Walker Evans photos at the heart of MCT’s new play

In the 1930s, unknown photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) took a commission from the Farm Security Administration to travel to a Midwest stricken with both the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The photos he brought back exposed their plight and made him famous.

Playwright Gwendolyn Rice dares to point out the missing pieces of the story in A Thousand Words, which opened Friday at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre after a three-week run in Madison, at Forward Theater, which developed this new play with MCT. Jennifer Uphoff Gray directed this fictionalized account addresses both Walker’s trek through Kansas and the years-later repercussions of those photos.

The play develops two stories in counterpoint.

There is the story of Walker himself (Josh Aaron McCabe), traveling Kansas with Shirley Hughes (Molly Rhode), a writer commissioned to document his photographs. Set against that is the tale of Metropolitan Museum curator Sally Quinn, in Kansas to gather quilts for an outsider artist exhibition, and Andrea Monroe (Georgina McKee), a local woman with a surprising connection to Walker Evans. Monroe might be able to help Sally acquire some rare photos discovered in Cuba.

From the start, it’s only slightly clear how the two pieces fit together. Walker and Shirley walk a linear narrative; Sally and Andrea’s fragmented narrative, set decades later, jumps in time and location rapidly enough to be occasionally disorienting. We barely know who or where they are until about halfway through the first act, when they finally meet and introduce themselves to each other,.

That’s a minor structural flaw in an otherwise compelling play. Missing pieces, more than anything else, keep us engaged with A Thousand Words: the missing rain in Kansas, the proof missing from Andrea’s secret (it’s unsurprising, but worth concealing), and the perpetually missing answers to: What is art? Who deserves to reap any financial benefits of art?

I’m afraid I’m making A Thousand Words sound ponderously intellectual. It’s definitely a smart play, but it doesn’t buckle under the weight of theory.

The actors’ levity holds the play up. McCabe and Rhode build an admirably complex dynamic, with his dry wit and critical eye complementing her indirect manner and fanciful tendencies. They feel like soul mates, always on the edge of something more.

Day’s Sally Quinn, involved with the photos decades later, is a prickly sounding board, the opposite number to both Andrea and her Metropolitan Museum coworker Brian Walkers (T. Stacy Hicks). Hicks plays a money man with minimal social skills; he spends much of the play infuriating everyone he encounters. Day is credible with Andrea, but her admittedly entertaining interactions with Hicks reduce her to a caricature as she angrily preaches about the value of art for art’s sake. One such shouting match is enough; subsequent ones are gratuitous. Their dynamic is perfect in the moments they’re not sparring over ideologies.

We do get some answers in the end, but A Thousand Words leaves a few matters up in the air. The lapses feel appropriate and intentional. In that, the play resembles Walker’s photographs, sans captions. As Evans tells Shirley, he shoots the picture, and it’s up to the viewer to interpret from there.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s production of A Thousand Words runs through March 11, with shows at 7:30 p.m. weeknights, 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $31-36; call (414) 291-7800 or visit the MCT online box office to order.

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