Deep Cut

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice

If you’ve never seen Jim Cartwright’s play, The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, you might assume that it’s yet another of those Broadway or Hollywood musical melodramas about a real-life or fictional singing sensation who rises to worldwide fame and then is destroyed by drugs, drink, groupies, self-doubt, the depredations of the music industry, or Fame itself.  We’ve all seen this story before.

But The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, directed in The Gift Theatre’s current production by Devin de Mayo and Peter G. Andersen, is about none of these things.  It is, instead, a small story about psychological abuse.

The title character, Little Voice, or “L.V.,” (Emjoy Gavino) is a deeply repressed and agoraphobic English teenager who never leaves the house she shares with her widowed mother, barely seems to eat, and has no work or hobbies, spending her days instead compulsively listening to the collection of LPs left to her by her late father.  The albums, by the likes of Judy Garland, Shirley Bassey, Edith Piaf and Billie Holliday, shimmer with overflowing emotion, and send L.V., who seems to have no emotions of her own other than a deeply buried bitterness, into silent ecstasies of vicarious feeling.  

It’s clear why L.V. is so repressed, depressed and on the verge of abulia (the complete lack of will or desire to do anything at all.)  Her mother Mari (Alexandra Main), it is strongly implied, drove her late husband — whom she describes as being tall and slender, but, she bitchily claims, more in the sense of Olive Oyl than Gary Cooper — to an early grave.  She is a stereotypical working class woman from the north of England, a blowsy, slatternly, hard drinking tramp who talks over everyone, has no self-awareness, and wears too much makeup and cheap perfume to mask the odor of booze and greasy bangers on her breath. 

She treats Little Voice like an object and so, too, does a disreputable local club promoter (Ben Veatch) who is, er, “dating” Mari.  When he hears L.V. singing in an unimaginably lovely voice that sounds exactly like a young Judy Garland, he sees a meal ticket for himself.  L.V.’s needs, her ambitions if any, and her severe psychological issues go unmentioned and unconsidered.  

The appellation “Little Voice” has three meanings in Cartwright’s telling.  In a literal sense, L.V. barely speaks at all, and when she does, she is unfailingly ignored.  She has no interest in a professional singing career.  And, when she does sing (gorgeously) she has no “voice,” or persona, of her own, capable only of pitch-perfect imitations of her musical idols.  She is, in other words, a novelty act at best, and at worst an automaton, a wind-up toy designed for the pleasure of everyone but herself.

L.V.’s “rise,” in plot terms, is exceedingly short, and her “fall,” punctuated by a domestic disaster, is equally brief.  The story itself is practically negligible; it travels only the briefest of dramatic arcs, and never leaves, either literally or figuratively, the northern English town in which it takes place.

That leaves the audience hungering for the singing of Gavino, which becomes the show’s focal point.  Unfortunately, the songs are presented only in snippets, whether L.V. Is being led onto the stage of a third-rate local nightclub blindfolded, or singing to herself in her room.  I don’t think a single song was sung from beginning to end the entire evening.  Unlike the imaginary audiences in the nightclub, we do care about L.V.’s psychological issues, but they are so cursorily explored in Cartwright’s script that the real-life audience, just like the fictional one, comes to think of L.V. only in terms of what she can do for us, which is to say, sing like a slightly manic magpie.

Without giving away too much of the ending, L.V.’s pseudo-rise and spurious fall (how could she fall any further than the nearly catatonic ragamuffin we meet in the opening scene?) is followed by a more genuine lift that comes in the form of a telephone installer (Martel Manning) who takes a shine to L.V. for some not-well-dramatized reason.  They meet in the most cliched manner conceivable — they bend over at the same time to pick something up off the floor, bump heads, and fall in love instantly when their eyes meet.  Please.  Later scenes featuring the two are somewhat more convincing, though not compellingly so. 

This production does not match the Steppenwolf production I saw years ago, and neither are capable of rising above the weak original source material.  The acting is generally fine, though it is difficult not to overact a character like Mari.  A sugar-addicted next door neighbor played by Julia Rowley is appealingly ditsy and vivacious.  Gavino’s L.V. has the requisite frailty her character requires, and a vibrato that will give you chills.  But — and I mean no disrespect by pointing this out — she is far too old for the character she is playing, and this fact creates an even more disturbing portrait of L.V.’s psychological state than the playwright probably intended. 

There is a recurring reference to lights in the story — the fuse box in Mari’s and L.V.’s squalid apartment that continually blows, plunging the apartment into darkness; the nightclub stage lights that frighten and metaphorically blind L.V.; and a light show created by the telephone installer as a passion project and as a gift for L.V. — a gift that presumptively allows her to sing, for once, in a glorious and unfettered fashion, though with her profound psychological problems barely even addressed over the course of the play, the “love cures all” message comes across as hollow and insincere.  Deep cuts don’t heal as easily as all that. 

Somewhat Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented by The Gift Theatre at Filament Theatre, 4041 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Tickets are available at thegifttheatre.org or by calling 773-283-7071.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.