Huntington

Raisin in the Sun at the Huntington

A Raisin in the Sun takes on a complex subject matter that’s not easy to discuss, unless you lace your discussion of it with generic, PC statements on race and oppression. I think this is why so much focus is put on the segregation issue that comes up late in the play, when our protagonists, the Younger family, are asked not to move into the house they bought in an all-white Chicago neighborhood. While there’s some historical importance here (most interestingly, how they were priced out of the black neighborhoods), it’s a minor point to the play.

It’s Walter’s–I’m not sure what to call it–that the play rests on. His neurosis, pain, hubris, anger, weakness, and/or discontent. Everything else is tangential to this; the optimistic lecture on the slow progress of change delivered by Joseph Asagai, the African student; the quick dip into residential segregation; and the jokes at the expense of the Black nationalism movement. The segregation issue only comes up to push Walter past morality and sanity, where he’s willing to swallow racism and prejudice for money. And money is not just money here. He’s trying to recoup his father’s life insurance payout…which he lost…by handing it over to a buddy, in cash, so that he could bribe people for a liquor store license…including the portion his mother set aside for his sister’s tuition but gave to him so he would feel more like a man.

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry lets Walter be her hero in the end, but I think that’s just to give the show a happy ending. Pieces of the play do have a sitcom quality. What makes the play worthwhile is the fact that it’s not easy to align oneself with Walter. He lacks the nobility our fiction likes to endow onto the oppressed. He’s both our villain and our protagonist. And his problems are as complex as our relationship to him. And that’s why the character is so powerful, especially in the hands of LeRoy McClain, whose performance at the Huntington is vastly superior to Sidney Poitier’s in the 1961 film (and certainly better than P Diddy’s). McClain sustains so much emotional intensity, one would think he’d pass out during the curtain call.

Corey Allen, LeRoy McClain (Walter), Corey Janvier (Travis) (T. Charles Erickson)

Corey Allen, LeRoy McClain (Walter), Corey Janvier (Travis) (T. Charles Erickson)

I think Walter’s anger is of the time of the play’s 1930s setting, but it comes off as being highly relevant. While Walter’s a cynic, it’s not difficult to make the connection between him and the 99%/Occupy movements. Or just that violent lake of magma beneath America’s seemingly sedimentary surface at any given time in the 20th century. This is the real history of racism and greed and economic and social opression in America, where it’s victims are not noble, deserving martyrs, but weak humans.

Clint Ramos has put together one of those massive, rotating sets that are becoming a mannerism of the Huntington and Walter’s anger is mirrored by blaring free jazz interludes. The production opens with a shout out to Chicago geography–a hip hop track with lots of references to streets and corners. Director Liesl Tommy has smartly undercut Walter’s intensity with comic relief from Walter’s sister Beneatha (Keona Welch). Her girlish promise, wisecracks, and back & forth with two suitors provide an endearing foil to Walter’s sad, fated desperation. The character of Ruth (Ashley Younger), Walter’s wife, takes a back seat here. It could be enhanced, but she’s not fully fleshed out in the text to begin with. She’s so forgiving of Walter and almost awkwardly silent at some of the play’s tensest moments that we wonder who she really is.

David Cromer Comes to Town

There’s been a lot of chatter on how David Cromer’s production of Our Town at the Huntington is somehow hard–a vacuum of the nostalgic hokeyness typically painted over Thornton Wilder’s text by high school drama teachers. And perhaps that’s true. If we get an extra coat of anything here, it’s irony and acerbity and metaness, mostly delivered by Cromer himself who’s come to town as a kind of traveling theatrical maestro, casting a whole slew of local actors for this local installation of his successful New York production. (It’s sort of a traveling one man show with a cast of at least twenty.) But Cromer didn’t arrive without a suitcase full of rural New Hampshire charm. All the warmth that, certainly more so than its modernist devices, has made Our Town the great American play is still there, tugging at heart strings and sucking water out through tear ducts. Even through the delightful and somewhat notorious third act, the play maintains a warm sense of humor that always seems to be there in the nick of time to cut through any melodrama. All in all, I’d call it funny and a little bit sad. Even death, at least for a few moments, is a happy place of calmness, comfort, and reunion.

