Delightful Diaries
Curtain Call
Review: Purgatory Diaries worth seeing
By Alicia Grega-Pikul

Most theatre-goers in the 570 have some preconceived opinion of the late actor/playwright Jason Miller. I know I did as an earnest high school drama student (and later a theatre major) with an inclination against authority in the late '80s. Upon meeting the man behind the myth just before he died in 2001, I learned my assumptions were wrong.

Playwright Tom Flannery knew all along how passionately devoted Miller was to his work and to the professional development of theater in Scranton. Personally acquainted with Miller since the late '80s, Flannery saw his very first script, The Driveway, produced in 2000 under Miller's direction.

Written in 2007 with the help of L.A. playwright Roger Jacobs, Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller shares Flannery's perspective without asking us to toss out our preconceptions. That is to say, the play is more interested in capturing the facts of Miller's tragedy than it is in paying tribute.

Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller will continue at Providence Playhouse in Scranton on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. in an independent production starring Bob Hughes and under the direction of Chris Slone.

Growing up in West Scranton as a schoolmate and friend of Miller, Hughes knew the artist longer, if not better, than almost anyone. The actor originated the role when Diaries premiered downtown at the Jermyn last year. When he's on, Hughes bears a resemblance to Miller in his later years that's so uncanny it's chilling. The actor still hadn't conquered the challenge of this weighty, word-packed role as of last Saturday, but you'll want to be there when he does. That day may come this weekend. If it doesn't, the play is still far more edifying than a bronze bust.

Diaries finds the post-mortem Miller working through the issues of his life in an ironic sort of penance - there's plenty of liquor, but he can't catch a buzz; cartons and cartons of cigarettes, but no matches. He works through those issues by writing it all down in an enormous book situated symbolically on an altar. We find him suffering from a sort of writer's block, which he then beats by talking to us as well as to the (invisible) spirits of his parents. A bell sometimes rings to indicate that Miller is speaking to his parents, but sometimes it doesn't. It's confusing and should be scrapped since the audience is smart enough to know when the actor projects his lines at two small lights on the house wall.

What the play lacks in plot and external conflict, it makes up with compelling inside anecdotes about the glory days of The Exorcist and That Championship Season that would propel Miller to fame before haunting him for the rest of his life. It helps to have an even greater familiarity with Miller's works or you may struggle with references to Tom McHale - an acclaimed 1972 national book award finalist, also from Scranton, who Miller feels deserved more attention - or F. Scott Fitzgerald, who Miller portrayed in a film about the writer's time spent in Hollywood.

Most rewarding are the play's alternately acerbic and poetic lines you'll suspect Miller might have actually uttered to Flannery. The character refers to writers as "masochistic drama queens," and compares critics to herpes because you can't get rid of them, even in purgatory.