The Storm Testament
Theater Review
"The Storm Testament," at The Villa Playhouse Theatre
Review by Eric D. Snider
Published on October 3, 1997
Lee Nelson's "The Storm Testament," a series of novels, may be good, but the play based on those books is not.
OK, I'll stop beating around the bush. The Villa Playhouse Theatre in Springville is not known for doing Broadway-quality plays anyway, but that's fine. "Harvey," the last production there, while lacking in many technical aspects, was still charming in its small-town simplicity. Plus, the script itself was cute and amusing, and the show was at least enjoyable.
"The Storm Testament" falls short on all those points. Not only is the script heavy-handed and serious, but this production of it lacks the joy and enthusiasm that are usually the saving grace of a community theater show. What is often lacking in acting ability and production values can be made up for with sheer zeal -- but there is no such zeal in "The Storm Testament." Simply put, the show is not enjoyable to watch.
The show is only two hours long, but it is an extremely long two hours. Things plod along at a very slow rate, with little emotion or vigor from the cast members to keep one's interest. Even when exciting things are happening -- boat wrecks, Indian attacks, etc. -- the tone is muted and ambivalent, and major events manage to pass by virtually unnoticed.
The best thing about this show is Clay Elder, who plays the main character, Dan Storm. This young man -- a teen-ager, by the looks of him -- is an exceptional actor, and he stands almost alone in that regard. Without his acting skill and likable stage presence, the show would be absolutely unbearable.
The novels on which this play is based are full of action and adventure as young Dan Storm makes his way around the American frontier of the late 1830s. Naturally, much of this action is going to be lost when you move it to the stage. Unfortunately, there's little else to take its place. The plot is negligible, the characters are two-dimensional; I haven't read the books, but I'm guessing the action was the main reason people like them. If there's more to it than that, it definitely got lost in the translation.
You sort of have to admire a local theater for even attempting a serious drama like this, but there's something they need to realize, too. While comedy is harder to perform than drama, it's also much easier to make a comedy entertaining. With a comedy, the basic structure and characters are liable to at least be interesting to the audience, even if you don't do a good job of making them funny. But with a drama, if you don't do it well -- what's left to recommend it? Drama can only be engaging if it has emotional impact. If you don't have the local resources to produce that impact, then you shouldn't do a drama.
Better luck next time, Springville.
Grade: F
This item has 2 comments
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Marc says:
August 21, 2007 at 3:30 pmAs someone who is personally acquainted with Clay Elder (my next youngest sister was a close friend of his during junior high and high school), I would have to guess that his statement about the therapist is likely not a joke. While both he and his older brother were boisterous and entertaining fellows, the subject does not seem to fit Clay's idea of humor. This is, however, just my best guess, and to know for sure we'd have to ask Clay.
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Turkey says:
August 21, 2007 at 4:19 pmI once went to a version of The Music Man put on by some of my dearest friends in high school. I had worked on musical productions with these people in the past so I didn't expect it to be spectacularly bad. But boy was it. I left in the middle of it it was so bad. The thought of enduring even one more second made me loath my friends for forcing such idiotic crap upon my head. The singing was terrible, the acting was terrible, the casting was terrible, the dancing was terrible, and the music (called MIDI I believe? It's what you hear on cheap internet sites) gave me a migraine. THAT was the worst experience in a theater in the history of mankind and I will never forgive my friends for thinking they were talented enough to pull it off, let alone in front of people besides their mommas.
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Notes:
"The Storm Testament" is without a doubt the worst play I have ever seen in my life. In fact, it may well have been the worst play ever performed, anywhere, by anyone. It was paralyzingly boring and slow, with people up on stage not so much acting as taking up valuable space and occasionally saying words. It wasn't even fun to make fun of, that's how bad it was. When the play was over, I literally had a headache, and I was depressed the rest of the night. No show has ever affected me, for good or bad, as much as this show did. It made me want to take the life of a loved one. I knew it might not be very good, so I made sure to see it with a friend rather than a date; but now, I can no longer be friends with this person because every time I see him, I think of this play. If I claim to have two different birthdays, know that one is the actual date of my birth, and the other is the day I saw "The Storm Testament" and was re-born a bitter, broken man.
Naturally, you cannot write a negative review of something in Utah County without someone getting mad at you (just who do I think I am, expressing opinions like that?!). And so the day this was published, the producer of the show, Bill Brown, called me at work.
Bill Brown was very civil to me, but his main point, if I assessed things correctly, was that when they asked to have their show reviewed, what they were really asking for was some nice free publicity. It didn't seem to have occurred to him that a negative review was actually a possibility. In fact, when I got the press release for the show at The Daily Universe, whoever sent it had hand-written at the bottom, "Please support our show and help us get some publicity!" This makes me angry.
