Good People

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire’s Good People offers a compelling, if liberal, view of race, class, and gender relations in contemporary Boston. The Broadway production, directed with subtle clarity by Daniel Sullivan, boasts a top-notch cast, who bring to their roles a kind of fruitful empathy that still doesn’t shy away from delving into the complications of people whose lives might not be entirely blameless or completely praiseworthy. Good People’s essential question addresses in fact what makes a person “good,” and debates whether personal choice or social circumstance determines who can claim that moral and emotional category.

Lindsay-Abaire begins his story in the dollar store where Margaret (who’s called Margie and is played with fearless intelligence by Frances McDormand) is quickly fired by her boss, Stevie (Patrick Carroll), for her chronic lateness. The two argue by the dumpster outside the store’s back door, since even as manager, Stevie has no office in which to conduct the unpleasant, necessary business of letting go his employee. Their personal relationship complicates their exchange— Stevie’s mother was Margie’s childhood friend. But against her excuses and objections, Stevie explains that he’s caught in the maw of corporate practices, supervised himself by a district manager who checks the employee’s punch cards. If Stevie doesn’t fire Margie, he’ll be dismissed himself.

Margie begs Stevie to keep her on, offering to take a pay cut and accusing him of favoring the “Chinese” cashier who started after she did. She knows that corporate management willingly hires new, lower-paid employees over loyalty to workers who’ve been with the store long enough to qualify for benefits and pay increases.

But Margie’s inability to get to work on time is inescapable. She’s the single mother of a severely disabled adult daughter and her childcare options are spotty and unreliable. The daughter is never seen—in fact, a whole host of offstage characters populate Lindsay-Abaire’s play—but her presence is determining for Margie, who feels keenly her responsibility to her only child. When she loses her job, she’s thrown into dire economic straits that affect them both.

Margie lives in South Boston, or “Southie,” the Irish, working-class section of Boston. She’s a scrappy veteran of a hard scrabble neighborhood, someone who’s clear-sighted about her few prospects for class mobility. Her boyfriend—her daughter’s presumptive father—departed long ago, leaving her to fend for herself in a world populated by women. One of the pleasures of Good People and its performances, in fact, is the company of tough, determined, implicitly self-supporting women who provide Margie’s emotional support and foundation. Margie’s sympathetic friend, Jean (Becky Ann Baker), has known her forever; Margie’s landlady, Dottie (Estelle Parsons), is a salty woman who needs Margie’s rent to survive, but who pitches in to babysit for her daughter and clearly likes her renters’ company.

All three women and Stevie are played with broad accents that locate them in a specific milieu. The characters’ costumes (designed by David Zinn) are second-hand store eclectic. Parsons wears Dottie’s heavy aqua eye-shadow and her mismatched clothing with a rather bohemian pride. Margie’s apartment and the bingo hall the women and Stevie frequent are designed (by John Lee Beatty) to emphasize the shabby circumstances in which people without means are forced to create warm community.

Through a series of coincidences, Margie reconnects with Mike (Tate Donavan), one of her few childhood friends to leave the neighborhood and his birth class. Mike is now a doctor, who conducts research on endocrinology. In their awkward reunion in his office, where his white coat, starched shirt, and fancy tie establish his now upper-class bona fides, the two dance around the intimacies of their past, trying without much success to establish common cause in the present.

Margie, in fact, has sought Mike out hoping he’ll employee her. When he demurs, she takes umbrage, and assumes that he’s pushing her away rather than telling her the truth about openings on his staff. Of course, Margie’s skills don’t completely fit a doctor’s office needs, and even though she insists that she can file and do other clerical tasks, her protestations only extend the distance—professional and personal—between the two.

In a surge of guilt, generosity, or sentiment, Mike invites Margie to a party at his house in Chestnut Hill, an address to which he admits sheepishly, given how far it is socially and geographically from his old neighborhood. Although he expects Margie to decline, she boldly agrees to come, nearly taunting Mike with her insistence on reconnecting. When he later calls to tell her his child is sick and the party has been cancelled, Margie assumes he’s creating a ruse to keep her out of his new life. She takes a public bus and travels to Chestnut Hill anyway.

