Theater review: ‘Private Jones’ a powerful tale of friendship, service and the cost of war at Norma Terris Theatre
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It’s a hell of a thing in this world this week to sit through a musical that feels it needs to justify why people fight wars.
The show, “Private Jones,” is getting a full-scale public workshop production at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre in Chester. The arguments are hardly pro-war, and they’re not at all propaganda-like or jingoistic, but it’s an uncomfortable subject at the best of times — and this is not the best of times.
“Private Jones” is the work of Marshall Pailet. The all-around theatermaker not only wrote the show’s book but also composed its score and directed it. It was inspired by the brief mention in a magazine article of a young deaf Welsh sniper during WWI.
This is very much a workshop production, so it would be improper to suggest that the book or score gets repetitious or overlong since it’s common practice in workshops to test variations on the same material. The show currently has a 90-minute first act, a 45-minute second act and a 15-minute intermission. Some melodies wind on incessantly as if they were the work of minimalist composers Terry Riley or Philip Glass. Songs meld into each other without clear beginnings, middles or ends. Those dimensions are clearly still in flux. If “Private Jones” is offending sensibilities, either with a surfeit of raunchy military swagger or its brutal battle scenes, it’s wisely figuring out what the limits might be before it fully tests them.
Critics were let in late in the run to provide feedback so the show could prepare for its first full production at the Signature Theatre in Washington D.C. in February. That will be a different staging, though also directed by Pailet and with some of the same cast.
One thing that is abundantly clear is that Pailet has a powerful vision for this show. His staging elevates his own script and score. Precise actions are paired with lines and melodies. There’s tight choreography by Misha Shields that aligns neatly with Pailet’s intricate sung-through and highly percussive score. So many workshops, including at the Norma Terris, have a loose improvisatory quality, especially in the blocking and choreography, that it is striking to see one that is so deeply refined in how it looks and acts.
Such a skillfully interactive presentation is no small trick given the challenges that “Private Jones” has set for itself. To convincingly and respectfully portray the story of a deaf Army marksman, the show has some deaf or hard-of-hearing actors in its cast and utilizes American Sign Language both in its plot and in some narrative sections. There are also subtitles, and the cast faces forward and clearly enunciates to enable lip readers in the audience. The show has enlisted the respected actress Alexandria Wailes as its director of artistic sign language, with cast member Amelia Hensley serving as American Sign Language captain.
In Pailet’s telling, the Welsh farm boy Gomer Jones loses his hearing in his mid-teens when he has meningitis. Exceptionally skilled with a rifle, he bluffs his way into the British Army near the beginning of the First World War. He’s vaguely patriotic but mostly has something personal to prove. “Private Jones” also features romance, military training ordeals, camaraderie in the trenches, suspenseful fight scenes and dark humor.
A lot of the staging jibes with established deaf theater styles pioneered by theater companies like Deaf West Theatre in Los Angeles and the old Connecticut-based National Theater of the Deaf. Yet “Private Jones” strives to avoid the direct, stagy Brechtian feel that’s associated with a lot of deaf theater. This musical is fluid, intimate and animated. It may be declarative and strongly enunciated, but it’s also going for a natural, emotional realism.
One of “Private Jones” cleverest dramatic techniques is its use of silence. For some scenes, the stage suddenly goes quiet as the perspective switches to Gomer’s non-audible sense of what’s going on around him. There are some useful abstractions that help the war scenes seem less bloodthirsty or violent. The loading and firing of guns are suggested by onstage actors playing a drum or ratchet, and the guns themselves are sculpted wooden sticks rather than the real thing.
The cast is well-chosen and nails another of the show’s best staging concepts. The cast is fairly balanced in terms of gender, even though the vast majority of the roles in the show are presumed male, including WWI soldiers, doctors and factory workers. Having Claire Neumann play the swaggering brute King, who bullies then befriends Gomer in the Army, takes the macho edge off this potentially repellent character and plays up other attributes. Lightly playing with gender roles is yet another way that “Private Jones” defies war story stereotypes and finds its own fresh approach.
As Gomer, Johnny Link (who was with the national tour of the musical “Cinderella” when it played in Connecticut in 2016-17) deftly navigates a role that needs him to be simultaneously naive, lovestruck and cold-blooded. His need to prove himself by “killing Krauts” is not simplistic and is not portrayed that way. There are many purposefully uncomfortable turns in Link’s performance.
Those who recall the downbeat musical “Darling Grenadine” at the Norma Terris in 2107 will marvel that there’s now another musical in the same venue featuring a wounded pet dog played by a somewhat creepy Labrador-size puppet. To some, the battleground skirmishes, with actors scaling then plummeting from short walls meant to suggest trenches, may recall the workshop of Erica Schmidt’s musical “Cyrano” at the Norma Terris in 2018. Otherwise, “Private Jones” is a fount of theatrical invention.
“Private Jones” has difficult questions at its core. This is a tough story to tell, and you don’t wander into the lobby at intermission feeling good about humanity. There’s a revenge plot that upsets relatively well-intentioned feelings elsewhere in the show. There are odd motivations and too-easy psychological turnarounds. Changing a line here or there couldn’t displace the overall doom and gloom of a coming-of-age tale that involves killing. Having set this hard path for itself, “Private Jones” finds a tone and lyricism that gets it through. It doesn’t preach about war one way or another, providing a message instead about acceptance and self-sufficiency, but war is all around it, and war can be hell.
“Private Jones” runs through Sunday at the Norma Terris Theater, 33 North Main St., Chester. The final performances are Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 and 6:30 p.m. $49-$54. goodspeed.org/shows/private-jones.
