Karl Miller and Aubrey Dollar in Completeness
Seeing these
two plays back to back made me think a lot about content and style in realist
dramas. Both Itamar Moses’s Completeness and Richard Nelson’s Sweet and Sad concern relationships, in more or less domestic
settings. Completeness
is about young people, just starting out in their lives; Sweet and Sad is about a middle-aged family whose lives have been
rocked in different ways by loss. Both
dramas are structured around story-telling and long monologues to which other
characters listen carefully; neither are plot-driven or full of action or even
conflict. And yet Sweet and Sad ends by being about so much more than it appears to
be, while Completeness, though in its own way sweet and sad, winds
up being about so much less.
The Moses
play, at Playwrights Horizons, fits nicely into the theatre’s menu of
beautifully presented, consistently satisfying work by “new” (usually young)
playwrights. With simple but elegant
productions, lovely, subtle direction, and top-notch acting, I’m rarely
disappointed by what I see at Playwrights.
But Completeness made me think a bit harder about what exactly
this bill of fare delivers.
The
four-hander concerns graduate students in computer science and molecular
biology making their way into new thought in their respective fields. Elliot (the baggy-eyed, appealing Karl
Miller) is working hard on an algorithm that will break a long-vexed problem of
predictive data management in computer science, but in his spare time, he’s
breaking up with his girlfriend, a colleague in his department, to pursue a new
attraction to Molly (Aubrey Dollar), a graduate student working on yeast
cultures and cell division in molecular biology. Elliot and Molly’s various former partners
and co-workers move in and out of their lives, as the couple dance around one
another, too entangled in their own emotional histories to really make a
commitment.
Thanks to
Miller and Dollar (lovely and intelligent as Molly) and to director Pam
MacKinnon’s unobtrusive but sensitive guidance, Completeness
makes a compelling case for its characters.
They speak often about their work, in long paragraphs that delve into
some detail about their various hypotheses and experiments. That these speeches remain interesting,
despite the often technical jargon of their fields, is a credit to Miller and
Dollar, who makes us see their ideas as living, breathing problems that they’re
eager to address and solve. The actors
make Elliot and Molly dreamy with ambition, so that their overlapping
investigations and their collaboration in science and math become as sexy and
poetic as their romantic moments. In
fact, their intellectual exchanges sometimes make for more compelling
conversation, since Moses delivers through metaphor the emotional challenges
they face as a couple. Molly insists she
needs to do more “screens” to prove her ideas; Elliot keeps hitting walls
because the choices his algorithm addresses increase exponentially with each
new addition.
That they’re
really talking about their emotional lives is both elegant writing and somehow
a slightly disappointing bait and switch.
I enjoy listening to smart characters on stage (especially women, who
are still too rarely given the dignity of real work to address as part of their
action). Elliot and Molly think together in ways that become as attractive to
spectators as it does to them. But once
their relationship starts, after a fast sexual encounter that they mutually
manipulate into happening, Completeness too quickly
devolves into a play that’s about the callow emotions of twenty-somethings,
instead of about the excitement of the science at which they work.
Moses
carefully structures their revelations.
After they grudgingly admit that their relationship might have a future,
both Elliot and Molly feel compelled to confess their flaws. Elliot tends to run from his feelings, once
the initial excitement of the chase has ended.
His speech about wanting to preserve the wonder and mystery of that
first flush of love for his new object of affection is beautifully crafted and
clear. Likewise, Molly meets his
acknowledgement with one of her own, relating obliquely that she broke another
man’s heart and in the process, broke her own, in a failed partnership that
continues to haunt her. She bemoans her
inability to be a “clean slate.”
But why
should this be Molly’s hubris and not everyone’s? Who is a clean slate, once they’ve reached
their mid-twenties? Those two lynchpin
speeches, then, provide an unfortunately misguided emotional turning point for
Elliot and Molly. While Completeness is notable for the emotional openness and
eloquence of its male as well as its female characters, these speeches retreat
back into typical gendered norms: Elliot
prefers the chase and Molly has baggage.
Even the play’s rather oblique ending, which offers Elliot the chance to
act against masculine type, remains tentative, leaving us with the sense that
while there’s hope, neither character has enough real gumption to break their
already established emotional patterns.