The second act’s confrontation between Mike and Margie, witnessed and complicated by the presence of Mike’s wife, Kate (Renee Elise Goldsberry), is a model of tightly written—if predictable—realist dramaturgy. The scene’s “reveal” is that Mike’s wife is African American, demonstrating another deviation from Mike’s origins, since South Boston has a history of white pride, if not racism. Lindsay-Abaire torques the race-class stereotypes in their relationship, since Kate is an upper-class, Georgetown bred lawyer, whose background couldn’t be more different from her husband’s. Mike’s determination to pass into her world and to erase his own working-class upbringing doesn’t always pan out. The scene opens on a discussion of the couple’s marital tensions and whether they should continue seeing a counselor.

Margie’s abrupt arrival underlines Mike and Kate’s differences even more starkly, as the strong wind of the past that blows into their Chestnut Hill house along with her unexpected visit further roils the surface of an already turbulent relationship. Kate tries to be generous with Mike’s friend, especially after Margie explains that she’s out of work and needs a job. Kate even suggests that Margie might babysit for their child, explaining that their current sitter is a neighborhood girl who doesn’t really need the money—after all, she drives a “Beemer.” (And, rather unfortunately, has an obviously Jewish surname.) The $15/hour the girl makes to watch their baby is far more than Margie collected at the dollar store. But even as Kate tries to be helpful, she only underlines the privilege in which she and Mike operate and her own ignorance about what it means to be poor.

[Spoiler alert.] Margie is torn about whether or not to make Mike responsible for her economic welfare and tests the waters by telling him that her daughter is actually his, the offspring of their brief affair one summer before he left. But when he reacts badly, she back-pedals, pretending she was just trying to manipulate him. Her presence in his home, though, will clearly have a lasting effect on his relationship with Kate. (One of the second act’s nuances is that Margie and Kate form a gender alliance over Mike’s recalcitrant maleness, despite the women’s stark class differences.)

Margie reminds Mike of the time he and some neighborhood boys went out of their way to beat up a black kid who’d intruded on their territory from the other side of town. Margie insists that if Mike’s father, who regularly watched for him out of the window of their home, hadn’t come to break it up, the boy might have been killed. Although she might not leave their moneyed Chestnut Hill living room with her financial future secured, Margie does succeed in reminding Mike and schooling Kate about his less than liberal past.

At the same time, the story she tells about the fight means multiple things. That Mike was racist suggests that he was a product of his childhood environment; that he subsequently married an African American women, though, indicates that people aren’t necessarily stuck where they begin. The three characters joke about whether you can take the “Southie” out of someone, even if you take them out of “Southie.” But Lindsay-Abaire finds that the truth in that debate is idiosyncratic, rather than general. Mike has escaped his past. He might try to white-wash who he was, but he’s changed. Margie, living her adult life in the same neighborhood with the same friends, is still the same.

Given Mike’s opportunities, though, Margie could be different. But she explains that desire isn’t enough to make escape possible. Mike accuses Margie of choosing badly. He blames her for being stuck in Southie and judges her for her inability to make of her own life the economic and professional success he’s made of his. But she reminds him that she didn’t have any choices. No one watched out the window for her; she was left to struggle on her own and wasn’t counseled about scholarships and routes out.

Margie also knows her fate isn’t about her abilities. She reminds Mike that she might be “ignorant” but she’s not “stupid.” Her world might be small but she’s not unintelligent. Her life is circumscribed by economic hardship; one of the character’s most striking speeches is Margie’s litany of where her money goes every month, a sad spiral of the proverbial robbing Peter to pay Paul. She lists the dentist, a towed car, babysitting money, unexpected expenses, and so on, illustrating the domino effect of poverty on non-existent finances.