Cromer puts his actors in what are probably their own contemporary clothes, turns the house lights up all the way, and doesn’t do more in terms of props and scenery than borrowing a couple spindle-backed chairs from the Huntington’s prop room. But, while Emily may not have a moon to look up at, the production isn’t completely spare of elements to enhance Wilder’s carefully articulated moments. During some of the play’s more poignant scenes, Hymns waft down from a BCA catwalk, where Grover’s Corners’ Schubertian choir director sits at a piano directing his small chorus. As drunk as he might be, they don’t sound too bad. Even behind Cromer’s extra layer of irony, all those practical declarations of love, small town details, and peeks into a future no happier and no sadder than Grover’s Corners’ present still spin the deepest emotion and drama out of the humble.

Cromer’s signature touch is a surprise dénouement that breaks down the pillars of Wilder’s temple to theatrical illusion. I usually don’t worry about dropping spoilers, but I really don’t want to ruin this one because it’s not just a plot twist. It’s a brilliant and perfectly executed artistic twist that disrupts our experience and enhances Emily’s metaphysical walk back into the world of the living, and into Wilder’s thesis on small town life (or life in general) that I can’t phrase all that well. All I can say is that I’d argue that Wilder was being a little darker than someone else’s description of him being warm and nostalgic. And that I’d also argue that he was being a little warmer than someone else’s cold and cynical description of Our Town‘s thesis.

A Cambridge Story: The Huntington’s “Before I Leave You”

It’s nice to see a local play; one peppered with references to the the Peabody Museum, “The Basement,” and Slumerville. It’s also nice to see the Huntington playing to its audience base, producing a play that deals with aging–an alternative to a popular culture that’s preoccupied with youth. But while local playwright Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro’s Before I Leave You reaches a touching and humble romantic conclusion, mostly carried by Ross Bickell’s (Jeremy) deep and eloquent performance, it’s a rough and inarticulate stumble there.

As Allen Moyer’s set of whitewashed books immediately indicates, we’re dealing with an intellectual crowd. Jeremy is an author and university professor, Koji (Glenn Kubota) is a theater academic, and his wife Emily (Kippy Goldfarb) paints. Jeremy’s down and out realtor sister Trish (Karen MacDonald) is the fourth wheel as she’s only as coarse as she is dumb, and Koji and Emily’s son Peter (Alexis Camins) has disappointed his father by choosing a life bagging groceries at Shaw’s, when he could at least be working the counter at Formaggio. While our primary characters have enjoyed an intellectual life of privilege, all the time they must have spent pursuing those advanced degrees seems to have stunted their growth. Where the college pals of St. Elmo’s Fire dealt with their shit as twenty-somethings, these folks are just getting around to it. Koji, at 62, runs off with a forty-something playwright and Jeremy finally makes his big move on Emily after pining after her for 40+ years.

The present of the play strikes me as strangely out of touch. Trish, who runs up her credit card on several Newbury Street shopping sprees desperately chasing youth, treats synthetic fabrics and open-backed tops as hot trends, showing them off like they’re an iPad. The characters grapple with a present that doesn’t seem like ours and shouldn’t be theirs. But, perhaps this is just the wishful thinking of a twenty-six year old that he’ll have settled into something at sixty. And oddly enough, it’s the play’s twenty-two year old who’s the most mature. Peter takes his strained relationship with his father in stride, confidently pursuing love, fatherhood, and adult life where his elders falter.

Alfaro has structured her play in vignettes that shift from Jeremy’s bookish home bought with the proceeds from his first novel, Koji & Emily’s apartment, and what I think is Harvard Square’s Yenching. It’s either due to this stilted action or under-developed dialogue that the the plots fail to develop, instead coming and going out of nowhere and depending on their predictability to reach the audience. Kubota doesn’t lend his character Koji much sympathy or depth, but he is damn good at coming off as a prick who we’re sure will eventually push his son away and his wife into Jeremy’s arms. (Only one ambiguous reference to Love in the Time of Cholera could make us believe that somehow, in the only way his inveterate narcissism would allow, he’s doing right by his wife and oldest friend.)

