The German philosopher/political
theorist Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in her
book Eichmann in Jerusalem, having
covered the 1961 trial of the former Nazi leader for the New Yorker. She noted
the absence of any affect of guilt, mental instability or even anti-Semitism in
Eichmann; he was thoroughly immersed in the role of a bureaucrat doing his job,
which involved carrying out Hitler’s Final Solution: the extermination of the
Jewish population of Europe.
Helen Edmundson, in writing The Clearing in 1994, was prompted by
the more recent ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian conflict to bring the story of
Puritan Oliver Cromwell’s extermination of the Irish people and their culture.
This production at Wellesley Summer Theatre illuminates the horror not only of
the dispossession of families from their land, but of the snuffing out of the
wild magic of Celtic culture, as played by the radical Pierce (Lewis D.
Wheeler); the woman he’s always loved, Maddy (Angela Bilkic), an Irishwoman
married to an English landowner caught between her roots and her beautiful new
life, and her lifelong dearest one (and nanny) the “strange, sweet” Killaine
(Elizabeth Yancey).
However, the banality of evil
shows up in the scenes involving Governor Sturman played with a peevish
stolidity by Mark McIntye, and Robert Preston (Woody Gaul), the English
landowner trying to keep his head buried in the piece of Irish sod he owns and
ignore the storm clouds gathering. These scenes, involving Robert and his
neighbor and fellow denialist Solomon (John Kinsherf), in which they realize
that the government does, indeed, intend to transport families to blasted Connaught, crackle with the high stakes intensity of a
zoning board of appeals meeting. Sturman is just a good German, or Englishman,
doing his job, and all the sexual menace that could infest his scenes with
Maddy—the playwright even has
her threaten him with witchcraft—goes
unspent. Woody Gaul, also, as a dashing, affectionate Robert, cannot truly
convey the awfulness of a man who loves his Irish wife but has only disdain for
Ireland.
Marge Dunn as Solomon’s wife
Susannah travels a poignant arc from shrewish nag to fierce and heartbreaking
warrior, and the sensitive performances among the Irish childhood friends
Pierce, Killaine and Maddy succeed in exposing the evil that poses as policy.