Margie leaves Mike and Kate’s home on the ethical high ground. In the play’s final scene, Margie and her women friends sit with Stevie at the bingo hall, hoping to win as they make their crosses on their cards out of a desultory kind of habit. But Dottie tells Margie that her month’s rent has been paid, giving her a reprieve as she looks for work. Margie and the women debate whether Kate or Mike sent the money to Dottie, but Stevie finally admits that he paid Margie’s rent with the money he won at bingo. That the rich couple hasn’t reached out to Margie, whether or not her daughter is Mike’s, is their final bit of self-absorbed negligence.

Who, then, are the “good people” here, Lindsay-Abaire makes us wonder. Should Margie risk her daughter’s welfare by not asking her biological father for support? Did she do Mike a favor by abetting his escape from a neighborhood from which so few of their friends could find their way out? Should people who succeed look back and lend a hand to those less lucky? Or do people only take care of their own, repudiating their pasts when they leave?

Good People doesn’t answer any of these questions definitively, but leaves them in the air with enough ambiguity and ambivalence to make the play stick. The expository first act seems to wander, and contains what seems gratuitous racism about the cashier Margie insists is Chinese, though Stevie says she’s not, and some unnecessary gay-baiting over Stevie’s unmarried status. The second act helps the play’s beginning make sense, although I spent the intermission bemused and a bit irritated.

In the end, Lindsay-Abaire crafts a good, conventional realist play. McDormand is terrific as Margie, bringing the character both dignity and compassion (and the suggestion that in the end, she truly is good people), along with a sense of humor that carries much of the playwright’s wry class critique. Donovan provides a strong foil as Mike, unable to get out of his own way when he’s befuddled by his shame at the past Margie represents. Goldsberry brings nuance and agency to Kate, who could become a stick (or stock) figure, the upper-class African American who in less able hands might only serve as a plot device.

Likewise, that Margie’s daughter, who was born prematurely, is severely disabled—although we’re never told exactly how—seems contrived, too. That she cares single-handedly for a disabled child is supposed to make Margie that much more of a martyr. Rather than having a presence of her own, the daughter is only conceived to illustrate Margie’s character.

Parsons, Baker, and Carroll generate the weariness of those who struggle to make ends meet, alongside the decency of people who care about their community and their common survival. They truly are the good people.

In a discussion with the full cast and the Manhattan Theatre Club’s education director after the matinee performance I saw, the actors were articulate about their characters’ situations and the complexities of their gender, race, and class affiliations. McDormand described growing up working class, and how Lindsay-Abaire’s play touched her own experience of being someone who left her birth community and sometimes finds it awkward to return. Donovan told the audience how Lindsay-Abaire, who’s from South Boston, worked with the cast on their accents as well as their characters. While the moderator kept the conversation short, the cast clearly could have talked for much longer, so committed were they to the project of the play.

That, perhaps, is part of realism’s political potential—that by believing in characters as people who could, somewhere, be real, spectators have a chance to learn something they might not have known. And actors willing to open their hearts and their minds, and to bring dignity and intelligence to their work, become conduits for audiences willing to do the same. Not a bad thing at all.

The Feminist Spectator

Good People, Manhattan Theatre Club, Broadway, April 9, 2011.

Precious Little

This very smart play presents a conundrum of ideas and feelings which, happily, it refuses to sort out in any complete or resolved way. Part of playwright Madeleine George's point is to suggest that even when we think we've got it all figured out, life becomes more ambiguous and ambivalent for reasons far out of our control. The protagonist here is Brodie (Kelly McAndrew), a lesbian linguist. After many years working in obscure language communities out in the field, she's achieved tenure at her university. The obvious next step for a woman of her generation and means is to have a baby. With characteristic deliberateness, she finds a suitable sperm donor and becomes pregnant.

One of the play's many pleasures is that Brodie is an independent woman completely capable of being on her own, who's decided to have a child because she wants to, not because she thinks she has to for her life to be meaningful or complete. The play opens with Brodie speaking with an obsequious, condescending young birth technology counselor (played by Theo Allyn, virtuosic in multiple roles), who tries to prepare her for the results of her upcoming amniocentesis.