Bickell’s acting is solid throughout, a fact helped by his character’s medical problems being the only serious plot that’s fleshed out completely inside the play and by the threat of death’s tendency to dwarf everything around it. MacDonald is entertaining in her dunce cap, playing up Trish’s misplaced confidence well. Goldfarb is warm and reactive in romantic scenes opposite Bickell and Camins does well at conjuring up some of the emotional content that might’ve been better developed in the script. Although witty banter over Hunan beef and hot & spicy tofu doesn’t key into dramatic tensions as well as it should, it is interesting by itself and I admire Alfaro and the Huntington’s choice of subject matter. I just wish it had come off better.

The Huntington’s Before I Leave You runs through November 13th at the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion (527 Tremont). Ticks run about $60 ($25 if you’re under 35) at bostontheatrescene.com.

Huntington Before I Leave You

Ross Bickell (as Jeremy) doting on Kippy Goldfarb (as Emily) (T. Charles Erickson)

How to put on a succesful show (besides making it good)

With unanimously rave reviews and record-breaking box office sales, the Huntington’s production of Candide is unequivocally a winner. As of October 7th, it’s the highest grossing musical in the Huntington’s history with over a million dollars in ticket sales. In the novella, one of Candide’s more cynical characters figures that out of five or six thousand thousand plays written in the French language maybe fifteen or sixteen are any good. Another critic names a figure of just over 1%, and that’s of the plays he owns! It’s already clear that Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of the musical will be a, likely the, highlight of the season and belongs in that minority of really really good shows. Perhaps this Candide‘s recipe for success is impossible to copy, but it seems like a perfect chance to point out what can make a show successful in the reviews and at the box office, beyond it just being well done.

Revise a Classic with some History and Give People Something to Talk About

Choosing proven material like Candide by no means guarantees success. In fact, the risks a production takes on only increase the better and more loved a particular play or musical is. Critics and audiences are more likely to have seen great productions before, so they come with high expectations. Sure, familiarity is good for ticket sales (Hollywood has had that figured out for a while), but it also sparks critique, anger, and frustration in defense of a work’s “original state”–just look at the A.R.T.’s Porgy and Bess.

Debate and an energized critical discourse feed right into our larger theaters’ massive PR machines. In the same way that people went to see The Blair Witch Project to find out if the witch was real or not, people will see a show a) because everyone is talking about it, b) to see why everyone is talking about it, and c) so they know where to stand in all this talk. You have to give people something to talk about and the critics something to write.

While Candide has been wholeheartedly praised without any of the “controversy” we saw with the A.R.T’s Porgy and Bess, its production history of revisions and revivals sparks dialogue by providing an interesting context. Hugh Wheeler’s book has consistently been sent back to the chopping block throughout the operettas many revivals. It’s no surprise. While a natural choice for a musical interpretation, particularly by a composer of Bernstein’s wit, Candide is a rather unlikely candidate for the stage. It presents the technical challenges of a fast paced narrative that crosses the Atlantic twice, reading almost like a boys’ adventure novel, all while maintaining perhaps the subtlest wit in the Western canon. In short, it’s difficult to condense without spoiling everything that makes the text great. When you do it perfectly, as Zimmerman has with the Huntington, you get something that fits into the narrative of the musical’s production history, so that the show isn’t just good, it’s essential.

More

My Husband Burnt My Homework: The Huntington’s “Educating Rita”

Adult education in America is usually the pursuit of employable skills, those that relate directly to a better job, a bigger salary, and a higher standard of living. Maybe first a high school diploma, then a degree or certification in something provident like accounting, web design, or human resources. There’s a side to it that’s education for education’s sake or having a degree for what it means to have a degree whatever it says on it, but very few adults wholly pursue the liberal arts to improve their intellectual status. This is of course exactly what Rita (Susan) White does in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, now at the Huntington through April 10th. Even though she’d probably make more money as a hairdresser, she enrolls in Open University to study Blake, Ibsen, and E. M. Forster and prepare for exams in….well I won’t pretend like I really understand the British educational system and try to tell you what the exams are for.

