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Could it have been mere coincidence that sent the Spring's first ice-cream truck down t2k's street the same day Clubbed Thumb's 8th Annual Springworks (née Summerworks) Festival opened downtown? And although I soon wanted to drop a heavy object upon said truck as it sat idling below, bleating the same moronic little jingle on a giddily endless loop, its presence nonetheless signified the coming of the season of renewal after a very long and very cold winter. Springworks' flagship production this season, Ann Marie Healy's "Somewhere Someplace Else" is also about renewal and new beginnings and staking out your place in the sun. With specific and sparing vagueness, Healy has crafted both a comedy in her characters' awkward, stumbling pursuit of meaning and a tragedy in how they can never quite grasp it long enough to claim it as their own. Healy's particular gift here is in capturing how people talk around the basic questions of life and being, of love and God and purpose; often without looking at one another, rarely if ever connecting. Ronny (Mara Stephens), a married, thirtysomething woman from Minneapolis, arrives abruptly -- and alone -- at her sister Jeanine's (Laura Heisler) ridiculously small Manhattan flat for a weekend stay. Ronny and Jeanine, several years her sister's junior, have never been close as siblings, and it is not difficult to see why. Where Ronny is a stoic, God-fearing housewife determined to put her best face on and her best foot forward, Jeanine favors Monster Magnet t-shirts, has a downtown guitar-playing boyfriend, and sullenly clings to a low-level office job with a "cunt-faced cow" for a boss. Gradually, it becomes apparent to Jeanine that Ronny's appearance at her door was not a carefree weekend getaway but rather the beginning of a desperate, groping odyssey to change her life. Prone to frequent, sudden bursts of sobs, Ronny believes her life is in God's hands, and if it is God's will that her life be sad, then it is her job to be happy about it. The sad part she has down pat. It is being happy about her sadness that is prompting those crying jags. As the weekend turns into weeks and the weeks into months, Ronny slips into a tentative, awkward affair with B.G. (an excellent Andrew Weems), Jeanine's upstairs neighbor and a self-described "bastard from Brownsboro" Texas. With his loose tropical-print shirts, baggy cutoffs and perpetual 16-oz. Budskis, B.G. seems to be waiting for the next Jimmy Buffet tour to roll into town, impressing the vulnerable Ronny as the very antithesis of her reserved, polyester-clad husband Lance. Before long, Ronny and B.G. are sharing stanzas of rooftop poetry; B.G. confessing he thinks of her more often than he does his favorite BBQ sandwich back home in Brownsboro. A burgeoning Lothario, he spontaneously serenades her with a stumbling warble of "She's Always A Woman To Me". Ronny is smitten, and soon the two are exchanging more than clumsy poetry and furtive kisses. Healy has real affection for and a solidly grounded understanding of her characters, and never patronizes what could be easy marks for smirking ridicule. At times, her fragmented, anecdotal structure -- several scenes are vignettes and others scarcely more than blackouts -- risks severing the emotional connections she is attempting to build, and here she is helped enormously by the steady, unifying hand of director Annie Dorsen and a strong, simpatico cast. It is particularly refreshing to find -- in a play essentially about women and a woman's attempt at independence and self-discovery -- that the men present are neither idiots nor assholes, but rather -- surprise! -- real human beings. Besides the superb Weems (think Bill Murray at his lowest key), Todd Cerveris turns in fine work as Ronny's bewildered husband Lance, a decent Midwestern guy who tries to understand why his wife doesn't seem to be coming home while looking appropriately baffled at her sudden inexplicable bursts of off-key Billy Joel. Heisler's Jeanine strikes an edgy balance between simmering, self-deluded anger and the sad, desperate resignation of finding her purpose in life by knowing that, yes, she's living in the same city and walking the same streets as those models from Vogue and Elle. As Ronny, Mara Stephens manages to encourage empathy where others may have evoked only pity, though her relentless Julie Hagerty-esque drone became increasingly grating as the night went on. David Korins' clever rotating set (spun with precision by the ever-attentive Jeff Zorabedian and Philip Dellapina) gives the distinct sense of watching skewered creatures revolving on some eternal rotisserie, slowly basting in their own ineffable despair. Healy's characters are lost, alienated souls filled with a void of vague longing, not simply for what they cannot have, but for what they are not able to even articulate. They know only that something essential that makes this life worth living is missing. And that is a sadness damn difficult to be happy about, be it here, there, or somewhere someplace else. "Somewhere
Someplace Else", "Springworks
2003" Copyright © 2003 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |
