New Rep’s latest production starts slowly, but don’t be fooled: great emotion is in store. The play explores grief, release, and that immortal question, what happens after we die? Playwright Steve Yockey’s answer, borrowing lightly from several religious traditions, winds its way to a theory of letting go. The production is strong; the direction, sound, and set design meet New Rep’s high standards. The script needs further development, but presents a fresh and thoughtful bout of wrestling with important concepts.
The first act takes the audience inside the anguish of two parents who have just lost their young son. The actors are appropriately fragile and distant, especially from each other. Marianna Bassham as Danielle gives a heart-rending performance of a woman slowly unraveling. Thomas Piper, as her husband Connor, is exactly right as a too-cheerful, soldier-through guy trying desperately to find control after a terrible tragedy. The two characters are diametrically opposed in their methods of dealing with grief, and thus they are each working through it alone, sadly – but realistically. The first half of the first act is slow, but action and tension build with the imminent storm.
The storm breaks, both literally and metaphorically, over Danielle and Connor’s heads. From this moment until the end feels like a different play entirely – and a better one. The different coping mechanisms the two characters display in Act I set the stage for their “afterlife” challenges. We enter a purgatory of sorts, reminiscent of Dante, with Eastern religion overtones, where each character (now including the dead son) must confront a vital truth before their soul can move on. All must accept the loss of life and release false hopes of reunification – yet each tackles this in a wholly disparate way.
The second act introduces strange, enchanting characters. Dale Place deserves special mention for his skillful puppetry as the Black Bird; with only one wing and a head, he creates a startling and delightful illusion of avian motion. Georgia Lyman as the Seamstress is haunting and disturbing (which is her mandate), and Adrianne Krstansky as The Proprietress mixes exasperation with humor, providing some of the best laughs of the play. This second act – or really, second play – is rich, thought-provoking, and worth waiting for.
We wish the play had moved to its central questions more efficiently. The playwright spends too much time in Act I making us guess the nature of the tragedy racking these two; it seems a bit gimmicky and unnecessary. What is tedious in real life needn’t seem so on the stage. (Also, the timing of the oft-referenced storm is odd; at moments it’s about to break, and then suddenly the threat recedes; this happens several times.) The end of the first act is emotionally shattering, even terrifying, as the audience experiences the power of the storm. The play would be stronger if we reached that critical moment in half the time, the intermission was eliminated, and the transformation to the afterlife followed immediately. Still, the production is well worth the trip to Watertown.
-- Shauna Shames & Johanna Ettin
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