Posted on: Friday, September 13, 2002

STAGE REVIEW
Strong women at center of 'Elephant'

By Joseph T. Roszmiarek

"We're going to see the elephant" originated as an expression by those holding a ticket to the P.T. Barnum circus. The elephant was the last act, and if you hung around long enough to see it, then you had seen it all.

"Seeing the elephant" became the slogan of the settlers and speculators who made the difficult trip west during the California Gold Rush. Eventually, it came to mean that one had survived the worst part of a difficult ordeal.

That's the spirit beneath the new Readers' Theater production directed by Vanita Rae Smith at Fort Shafter's Richardson Theatre.

"Going to See the Elephant" is the improbable collaboration of playwrights Karen Hensel, Elana Kent, Patti Johns, Sylvia Meredith, Elizabeth Shaw and Laura Toffenetti. It focuses on four very different women brought together in a sod hut in the Kansas wilderness of the 1870s.

The eldest is Maw Belle Wheeler, a tough old bird who has not yet been consumed by her wandering spirit. She shares the place with her daughter-in-law Sara, a simple soul content that her world ends within a 40-mile radius.

They are joined by Etta, a young neighbor, still traumatized by her abduction by the Cheyenne, but hopefully planning a marriage to her cavalry rescuer; and by Mrs. Nichols, an Easterner beaten down by the harsh prairie life.

Men folk are curiously absent. Maw's son and Etta's husband is away purchasing supplies. Mr. Nichols is inside, possibly dying, and never appears.

During the course of one long night, this foursome deals with wolf attacks, fear of Indians, and almost overwhelming isolation.

Smith doubles up the roles, having just two women read the four parts. This seems to be an unnecessary economy for so small a cast and causes some difficulty in following the early action.

However, the convention is working well by the emotional second act, where Jo Pruden wondrously reads both parts in a climactic confrontation between Maw Wheeler and Mrs. Nichols. Blaming her ailing husband for the death of their young son, a disintegrating Mrs. Nichols plans to load him into their wagon for an impossible 80-mile journey — at gunpoint — if necessary.

Shari Lynn does double duty reading Sara and Etta.

With Jayme Shirrell providing the narration and the sound effects, the women exchange detailed notes on buried children, fight off a wolf attack and butcher a cow — a very full night on the Kansas prairie.

But it falls to Maw Wheeler to set the survivalist tone.

"Going to see the elephant" means more than climbing the next hill. It's a willingness to step out to confront whatever may lay ahead, and reaching out to embrace your fears. It's that emotion that gives the play its tragic beauty, and the sense that women carried an underrated burden in winning the West.