Although the character she plays is a credulous, simpering, unworldly, clueless ninny, actress Andrea Alton has the unflappable confidence and skill that makes her one woman show Possum Creek at the New York International Fringe Festival a delight to watch. Alton portrays Beth Ann, a young woman who tells her Civil War-era tale through letters that she has written to her fiancé Joseph, who is away at war and seemingly unable to reply. We hear about the sundry events of Beth Ann’s life, most of which are misunderstandings: she spends the night with Lisbeth, the town lesbian, without understanding what “lying with women” means, which prompts her to write a very confused letter to Joseph at 3:00 in the morning; she makes contact with an Indian woman, who is her brother’s girlfriend, who she finds herself surprised to like (“I shouldn’t have wished she was my sister, because she was brown, but she had pretty hair, and I liked that I couldn’t understand what she was saying, because it meant I got to talk more”); she is manipulated by Harriet Tubman into housing an outpost of the Underground Railroad at her farm, although - or because - Beth Ann doesn’t understand that “railroad” is a metaphor (“I keep telling Harriet that her nice friends could stay upstairs if they wanted to, but she keeps saying no! And I haven’t seen a single train since the day she came in here!”).
Alton’s portrayal of this simpleton could have turned into mean-spirited mockery, but Alton is the rare comic whose sensibility is both dark and warm, and we are sympathetic to poor Beth Ann. Beth Ann is, after all, honest, and her ingenuousness is a cultural prism: “Dear Joseph. I think about you every day,” she writes. “Well, I suppose that is not true. I did not think of you when we saw all those Indians slaughtered in the field last Tuesday. I guess God really does punish those who are different!”
Alton is a master of timing and physical nuance, and Beth Ann’s mannerisms, such as her ploddingly thoughtful pauses when writing letters and her girlish, exaggerated sighs when she speaks of fiancé Joseph, elevates Alton’s depiction of Beth Ann from what could have been an SNL skit to a memorably hilarious figure. Alton is equally talented as a writer, and the narrative of Possum Creek is ridiculous and Monty Python-esque (many of Beth Ann’s dunderheaded ideas somehow come true – for example, that women in their sixties can still achieve pregnancy, because wild corn tastes good, not only when it is ripe, but when it is dry as well). But the silliness is always funny, and the chapters of Beth Ann’s life are varied and move quickly. Alton is a consummate actress; I relished in her idiocy, and I mean this as a great compliment.
