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Sometimes life has stupendous timing.
If you were not lucky enough to see El Gran Circo Teatro de Chile's "La Negra Ester" during the L.A. Festival or if you haven't seen the inventive devices of Theatre Repere's "The Dragon's Trilogy" (still playing at UCLA), you may not be able to savor the coincidences between those shows and Adrian Hall's "Hope of the Heart" at the Mark Taper Forum.
But surely you have tuned into at least some of Ken Burns' mega-documentary, "The Civil War," sprawled all over PBS. It supplies perfect context for Hall's amazing "Hope."
Or parts of it.
"Hope of the Heart" is nothing if not difficult to put into words, which is the surest manifestation of its theatricality. One hesitates to call it a play. It has the flavor and structure of a complex poem and is half based on one: Robert Penn Warren's "Brother to Dragons." That's part two of Hall's piece. Part one is an extrapolation of the fourth chapter of Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," first written and published in the Partisan Review in 1944 as "Cass Mastern's Wedding Ring" and later incorporated into "Men" as a discrete chapter. Hall's "adaptation" (an inadequate word, for what he has accomplished) is in fact two plays tied by their mutual exploration of man's inhumanity to man. The first, "Cass Mastern," was inserted in the Penn Warren novel as protagonist Jack Burden's investigation into his own past, triggered by reading his ancestor Mastern's personal diaries. They describe this Southern plantation owner and Confederate soldier's disastrous love affair with a married woman and...