Brodie is over 40, and knows that her age means that her pregnancy could go awry in myriad ways. But the jolt in her life's narrative comes when the test does indeed show a potential abnormality, and Brodie responds with uncharacteristic uncertainty about which path to choose. Should she abort the baby or carry it to term, gambling on the possibility that her daughter (she knows its sex because the inept counselor accidentally slips and tells her) will be, as she imagines, "broken"?

George isn't sanguine about a middle-age lesbian's life choices. But at the same time, she suggests that for strong, sure women who've spent their lives making good decisions, it's still possible to be surprised and unprepared when a curve ball comes flying at you. In fact, one of the play's many ruminations centers on the unpredictability of our lives, regardless how intelligent, controlled, and well-meant our plans.

Brodie is a linguistic anthropologist, whose interest in language doesn't necessarily guarantee that she's an excellent communicator. For each of the play's multiple characters, the ability to access language provides the key to a deeper level of feeling.

The play opens with a caged gorilla living with great equanimity behind her bars, speaking her inner thoughts in short, declarative sentences. Played with simple, suggestive physicality by Laurie Klatscher, the animal is fully present to her environment, noticing the angle and quantity of light has it floods her home and the smell of the air on her fur. The animal describes her own activities in the present tense, luxuriating in the pleasure of cataloguing her life as it happens.

A parade of visitors roam past what Brodie and her graduate student, Rhiannon (Allyn), call the animal's "enclosure" instead of its "cage," using politically correct language to mask the fact of the ape's captivity, just as we all use euphemisms to soften the sting of difficult realities.

Allyn also plays a collection of people called "the zoo goers," who stand outside the ape's cage looking in, their words and responses blurring into one another much the way the animal might hear them. As George writes their stream-of-consciousness impressions, it's evident that most people just want to consume their superficial experience of the animal, rather than really trying to connect with it meaningfully before they move on to the next exhibit. They barely notice her soulful presence before they're begging to see the giraffes.

Dragged to the zoo against her will because Rhiannon, her young graduate student lover, wants to do something other than have furtive sex in her office, Brodie does in fact connect with the ape. Although the animal supposedly has 30 or so words at her disposal, their appeal to one another is mostly mute. Brodie understands something of the animal's presentness, her ability to simply be in the moment in ways that Brodie's life precludes.

The animal becomes a kind of ego ideal, as Brodie comes to realize that she, too, will have to be staunchly in her life instead of second-guessing whatever choice she makes. As Dorothy (Klatscher), an older, wiser counselor at the birth clinic suggests as Brody debates her baby's fate, she'll make a decision and then she'll live in it, regardless of how her life changes.

One of Brodie's research informants is Cleva (Klatscher, poignant in the third of her multiple roles), a woman who speaks the dying Slavic language Brodie studies. When Cleva emigrated to the States, she adopted English to separate herself from a politically violent past. As she works with Brodie, who gives her words to record in the university's sound booth, Cleva reconnects to her history through her original tongue and seems to slip from the present, which irritates her emotionally parsimonious daughter no end.

For Cleva, language is a gift, even though it describes a traumatic past. For the ape, language allows her to describe and revel in her local environment, however compromised. Brodie's challenge is to figure out how to use language to capture a future she can't quite imagine. When, in the play's final moment, the ape grips Brodie in a fervent embrace, Brodie’s great relief seems to be the solace she derives from simply being in that moment without the necessity that it be resolved or vocalized.

The play is beautifully directed by Tracy Brigden, who moves the three actors around a simple, evocative set through vignettes of Brodie's emotional and philosophical quandary, accumulating anaffective nuance as the play goes forward. Each of the performers offer precise, carefully drawn portraits of the women whose lives intersect with Brodie's. McAndrew presents a straightforward, likable Brodie, whose existential debate proceeds along a steady trajectory.

Precious Little isn't interested in a voyeuristic study of the emotional angst of a difficult, life-altering decision, but instead, presents a character for whom deciding whether or not to continue a pregnancy provides an opportunity for useful growth. To see a woman academic onstage who's not punished for her intelligence by a fatal disease (see Wit and even the recent The How and the Why), and who isn't belittled or presented as somehow castrating, makes Precious Little a notable contribution to dramatic literature in which female professors are more routinely made to suffer for their competencies.

