The nursery rhyme goes thus:
“As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives,
Each wife had seven sacks, each sack had seven cats,
Each cat had seven kits: kits, cats, sacks and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?”
It?s a whimsical English riddle (the answer is one) that challenges our sense of logic and perspective, and is therefore a fitting title to the Lee Blessing play, “Going to St. Ives,” now at the Everyman Theater.
A small, cloistered village in Cornwall, England, St. Ives is the setting of the small, cloistered home of Dr. Cora Spencer (Kimberly Scharf), a renowned eye surgeon, and the temporary lodging for glaucoma patient May N?Kame (Lynn Chavis), unwilling mother of a self-appointed “god” (a dictator of an unnamed African nation). In the first act, the two spar with entertaining wit, mostly from the Empress May while Dr. Spencer provides proper British befuddlement, but the humor is only the eye of the storm.
The storm involves two sons who, whether accidentally or directly, die by their mothers? hands; four doctors condemned to die; and two women who learn about their own prejudices, desire for vengeance and their definition of civility, while achieving some level of redemption.
Dr. Spencer serves tea from a blue willow china set, a significant metaphor in the play. On the surface, the set is an example of English refinement and respect for tradition. On the other, as May notes, it represents a style “200 years out of fashion,” sold by the Chinese to the English who “force-fed the Chinese opium to get their money back.” Even the sweet story behind the cobalt blue designs about two lovers made doves by the gods covers an uglier truth of how these lovers first met brutal deaths.
Later in the play, Dr. Spencer attempts to shake May from her resolve to die by saying she?ll bury her body in her backyard, which, once a Victorian era rubbish heap, contains “10,000 shards of blue willow.” May retorts she “won?t be exotic fertilizer for your English roses,” and confronts her own prejudice for English society just as Dr. Spencer faced her own toward “dusty, blood-soaked African nations with names nobody can pronounce.”
Nothing is quite as it appears in the play, and that is a definite strength as the audience is carried along, pondering their own values about race, family, right and wrong.
IF YOU GO
“Going to St. Ives”
» Venue: The Everyman Theater, 1727 N. Charles St.
» Date: Wednesday to Sunday, through Feb. 25
» Tickets: $17 to $30
» More Info: 410-752-2208
