Certainly not an upbeat summer show to take the kids to, Gurnet Theatre Project’s production of James McManus’ newish play Cherry Smoke packs enough traumatic melodrama to make you throw up a little bit in your mouth at least once. The play’s cumulative shock value, coupled with the Boston Playwright’s Theatre finicky air conditioner and the stench of herbal cigarettes (though I’ll take them over fake stage-smoking) left me not really knowing what to think as I left the theater overheated and in search of water. I felt not unlike Fish (Chris Graham), the play’s bad boy street fighter protagonist with the potential to love, must have felt walking away bloodied from a boxing ring–sweaty, tired, and a little foggy from the barrage of Cherry Smoke‘s cryptic metaphors and monologues that often ring like a heady spoken word slam. Graham delivers the majority of his lines with such a hip hop vibe and his main squeeze Cherry (Jackie McCoy) takes more than a few turns as a poet. I still don’t really get the central metaphor from which the title is drawn.
Even the play seems to exist in a kind of head trauma induced delirium. There’s no clear setting where our characters (two brothers and the loves of their lives) reside, though Fish’s costumes could place him in Boston. They live in an old Airstream, above a failing garage, and in a river bed in a kind of poverty that should strike us as impossible. The play hops through their lives in a string of non-chronological episodes that build their characters and their character’s histories at once, but keeps them from really going anywhere. Fish, though he moves from boyish mischief to jail time, is really always the same boy he is in the earliest episodes. As is Cherry, a runaway who sets her eyes on Fish (or perhaps inside him, on a soul that only comes out in her presence), whose childhood trauma has left her permanently a child, secure inside her own little universe that revolves around, and only exists for, Fish.
Joe Ruscio (as Duffy) & Chelsea Schmidt (as Bug) (Meg Taintor)
Bug (Chelsea Schmidt), another neighborhood girl and the love interest of Fish’s wimpy younger brother Duffy (Joe Ruscio), is born to be a mother. She has an intrinsic maternal intelligence that’s steady from childhood, so much so that her voice is the only one that doesn’t change between ages. She’s not really subject to a childhood at all. While Fish and Cherry are eternally trapped in a foreboding fantasy-romance, moving further into their characters and a relationship set firmly in place at a young age, Bug doesn’t need to grow. Her beau, Duffy tries to, but doesn’t get very far from his brother’s aggressive shadow.
The drama takes place on Matt Whiton’s abstraction of a set, almost frustratingly darkly lit by Chris Fournier. This cast of young actors well capture the grittiness of Cherry Smoke‘s subject matter and don’t falter as they age and regress. I don’t see this as a typical non-linear narrative, but rather a non-linear multiple character study. The play’s narrative seems fated from the beginning, the characters stuck in a feedback loop. One pair of lovers is able to chisel out a life from their circumstances and the other isn’t. Because we get our marginalized characters and their lives at once, they’re static and without that comforting device of overcoming something. And that leaves one in a state a confusion.
The play would benefit from a more fleshed out compromise between its melodrama and its sense of humor, its pulpy grittiness and its “poetic” language. It’s between these things that Cherry Smoke loses its bearings. I’m not sure if this is entirely a weakness, because the play does have some tremendous moments of love and tragedy and life at the edge.
The Gurnet Theatre Project’s Cherry Smoke runs through July 24th at the Boston Playwright’s Theatre. Tickets are $15
Jackie McCoy (as Cherry) & Chris Graham (as Fish) (Meg Taintor)