The snappy Rita (Jane Pfitsch) is paired with the borderline alcoholic poet-professor Frank (Andrew Long) who might have once believed in “the life of the mind,” but now is cynical, embittered, and only hanging on by a thin stretch of his tenure. Before Frank starts lending her books, Rita’s interest in literatuuure really doesn’t exist at all. She’s read the then popular 1973 coming-of-age lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle (I’m not sure what we’re supposed to take from that), but what she’s really interested in is walking the walk and talking the talk. She’s fascinated by the sophisticated clutter of Frank’s office. She explains how she always wished she could’ve gone to boarding school. She looks longingly out Frank’s large windows at students studying on the lawn and wants so badly to be able to speak their language–to talk of books and music and trips to the Continent. Frank, eventually taken with her spirit and zeal (the things he has little left of) agrees to help.

Jane Pfitsch and Andrew Long (T. Charles Erickson)

Sometimes the plays feels like an advertisement for Open University because, although Russell’s take on education isn’t idealistic, Rita makes rapid progress. Before we know it, she’s an expert in Chekhov, reciting the Songs of Innocence from memory, and has dumped her book burning husband for someone who summers in the south of France. At other times, it feels like one for reader-response criticism. Russell tells us that even though Rita has nothing to say when she first begins her education in literary criticism, her personal reactions to texts carry more value than her later more objective critical writing. At least Frank thinks so and he becomes progressively saddened by the thought that he’s created a monster, replacing the spirit of a lively young woman with everything he hates about himself and his work.

The play’s greatest asset is its structure. The narrative is pieced together entirely through Rita and Frank’s sessions in Allen Moyer’s giant and meticulously detailed set. Director Maria Aitken, along with lighting designer Joel E. Silver and composer/sound designer John Gromada, has crafted beautiful interludes between the scenes. The set’s massive back-lit windows light up with patterns sometimes showing passing days and sometimes just tripping out with psychedelic imagery along to pretty original music.

Pfitsch offers a fine performance of a difficult character with a complex arc, as not only does Rita have to change into the baggy-sweatered intellectual she desires to be, but she must come around once more, and realize the life of the mind is not everything she once thought it was. She gives off a real sense of change, thus giving the play a sense of duration. Pfitsch and Long have a rare chemistry on stage and I suppose that’s the one prerequisite for a decent production of Educating Rita. Frank and Rita have to bond, but there’s nothing explicit in the text that bonds them together. The Huntington went for a sure thing on this one, not straying too far from the play and aiming to please audiences with Rita’s irreverent sense of humor (at least it starts that way) and Frank’s sardonic wit. And they’ve succeeded with this warm and funny production that’s as much as anyone could ask for.

The Best Little Whorehouse in the Congo: The Huntington’s “Ruined”

Ruined begins with a comic, romantically-hued scene between grey-market merchant Christian (Oberon K.A. Adjepong) and Mama Nadi (Tonye Patano) at her ramshackle bar deep in the Congolese jungle. Christian makes friendly passes at Nadi, teases her by withholding some lipstick she ordered, and prefers orange Fanta over beer. When it’s time to get down to business, they begin to barter over some unnamed wares in Christian’s truck outside. For all we know, it could be a case of Johnny Walker or an upright piano. The negotiation is comic, filled with sass, chuckles, and affected disappointment at the slaughtering of one’s bottom line. A number is agreed upon, with some cigarettes and Fanta thrown in, and Christian retreats off-stage to retrieve the cargo. He returns with two disheveled girls.

We get a few moments to adjust to the business at hand, until Christian explains that one of the girls, Sophie (Carla Durren), is ruined, i.e. she was raped with a bayonet or some similar implement. Sophie wobbles when she stands. Each of her slow, wide steps are taken with what appears to be excruciating pain. She clutches at her stomach, as does most of the audience from just looking at her. Durren conveys so much with those pained steps that we don’t even require a re-telling of her trauma. The bartering continues, as Nadi is reluctant to take on a girl anatomically unequipped for her trade. With this new knowledge, what was once a comic exchange is now a grotesque exercise. Nadi acquiesces, taking on Sophie (who turns out to be Christian’s niece) as a singer-bookkeeper-maid-bartender.