It's also refreshing to see a play in which a lesbian isn't eager to form a conventional domestic couple. Brodie enjoys Rhiannon, but when the younger woman's opinion about Brodie's pregnancy sounds too glib and thoughtless, Brodie doesn't hesitate to end the relationship.

At the same time, Rhiannon is clear about the pitfalls of sleeping with a professor, anticipating the day when Brodie will not so subtly pass her off to a colleague and withdraw her support. Separating the personal from the professional, George suggests, is impossible, since women who've achieved the success Brodie boasts often find their emotional support and sexual pleasure among those with whom they connect intellectually.

Brigden and the actors capture this dynamic nicely. It's clear that although she's guarded about their relationship, Rhiannon has real affection for her professor, while Brodie is just a bit too distracted to really notice the young woman's attentions. We're not invited to witness the formation of a couple, but to observe how even the most intimate relationships develop through a series of hits and misses, through sentences that sometimes don't really finish the thought they mean to convey. When Brodie breaks off their affair, she says vaguely that "this isn't working out." Rhiannon knowingly retorts that it'd be kinder, in the long run, for Brodie to say exactly what she means.

But in Precious Little, even the most precise language can't quite convey anything with real certainty because in the end, life's just not that simple. Living in it, with all its immutable contradictions and confusions, with magnanimity and generosity, might be the best we can do.

The Feminist Spectator

Precious Little, City Theatre, Pittsburgh, PA, April 3, 2011.

Kin

Bathsheba Doran’s lovely new play is a meditation on community and the unlikely ways in which it forms and dissolves across time. With a light touch and moving, smart insights, Doran paints a series of vignettes that illustrate how despite the fundamental ambivalence with which we make our collective way through our lives, our sometimes unlikely connections with one another can be real and sustaining.

Anna (Kristen Bush) glues together a disparate group of quirky characters. At the play’s opening, she’s a grad student in English at Columbia working on a thesis about punctuation in Keats. She sits silently, withstanding the harangue of Simon (Matthew Rauch), a male professor with whom she’s had what appears to have been a casual affair. He’s breaking it off with all the pompous ego-centricity of an over-educated, over-privileged, too-cool white man. (Doran did her MFA at Columbia, and observes the peculiarities of academic practices with droll humor throughout Kin.)

In Anna’s next scene, she moves from Simon to Helena (played by the galvanizing, terrific Laura Heisler), her oldest friend, a mostly out of work actor who’s devastated by the death of her dog, with whom she’s clearly had her longest, most important emotional relationship. The two women bury the poor animal together at night in the park, even though Helena knows that the city forbids such interments. The scene is both funny and poignant, and sets the dual tone on which Doran balances Kin’s emotional quotient throughout.

In a parallel universe that soon connects with Anna’s, Sean (Patch Darragh), an Ireland-born personal trainer, speaks by phone to his mother, Linda (played by the wonderful Suzanne Bertish), back home. He’s broken up with a girlfriend who turned out to be a drug addict, and Linda is house-bound, agoraphobic because she was raped many years ago by the murky figure she calls the “man in the mist,” who’s never been identified or prosecuted.

Matched up by an on-line service, Anna and Sean begin to date, and Doran intertwines their very different lives in surprising, never predictable ways. Each character is drawn with confident, clear, and compelling attributes but with little elaborate psychology. Doran provides some back-story—Anna’s mother died of cancer when she was a teenager; her father, Adam (Cotter Smith), is a military man with professional and personal secrets that keep him and his daughter estranged; neurotic Helena’s mother is a psychiatrist. But we learn these details by accretion rather than through exposition, because what motivates Doran’s characters isn’t as important as the choices they make in the play’s present.

