no idea what. She is obsessed with her own future and her individual achievement but cannot see that the individual is nothing without the whole. In this way she serves as a balance to her mother in that her mother was striving for change of the most meaningful sort.
Despite the excellent acting and directing, Wilson’s script seems to devalue a generation whose ideals moved the country into a direction of greater civil liberty by treating those beliefs simply as whims of those who held them. Regardless of the many problems still faced by America, the Vietnam War period was a point which contained not only American politicians’ lowest point, but American culture’s highest point. Ever since then the beliefs of those who fought for the rights of blacks and women and gays in America have been the bedrock of everything that is right with this country, not vice versa. It seems that Shirley Talley’s generation, in yet another time of great American turmoil, would do well to reevaluate the ideas of community and political concern which we seem to hold in disdain today.
The cast and crew of Fifth of July found a way to turn a play with little action or plot into a brilliant performance. They took a script which left much up to the individual production and created a fantastic display of well-directed characters whose relationships with one another elicited an emotional experience. The acting and direction of this play were assuredly the apex of what I have witnessed while viewing the works presented by the UA theatre team, and are a bold statement of the abilities of the entire department.