Ruined Huntington by Lynne Nottage

Wendell B. Franklin (Jerome Kisembe), Carla Duren (Sophie), Zainab Jah (Josephine), and Tonye Patano (Mama Nadi) (Kevin Berne)

Structurally, this is how Lynn Nottage’s Ruined (at the Huntington through February 6th) works. It shocks us, lets that shock dissipate (after all, if the characters are able to get on, we can too), then comes up with something even more gut-wrenchingly horrific, before letting that horror scatter once again. It strobes between extreme, even fatal, trauma and a kind of contentment that comes with the will to survive in a place where survival is often the exception to the rule.

Caught between opposing militias battling for control over the Congo, and what is here its most precious resource, coltan (one of those rare-earth minerals required by First World electronics), Mama Nadi runs her shabby little brothel like Rick ran his American Cafe in Casablanca, without taking sides and doing her best to keep the men in charge inebriated and happy, with their fingers on her girls rather than the triggers of their assault rifles. But of course to choose a side would be a completely arbitrary decision, as the crimes of one are always matched by those of the other. And it’s known from the beginning that Nadi’s no-questions-asked-as-long-as-you-check-your-bullets-at-the-bar policy is as much a cocktail recipe for disaster as choosing a side would be.

Nadi does get one shot at personal redemption and, just as Rick famously sent Ilsa and Victor away with his insurance policy, she attempts to rescue Sophie from an approaching tempest of gunfire with hers, a substantial diamond that could set her up for life and buy her the surgery she needs to reverse the damage of her rape. But, Nattage’s Congo isn’t a place of such poetic justice. It is rather a place of the poetic interference that precludes, not just recompense, but really anything going entirely right.

Huntington Theater Boston Lynne Nottage Ruined

Carla Duren (Sophie) (center) and cast (Kevin Berne)

Despite the bloody realism of the play’s content (Nottage apparently spent some time interviewing rape victims in the Congo), Clint Ramon’s set looks like something from one of those semi-permanent shows they have at amusement parks–as cartoonish as the silent miners that pass in and out of it. Nadi’s house band (Alvin Terry and Adesoji Odukogb) is so good that the music, even when Sophie is singing, seems only 10% diegetic. The musicians are poorly used as extras in scenes where they stick out like sore thumbs, despite the vitality their talent brings to the show when they’re on stage, playing like a band in a musical. (The extras the play actually needs are the seven or so additional girls alluded to in the text.) Nothing, except perhaps Kathleen Geldard’s costumes looks as it actually would, so we’re left with a surreal backdrop to events so horrifically real, they seem surreal to us.

In one particularly weighty moment a cell phone rang in the audience. This might have been the first moment in the history of theater where a ringing phone in the audience was poignant. With all the the violence the play draws around the coltan mines, I actually thought for a moment this had been staged. But, it was only coincidence. Ruined doesn’t try to force feed us with a thesis or instill a sense of post-colonial guilt–the idea that this is all somehow our fault, if only through ignorance and apathy. The only white character, Mr. Harari (Joseph Kamal), is no hero, but the only thing that gives him power in the middle of this war is the power his passport gives him to come and go. While the program notes establish the proper historical context, colonization included, the text itself does not. If there is a point to Ruined, it’s that survival and moving-on is always possible. Through all the violence and trauma, the characters and the audience alike, are able to return to that lighter, comic demeanor the play begins with, containing the symbolic prospect of marriage. Yes, this comes at a cost, as we’re left with the knowledge that Mama Nadi herself is ruined and have to watch her tough shell crack in an emotional breakdown. But, as much as she hurts, this crack provides a window for Christian’s affections. It’s in this ambivalent way the play’s tragedies sit side-by-side with its sweeter moments, in which we tend to forget what happened or what’s happening, moving on if only for a scene or two.

