The Immigrants

By LANCE MORROW

THE PORTABLE PIONEER AND PRAIRIE SHOW by DAVID CHAMBERS and MEL MARVIN

The old traveling song and medicine shows that used to roll through rural America possessed a kind of corny fraudulence that was redeemed by their sheer authenticity as expressions of that America. The danger of mounting such a show in the age of Interstates and Holiday Inns is that only the fraud and an offensive corn would be left, candied thickly with commercial Americana.

The Portable Pioneer and Prairie Show, now touring the upper Midwest under the sponsorship of Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater, is much better than that. It is an honest, entertaining evocation of the lives and songs of some of the Swedish families that settled in Minnesota in the late 19th century. Singing families developed their own repertories of music and comedy. Two young New Yorkers, David Chambers and Mel Marvin, have researched the tradition of such troupes, studied their sheet music, old newspaper clippings, family photographs and journals, and distilled them into a modest Midwestern saga.

One recent evening in the splendidly gilded 19th century Mabel Tainter Opera House in Menomenie, Wis., the sound system was awry and the stage a bit small, but the cast of eight gave a spirited performance all the same--of the mythic Andersson family emigrating from Sweden, its terrors of the new country, its settling, its dances, a child's death, the plague of locusts that wiped out the farm and drove the family into rural show business. Terry Hinz is perfect as the boyish paterfamilias, but one remembers especially the dazed, inward quality of Mary Wright as Mrs. Andersson. Hers is a portrait of private, immigrant pride, of anyone who ever tried to live with dignity in a new language.

All of it has a lovely diffidence--the tunes, which sometimes sound like wholesome Kurt Weill, the hopefully pantheistic lyrics ("Speak to the earth, and it shall answer"), the audience-participation magic show, the light travesty of a temperance play. It is still a Midwestern country road show, a spectacular only of the local Grange hall. But it is wonderfully sufficient as it is.

Lance Morrow

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