Bill Brown said, "As a journalist, you have the power to crush people's feelings with the stroke of a pen." I told him I was aware of that, but I kept thinking, "Hey -- I'm not the one who made your show crappy. YOU produced the show, and YOU asked US to come review it. If your show is lousy, don't invite critics." But I did not tell him that.
He finally asked what about the show DID work for me. I was thinking, "Well, we had ice cream afterwards..." What I said was that the blocking seemed good. (If you are not familiar with theater, "blocking" is the actors' movements -- when they cross to the other side of the stage, when they sit, when they stand up, etc. Saying a show has good blocking is not much of a compliment, but it's all I could muster for this pile of crap.)
Naturally, people wrote letters, too....
I've read this letter several times now and still am not sure what he was saying in certain parts of it.
I did catch, in the first paragraph, that I was supposed to "see beyond" the actors, dialogue and music. What am I supposed to look at, the sets? (Note: The sets were bad, too.)
I also like the part about how real life is not always exciting, and that's why the play was slow. This implies that they WANTED the show to be slow. If this is true, then 1) Why?, and 2) Mission accomplished!
On Oct. 21, I got the following anonymous note mailed to me at The Daily Universe:
The note came in an envelope with no return address. Accompanying the note was a photocopied article from the November 1997 "Reader's Digest" (p. 83), called "The King of Dumb." It's about a journalist who used his newspaper powers to have a certain congressman declared, by his colleagues, "The Dumbest Congressman." Then, years later, the journalist read the congressman's obituary, which mentioned this past "honor." The obituary also mentioned all the good things the man had done, such as teaching a Sunday School class for 20 years and being president of the PTA, and the journalist felt ashamed that he had used to powers to present such a one-sided, unfair view of the man.I get the point, of course, but it doesn't exactly apply. For one thing, the only person I mentioned by name in my review was the one person I said was really good. Furthermore, I only slandered the show, not the people involved in it. Furthermore, as I believe I've mentioned before, the show was really REALLY bad. I cannot overstate this point.
I was mystified as to who had sent this anonymous note. Later that day, I visited the Herald offices to check my box and found the following letter, written by Marni Ashby. She had worked extensively with the Villa but was not directly involved with "The Storm Testament." Accompanying this letter was the envelope it had come in, on which I thought I recognized the handwriting as being the same as on my anonymous note earlier that day. I was so convinced that the anonymous note and this letter had both come from Ms. Ashby that I said so here on this Web site; however, some years later, Ms. Ashby stumbled across it and said she was NOT the author of the anonymous note. No longer having the physical evidence, I shall have to take her word for it.
Anyway, here is the letter she DID write, addressed to the Herald. As with all letters reprinted here, I have preserved her spelling and punctuation.
This letter contains one of my favorite lines ever written: "With one swipe of his self-righteous pen, he has lowered the morale of a group of sweet, hardworking people whose only crime was to try to entertain him." I take issue with that, though. Their only crime was NOT trying to entertain me. It was trying to entertain me but instead making me want to kill myself.I am glad that Marni took the time to put into words the sentiment that is so widespread in the Provo area: That reviewers aren't supposed to CRITICIZE shows; they're just supposed to say positive things and give the play (or CD, or whatever) good publicity. "If you can't say anything nice...."
Then, on Nov. 5, the Daily Herald printed this letter:
Later, the Herald got a letter from someone who is the director, or something, of one of the OTHER theaters in Springville. He was bothered by the last line of my review -- "Better luck next time, Springville" -- because it didn't distinguish WHICH specific Springville theater (there are three) I was talking about. Basically, he wanted to disassociate his theater from the Villa Playhouse, which I don't blame him for.A couple years later, I heard from two young men separately, both high school students now, who had been in "Storm Testament" and had stumbled across my review online. One of them was Clay Elder (Dan Storm himself), whom I later reviewed in other shows and still found to be quite talented. In his e-mail to me, he said, in part, "I am most likely the person who suffered most from the effects of the show. During the actual run of the show, I never wanted to read any of the reviews for fear of what they would say, and so I never got the chance to read your review. Finally, now that my therapist had said that I've sufficiently repressed the whole experience, I'm now allowed to slowly start remembering that period in my life and so I finally got to read the review. Thank you very much for giving me such a great review, it made me feel amazingly better about the whole situation."
I think he was kidding about the therapist thing.
I eventually got to be friendly with Bill and Marilyn Brown, Marilyn in particular. Once, in a candid moment, I said, "So what was the deal with 'Storm Testament'?" She said, "Well, we had a bad script to begin with...." and it went from there.