So what’s it
all about, then? Molly says their whole
generation is damaged, unable to complete the pass of real relationships. The stakes seem too high, yet at the same
time, in the play’s story, they’re also too amorphous. What do either Elliot or Molly really have to
lose? They’re both well situated, with
funding for their research, despite Molly’s earlier sexual relationship with
her advisor, who proceeds to try to blackmail her professionally. (Happily, Moses lets Molly stand up to this
creep; she’s clearly a woman with professional courage and clarity.)
These aren’t
characters in danger. Elliot works with
an undergraduate woman (Meredith Forlenza, excellent and distinct in each of
her three subsidiary roles) who’d be happy to start a relationship with him,
and Molly’s fellow grad student, Franklin (Brian Avers, also energetic and
amusing in his multiple roles), doesn’t hesitate to kiss her as they work
together, after offering what he admits is too much information about his own
emotional traumas. (Moses’s men are
supposed to be as vulnerable as his women.)
Elliot and Molly will be fine; the play shows us that at every
turn. Why, then, should we care about
whether or not they choose to be fine together?
Sweet and Sad, on the other hand, concerns a middle-aged
family of brothers and sisters, their partners, and an elderly uncle trying to
live within their long-standing emotional entanglements against the backdrop of
the national cataclysm that was 9/11.
Nelson is specific about when and where the family's conversations
unfold; the program notes that the play “takes place between approximately 2pm
and 4pm on the afternoon of Sunday, September 11, 2011” in the “dining room in
Barbara and Marian Apple’s house on Center Street” in Rhinebeck, New York. Through this specificity comes a grounded
sense of place and time, in which the characters spin out not just their
familial and emotional ties, but their private sense of how their own traumas
and histories fit into the memory and present of the more public trauma of
9/11.
Jay O. Sanders, John DeVries, and Laila Robins in Sweet and Sad
Nelson
directed his own script for this Public Theatre PublicLab production, a sequel
to That Hopey Changey Thing, which
opened on election night, November 2, 2010.
I didn't see the first installment in what Nelson promises is a series,
which I regret, having found Sweet and
Sad a lovely, important example of how theatre can participate in public
dialogue. Although it might be called
intense realism, conducted as it is through quotidian conversations, in one
set, against the backdrop of a family meal in preparation for an evening out, Sweet and Sad speaks so resonantly into
a notable public moment (the 10th anniversary of 9/11) that it seems
almost Brechtian in its appeal to a thinking spectator caught in the inevitable
changes wrought by history.
Nelson
addresses private and public loss.
Marian (Laila Robins) has moved back into the family home with her
sister, Barbara (Maryann Plunkett). Both
are public school teachers. But Marian's
daughter has recently committed suicide, for reasons Nelson doesn’t
clarify. The motivation for the young
woman’s death isn’t as important as the effects of her loss on Barbara and the
rest of the family. Barbara tries to
soldier on in her life, but her spirit is broken. When she disappears from the family dining
table, overcome by grief, her family whispers about how they might help
her. Her mourning is a problem, in a Brechtian
lehrstuck sort of way—how might we address socially what seems only private?
Analogous to
Barbara's mourning is the national grief recalled by the 10th anniversary of
9/11. Around these two parallel griefs,
the family talks about their lives and their choices. Richard (the compassionate, articulate Jay O.
Sanders, whose acting makes subtle nuances in a character who could be boorish
and unlikable) is a wealthy Manhattan lawyer; his third sister, Jane (J.
Smith-Cameron, lovely in the role of a woman who’s arch and competitive but
continues to grapple with her own personal and public sensitivities), is a
journalist who’s seeing an actor, reviving a long-standing but fallow
relationship after she divorces her husband.
The Apple
family, that is, are adults—successful (for the most part), white, middle-class
adults, which makes them representative of only a small part of New York
society. But nonetheless, Nelson makes
of their conversation a smart and compelling meditation on how we lead our
lives and how we make our choices, the consequences of personal gestures in the
context of a public still roiled by a sense of its own vulnerability and
connection to world forces much, much larger than the very tiny units of family
and work in which our lives play out.
Completeness, by Itamar
Moses, directed by Pam MacKinnon, Playwrights Horizons, September 24,
2011. Closed.
Sweet and Sad, written and directed by Richard Nelson,
PublicLab, September 24, 2011. Closed.