The Huntington Theatre Company’s Ruined runs through February 6th at the BU Theatre (264 Huntington Ave). Tickets: $25-$89.

Baker in Boston: The Huntington’s “Circle Mirror Transformation” and SpeakEasy’s “Body Awareness”

The local press has been buzzing with news of Annie Baker, playwriting’s hot new thing, at least around here, with a three play festival (it’s not a trilogy) split between the Huntington, SpeakEasy, and Company One at the BCA through November 20th. I’ve caught the Huntington’s Circle Mirror Transformation and SpeakEasy’s Body Awareness, but not Company One’s production of The Aliens. (I’m not Larry Stark, you know.) This is unfortunate because, from what I’ve read, it seems to be the one of the three plays that pushes Baker’s trademark awkwardness and silent conversational ruts to the greatest extreme. Moreover, it received the most intimate staging in one of the BCA’s rehearsal halls. With the smallest cast and being set behind a coffee shop, out by the dumpster, the play, I’m assuming, demands the greatest level of physical intimacy of the three.

But Baker’s precisely scripted inarticulateness seems best served with a certain level of intimacy, notable missing from the Huntington production. Some might call Baker one of great new voices in theater, strange, because her language is not new, but rather familiar and mundane; so quotidian in its diction, stilted rhythm, and content that it strikes one as belonging not to a stage or a script, but to a voicemail, cocktail party, or the next cubical. When writing she actually reads lines into Garage Band on her Mac, playing them back to herself to ensure the authenticity of her characters’ tongue-tied speech patterns.

The three plays are set in the fictional town of Shirley, VT, the nom de guerre of Baker’s own hometown, Amherst, MA–the Brewer to her Reading, PA. Although Shirley possesses a quirky and basically irrelevant history described in the programs (it’s host of the Vermont Gourd Festival, was named for Lord Henry Shirley who tried to exterminate the Native American population with smallpox, boasts a small community of Cambodian refugees, was once a haven for nudists, etc.), it is by no means a Yoknapatawpha County.

The plays don’t overlap in covering their three very different slices of Shirley society. Actually, Baker (from reading her quotes) only continues to set plays there by default, succumbing to an internal temptation that probably has less to do with some far-reaching authorial intent and more with the fact that all these plays contain substantial autobiographical content–as is to be expected from a young playwright like Baker. Though, not so much, and not in such a way that anyone has to sit around with a cipher of her Amherst childhood. Baker’s too smart and not indulgent enough for that.

“Circle Mirror Transformation” takes on the intermittent structure of the syllabus of the under-enrolled community center acting class it’s set in, giving us a series of short scenes of acting games, bathroom breaks, and awkward pre- and post-class banter (sometimes it sounds like an ESL class for Shirley’s Cambodian refugees) that fade to black. I suspect some of the play’s popularity is owed to the fact that it is an inside play, poking fun at acting class exercises performed at the expense of actual acting, as hoodied teenager Lauren (an A+ performance by Maria Polizzano) observes.

Marie Polizzano (Lauren), Michael Hammond (James), Jeremiah Kissel (Schultz), Besty Aidem (Marty), and Nadia Bowers (Theresa) in the Huntington's "Circle Mirror Transformation," (T. Charles Erickson)

For a lot of non-theater people, the surface comedy of Baker’s theater game parodies might work better in a five-minute SNL sketch than a two hour play, but, as in an acting class where these games are meant to build relationships, cohesion, and emotional dexterity, these games are the basic narrative devices that drive the play. Without expressive or even very descriptive language and dramatic action (that doesn’t happen off-stage, as it usually does here), these histrionic trust falls tease much of the emotional content.

Baker’s theater games probably work out better for us than for the students. The only one who’s really set on improving her acting is Lauren, the taciturn Ally-Sheedy-in-The-Breakfast-Club-type in the back of the room, who’s looking to be cast in her high school’s production of West Side Story. Awkward divorcée Schultz (played gawkily Jeremiah Kissel, but gawky is a good thing here) is there to fill his emptiness and get out of his condo for a night, sexy NYC emigré Theresa (Nadia Bowers) has worked as an actress, but has given the vocation up to study acupuncture and Rolfing, and James (Michael Hammond) is only there because his granola-vore wife Marty (Betsy Aidem) is teaching it.