All of the characters change across the arc of the play in ways that seem hopeful without being facile or trite, and although Anna is central to the group’s relationships, her trajectory is ultimately one among many. Sean thinks Helena is crazy, then begins to feel real affection for her; Anna finds her dead mother’s diary and realizes that her parents were never happy; Sean wonders if he loves Anna and remains emotionally preoccupied with Rachel (Molly Ward), his drug-addicted ex.

When he first finds out about his daughter’s relationship, Adam scoffs to Kay (Kit Flanagan), his secret lover, that Sean will never amount to anything. But he comes to respect Sean, to see his goodness, and to understand what the young man brings to his daughter. Anna never meets Kay, who sees Anna’s picture for the first time on the cover of her book, even though Kay has mothered Anna, unacknowledged and unknown, from a distance for most of Anna’s life.

Adam’s secret relationship with Kay stands in for the wealth of what we don’t know about one another. Relationships, Kin suggests, are risks we take based on the tiny bits of knowledge we’re able to gather, confronted with how finally unfathomable we are to one another, yet how inevitably tied. Our connections are tenuous and attenuated, but they persist.

Helena, to whom Doran assigns the funniest lines and the most outrageous traits, seems poised on the brink of disaster throughout the play. She cries frequently and easily, sometimes for cause, sometimes not, and her career as an actor is minor at best. She dreams of a ward of children who’ve tried to commit suicide, and sees herself among them. But instead of ending her life, Helena begins it again by moving to North Carolina, where a confrontation with another animal provides the epiphany she needs to reboot her emotions.

Doran and director Sam Gold provide a hysterical spin on The Winter’s Tale’s famous stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear,” in a scene that provokes not only laughter, but admiration for Doran’s ability to craft a scene with such delicious theatricality and such moving sensitivity.

No prefabricated, falsely cataclysmic pathways open for these characters. Instead, Doran observes them making ambivalent but sustaining and transforming choices that change them by accretion, over time. On a very simple set that uses moveable pieces to frame the action, the most salient décor is the clocks that actors place on the walls, not to tell the time, but to remind us that time is the element in which we act. Time passes, as it does in Kin, in ways that we’re surprised to mark, in ways that bring us closer together and draw us apart less by agency than by the simple accumulation of hours, days, and years.

As Kin progresses (in under two hours with no intermission), Anna gets her PhD, writes a book, and gets tenure, but none of these events are as determining as what she learns about herself in relationship to the others. That self-knowledge isn’t delivered in big scenes with long, self-explanatory monologues, but in the way Doran and Gold establish the simple on-going project of her life. The play’s events are crafted through the characters’ commitment to one another, despite the essential, hovering doubt that infuses their interactions, much like the mist that obscures Sean and Anna’s wedding on the cliffs in Ireland at the play’s end.

For example, schooled by more conventional realism, we expect that Linda will undergo some profound catharsis that will exorcise the trauma of her rape. She finally does move outside to sit on the stoop of her house with Anna, and in the end, walks to the very cliffs where the rape took place to attend her son’s wedding.

But when Linda finally ends her self-imprisonment, Doran doesn’t herald the moment as a blaring triumph. The playwright presents it instead as an understated, simple movement forward. Linda’s liberation comes from the Xanax Anna supplies, and from the supportive arm Adam offers when it comes time to attend to the wedding ceremony. Doran suggests that great emotional revelations aren’t as important as the simple ways in which we help one another get through—with a pill or an arm that makes unexpected progress possible.

That the story culminates in a (heterosexual) marriage should make it seem conservative, but instead, the event seems less about the couple and more about the fragile but committed community that surrounds them. All the principals gather upstage, in a terrifically executed rainfall and cold mist that billows out into the first rows of the audience. As rain drenches the dearly beloved, Helena officiates, shouting against the weather that she’s not present in a religious capacity, but as a witness.

Linda stands beside Adam, revisiting for the first time the site of her own rape to observe her son’s marriage. Despite how momentous her presence is, Doran doesn’t focus the scene on Linda. But her attendance at the wedding underlines that change is fundamentally possible, that we can return to the scene of a crime and revise what that place means, that we can stand in it differently and reorient ourselves to our pasts and our futures.

