Theatrical Magic with Horse Sense

By Dan Hulbert, Theatre Critic
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Whispering to Horses is the most magical experience of the Atlanta theater season. But a fairy tale it's not. Jo Carson's play, brilliantly imagined by the artists of 7 Stages, passes through dark chambers of memory fragments of farce, tatters of nightmare, to honestly earn its climactic joy. It's a love story about a father and daughter, but you're never quite sure of that until those final moments. A horse serves as a family healer, and the astonishing way that it's brought to life - by a puppet sculpted from wisteria vines - is a reaffirmation that the theater's ancient illusions, too, can heal.

It's not a perfectly told story, but an enthralling one. Michael J. Burnett's poetic set centers around a carved platform of wood, whose sweeping shape suggests the wing of the father's World War II scout plane or a piece of Tennessee hillside tilted toward the twinkling stars. Storyteller Pat (Heather Heath) leads us on. She shows us a 1950s childhood in which she lied with abandon ("I was late because my bed wouldn't let go . . . ") was whipped by her father, Price (David Milford) and then lied even more by way of revenge.

Time unspools in spurts, like a tangled thread, so that at some moments we see Pat and Price 30 years on, working side by side to help their neighbors (a funny, muddy interlude in a flooded basement) and Pat's mother (Rebecca Ranson), whom Alzheimer's has transformed into a child. The aging father and middle aged daughter are pals so long as the pain in their past isn't mentioned.

But it must rise, as surely as that flood water must be pumped. The catalyst is Pat's purchase of an ornery mare, Kate (puppeteer Marisabel Marratt). When Pat finds herself beating Kate so hard that the switch breaks in her hand, she weeps - breaking, too, some barrier in herself and leading her to a revelatory confrontation with Price. Though there are unnecessary sidetracks in Act 2 (flashbacks about the mother's life and an abused neighbor girl), it's nothing that 15 minutes of trims couldn't solve.

The truthseeking actors are courageous. As the mother, Ranson's lightning transitions from health to dementia are devastating. Heath isn't ideally cast as Pat; an older actress with an authentic deepcountry accent (such as Ranson's) might bring more gravitas to the role without having to "perform" so much. Still, Heath is strong. Milford's fearless climactic scenes seal the play as a memorable evening.

Steven Kent directs like a master illusionist. He creates, with quicksilver turns of lighting (Jessica Coale) and music (Michelle Brourman), images as haunting as dreams. There's the apparition of a grandmother's ghost (Patricia French) that lives in a mirror as enchanted as Alice's looking glass and a hilarious, mind-bending dinner tableau where the weird but likable young Pat ("I'm really from Uranus!") pretends to eat her lima beans at the end of a giant, 20-foot-long table, as literally far from her parents as ,every child sometimes feels.

And then there is the moment, almost too exquisite to describe, when Pat changes her horsetraining technique from shouts to whispers. The horse - its vines as elegantly, intricately coiled as the motives of the human heart - hesitantly approaches. It gently moves its ear to Pat's mouth, a far-off piano sounds a delicate chord, and three lives are changed forever.