The class would lose its critical mass if one student were to skip or drop it, but we get the picture everyone here doesn’t have much else going on. Schultz is alone and smitten with his classmate Theresa, who’s getting over her NYC ex-boyfriend, Lauren obviously isn’t one of the popular kids, choosing to spend her evenings here rather than at the malt shop or something, James’ daughter won’t return his calls and, it turns out, his and Marty’s marriage isn’t exactly rock solid. Even though few of the play’s major dramatic events occur on-stage and during class time, they do happen around the class. At least two critics have pointed out the similarity with Chekov.

Jeremiah Kissel (Schultz), Marie Polizzano (Lauren), Betsy Aidem (Marty), Michael Hammond (James), and Nadia Bowers (Theresa) in the Huntington Theatre Company production of Annie Bakerís CIRCLE MIRROR TRANSFORMATION. Directed by Melia Bensussen. Now ñ November 14 at the Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA. huntingtontheatre.org. Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson.

Jeremiah Kissel (as Schultz), Marie Polizzano (as Lauren), Betsy Aidem (as Marty), Michael Hammond (as James), and Nadia Bowers (as Theresa) (T. Charles Erickson)

The play strives for a 21st century realism with its language, plain Jane set (by Christine Todesco) and costumes of wrinkled khakis, hiking boots, and yoga pants (by Bobby Frederick Tilley II) (both did sets & costumes for all three plays), which can leave one a little bored, desiring a little more drama or comedy, beyond the theater game parodies. The play does chronicle a brief extracurricular relationship between Schultz and Theresa, but we know they’re not much a match from the beginning; she’s either out of his league or just rebounding. And the characters do source material from their own pasts to act out, or at least do some kind of exercise with. The juicy stuff doesn’t really come until the end, that’s marked by Lauren’s opening up/coming-of-age and Maria Polizzano’s own praise worthy performance.

The characters of SpeakEasy’s Body Awareness don’t struggle as much with getting their words out. After all, they’re from Shirley’s ultra-progressive academic side of the tracks. Like Circle Mirror is structured upon a class syllabus, Body Awareness happens over something called Body Awareness Week, Shirley State’s re-branding of National Eating Disorder Week. The play begins with the week’s MC Phyllis (Adrianne Krstansky), a stammering psychology professor, giving the opening remarks and offering some of the week’s highlights, including a dance troupe of Palestinian refugees, to an audience of Shirley Staters. Dancing Palestinian refugees is not, however, the kind of body awareness Baker is concerned with.

Most of the play’s action happens within the cosy, bookishly sophisticated (in spirit, not in value) home of Phyllis, her girlfriend Joyce (Paula Plum), a high school cultural studies (read: not social studies), and her too-old-to-be-living-at-home son Jared from her heterosexual days (Gregory Pember), an amateur lexicographer with a penchant for the OED and phone sex lines, who may or may not have Asperger’s.

A mother (Paula Plum) confronts her son (Gregory Pember) about some questionable credit card charges in a scene from the SpeakEasy Stage Company production of BODY AWARENESS, running October 22 through November 20, 2010, at the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St. Boston. BODY AWARENESS is one of the three plays in the Shirley, VT Plays Festival, a landmark local collaboration among SpeakEasy Stage Company, Company One and the Huntington Theatre Company to produce the work of breakout playwright and Amherst, MA native Annie Baker. Tix/Info: 617-933-8600 or www.BostonTheaterScene.com. Photo: Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo.

Paula Plum (as Joyce) and Gregory Pember (as Jared) (Craig Bailey)

The narrative is a little more complete here than in Circle Mirror, relying less on character backstory and off-stage action, and the characters are more enhanced–Phyllis with her militant political correctness and Jared’s nervous ticks and attachment to an electric toothbrush–sometimes, it feels, the play is reaching a borderline state of parody, so that Baker can communicate her feminist thesis, that strikes me as a little simple and obvious. But, even when the characters appear to be acting as comic parodies (they are really funny), they don’t lose the realism and vulnerability that Baker achieved so well with the characters in Circle Mirror.

