Killing elephants is a deeply troubling thing, which probably explains why stories about their killing lend themselves so well to broader examinations (or condemnations) of the society that finds cause to perform the gruesome act. George Orwell may be the best known writer to have tackled such a story, but George Brant’s Elephant’s Graveyard (at the Balagan, 1117 E. Pike St., through Sept. 26; tix $12-$15) is a fine addition to the genre, and the performance is strong enough that most audience members find themselves fighting back tears by the end of the night.
Brant reconstructs the true-life story of “Mary,” an elephant in the Sparks Circus that was reputedly even bigger than Barnum & Bailey’s famous Jumbo. In September 1916, Mary killed her new, inexperienced trainer when, unable to control her, he began harming her. The small-town Tennessee people who witnessed the violent death demanded Mary be put down, and in a perverse twist on Thomas Edison—who executed an elephant at Coney Island in 1903 in an attempt to discredit his competitor Nicolae Tesla’s alternating current; the event was filmed—the people of the town of Erwin decided to execute Mary by public hanging using a railroad crane. The hanging failed twice, first because they left her chained to the track and essentially tried to pull her in half, and second when the chain around her neck broke, causing her to crash down, shattering her hip. Over 2,500 people watched.
The scope of Brant’s play veers away from the standard interpretation of Mary’s story (an indictment of circuses) and uses it to explore American society caught in the throes of modernization. Erwin is portrayed as a godforsaken mud-pit of a town, the townspeople itching for excitement and grandeur, while the circus is its own society of adorable outcasts desperate to protect one of their own.
The show is performed as direct audience address, with all the different characters telling their story directly and rarely interacting with one another. It’s a device that works well and lets Brant display a wide cross-section of the people involved. The circus folk offer a lot of comic potential, and Jake Groshong as the Russian strong-man and Chris “Sloop” Bell as the clown offer the comedy that keeps the show from becoming too heavy-handed. The emotional core, though is delivered by the trio of Ray Tagavilla, Allison Strickland, and Jose Amador.
Strickland, the “ballet girl” who performs with Mary, manages both the peek-a-boo eroticism of the character while delivering a deeply moving performance exploring her relationship to the elephant. Amador, who plays a native Erwin black man, adds depth and relevance to the situation by actively reminding the audience of the complexity of race in 1916 America. And finally, there’s Tagavilla: As Mary’s trainer, he portrays a man deeply committed to his animals, but for whose bosses the entire tragedy would have been averted. Tagavilla’s performance is complex and compelling, and he takes on the moral and ethical dilemmas that are central to the play head-on.
There’s not much to fault the Balagan’s production for, which has the audience in stitches at the open and in tears at the close. Brant’s script is fine, though I can’t help feeling he’s a little too sympathetic to the circus overall. The only place it loses its way is at the end, when Brant seems to have written himself into a trap. He has to give all his characters the chance to offer their own closing, which drags on (though overall it’s a short play at about 75 minutes).
