Goodman Theatre Presents PAMPLONA Review – Stacy Keach Embodies Ernest Hemingway

Stacy Keach, returning to play the role of Ernest Hemingway he was slated to perform in a production of Pamplona at the Goodman Theatre last season, sits at a typewriter in frustration. It's an image director Robert Falls will return to throughout the 90-minute one-man show, and one Keach fills with trepidation and yearning each time he resumes the position. For in Pamplona, written by Jim McGrath, Hemingway is cornered, both literally and figuratively. In what will come to be the last year of his life, he is struggling to come up with the words to accurately express what he has witnessed in Spain covering a matador fight for Life magazine. But he is also cornered by the looming grey walls of Kevin Depinet's scenic design, which slope upwards to form a vertiginous prison for the writer. As McGrath's play unfolds, these walls will serve as canvases for Adam Flemming's projections to display past acquaintances of Hemingway using real-life photographs. Even towering over Keach, however, these pictures can't begin to match the stature of an actor who, at 77 years old, is crafting a performance that exemplifies the visceral connection that can be created between actor and audience.

Goodman Production Straddles Education and Entertainment

Part slice-of-life play, part internal monologue, and part biography, McGrath's script straddles multiple genres at once. Some moments, you are watching Hemingway struggle with a thesaurus as he searches for the perfect word. At other times, he's directly addressing the audience as he expounds upon his troubled upbringing and his disdain for his mother. Falls and Keach do plenty to make these shifts in content smooth, although to this writer, there were times when the biographical content in Pamplona began to feel more didactic than expository. Even so, audiences less familiar with Hemingway and his multiple marriages and run-ins with death will likely appreciate the inclusion of these details, which do serve to enrich the portrait of the author. In the end, Keach's unflagging performance makes Pamplona a worthwhile ticket, exemplifying the greatness of not only a Nobel Prize-winning author, but of an actor at the height of his career.