Although Jared has his problems, as a half-formed adult with an overly sensitive mother, and Phyllis really goes after him with a diagnosis of Asperger’s, the play begins in some kind of post-counter-culture progressive domestic bliss. (It’s clear that Baker doesn’t put much value in traditional family units.) The arrival of photographer Frank Bonitatibus (Richard Snee), brought in for a student center exhibition of his female nudes as part of Body Awareness Week, spices things up. Phyllis must have forgotten to Google his name after one of the Body Awareness Week planning committee meetings and agreeing to have him as a house guest, because she immediately finds him and his art offensive and misogynist.

So offensive, in fact, that to any reasonable audience, her reaction is disproportionate, rude, and irrational. Her own body issues, having to do with her own body and her possessiveness over Joyce’s (Joyce is the one doing all the cooking), who flirts with and wants to pose for Frank, become transparent. And her academic cant, Deepak Chopra quotes, and even her dog eared copy of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom become a thin surface membrane of a defence against her own unresolved issues which are, if Baker’s parallel serves us correctly, as deep and clinical as Jared’s–the 21-year-old virgin who works at McDonald’s and throws around the word “retard” enough that it would be offensive if he wasn’t, well…

Frank is an odd foil, with his new-age spirituality and hippy chill out man attitude, to this firecracker feminist. (Between the two plays, Frank is Baker’s only grown-up hippy who hasn’t at least partially grown up.) We’re not sure whose side we’re supposed be on…probably neither since Frank is the most parodic and Phyllis’ lines, hands down, earn the most eye rolls. It’s at least clear that Phyllis’ brand of cultural politics is bad and her resentment misplaced, but we all know that. Baker’s take on Shirley academe just isn’t that interesting, but aside from the this core “polemic,” the play is really good and really funny. Perhaps it’s just trying to take itself too seriously?

Adrianne Krstansky (as Phyllis) & Paula Plum (as Joyce) (Craig Bailey)

Adrianne Krstansky (as Phyllis) & Paula Plum (as Joyce) (Craig Bailey)

Todesco’s set has a few holes in it, but features a gorgeous installation of mahogany-colored panelling around the entire stage. Pember is thoroughly in character in every frustrated glare, nervous tick, and eccentric gesture; from shouting matches with his mom, to reading reading his condensed OED with a magnifying glass. Joyce comes naturally to Paula Plum–with great comic effect and chemistry with Snee–giving us a woman who’s experienced some trauma and some tragedy and has something suppressed inside herself that she wants to free, without the needs or wishes of others getting in the way for once.

Krstansky doesn’t provide Phyllis with very much vulnerability (besides that which we read into the character), nor are whatever emotional changes she undergoes at the end of the play (she does seem to come around a bit) made clear to us. While her actions are decidedly different, the process of arriving at those actions isn’t there. Krstansky does have an excellent and precise handle on Phyllis’ inarticulate and not-so-sophisticated language and delivers some beautifully clumsy and sincere monologues to her Body Awareness Week audience. As much as I like this play and as much as I love Krstansky (who’s actually really well cast for the role), the character itself feels incomplete.

The play begins as a very modern family portrait with Frank on the outside and ends in the same way, with Frank actually taking their family portrait–something he wouldn’t usually do, since Jared is a man and everybody has their clothes on. They’ve made up, brought together by some trouble Jared got himself into and, in a very dramatic and poetic gesture, are performing Shabbat with grape juice (no booze in this house) and an excerpt from Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, since Joyce doesn’t remember much from Hebrew school.

The Huntington’s Circle Mirror Transformation runs through November 14th at the BCA’s Wimberly Theatre; tickets are $25-$65. SpeakEasy’s Body Awareness runs through November 20th at the BCA’s Roberts Studio Theatre; tickets are $30-55.

1 2