Sean and Anna’s wedding isn’t inevitable in Kin. Both characters wonder if they should leave the relationship. Sean visits Rachel to see if the emotions he imagines still exist, and finds her already married, sober, and rather empty, unable to recall any of what must have been their old feeling. Anna confides in Helena that she feels alone even when she’s beside Sean, and thinks about leaving him.

Yet they do marry, not because they’re settling for less, but because Kin suggests that though doubt is a fundamental condition of our lives, it doesn’t prevent us from living. All the characters endure some sort of emotional damage that complicates their responses and relationships, but in Doran’s hands, their baggage isn’t predictive or fundamental, but only emotions that they carry along and move through, as time passes.

Kin is structured around two- or three-character exchanges until the very end, when the assembled community gathers for the wedding. The intimate style of those small scenes demonstrates Doran’s facility with language, her ear for how people talk to one another, garnished with a poet’s sense of how the content of what we say draws on a well of feeling that’s often expressed indirectly, metaphorically.

Gold directed Circle Mirror Transformation and Aliens, both written by Annie Baker, whose plays resemble Doran’s in their attention to tiny human interactions and the threads of relationships that make up lives and emotional communities. He directs Kin with a strong but simple visual style and deep emotional understanding. This is an actor’s play, which Gold and designers Paul Steinberg (set) and Jane Cox (lights) frame gracefully to highlight the characters’ connections.

Occasionally, when a scene ends, the actors who just performed remain on the set in a half-light to watch the next scene. Doran and Gold offer these moments of silent witnessing, of characters (or actors) just being there for one another, watching their lives unfold across time, perhaps to illustrate the wordless support we bring to our relationships just by staying connected.

Gold’s exquisite direction trusts the ensemble of talented actors to convey the script’s nuances. The set, which the actors move into its various configurations, shows us as if through a picture frame how we capture, if not memorialize, moments in our lives. The set’s predominating clocks seem to underline our passage onward and our sometimes perplexing faith that simply moving through time and space will lead us somewhere, however unexpected, however surprising.

Life, Kin tells us, is never perfect, but can be very good. After their wedding, Sean unexpectedly exclaims to Anna, “I hope we don’t die,” and she says, gently, “We won’t, not for a very long time.” The simple exchange crystalizes our continual surprise at the preciousness and fragility of our lives. The play ends on a note of hope, with a warm faith that by extending our kinship, we sustain ourselves.

The Feminist Spectator

Kin, by Bathsheba Doran, directed by Sam Gold, Playwrights Horizons, March 18, 2011.

Fen

Caryl Churchill’s 1983 play, Fen, represents the British feminist playwright at her best, even though the play is rarely produced. In this revival at London’s Finborough Theatre, director Ria Parry (Iron Shoes Productions) and a top-notch cast offer a thrilling reminder of Churchill’s theatricality and her incisive Marxist/feminist analysis of the politics of gender, sexuality, and class.

Like many of Churchill’s earlier plays, Fen addresses the interactions among a community of people, rather than singling out one or two individuals for dramatic treatment. Here, Val, one of the women who work in the potato fields, stands out from the rest, but only as the catalyst for the story’s investigation of the social constraints dictated by the economics of labor. At the play’s beginning, Val decides to walk away from her job, to the surprise of her co-workers and their boss, a woman nominally more powerful than the field-hands, who stands on a low bridge above them, watching them work.

Played by Katharine Burford—the only cast member who doesn’t perform multiple roles—Val is a bit of a dreamer, convinced that her love for Frank (Alex Beckett) is more important than anything else in her life, including her job and her two young children. Val is the play’s most determined idealist; she establishes one pole of ambition against which the other women and Frank are measured. Val’s hopeful investment in the power of love doesn’t release her from her straitened circumstances. In fact, by the play’s end, her only way out of a deadening life is to beg Frank to kill her. Val’s trajectory represents Churchill’s bleak view of the options for those without economic agency.

In the small Finborough Theatre, which seats perhaps 50 spectators on two banks of facing risers across a small, narrow playing area, director Parry creates a rather environmental production. The two sides of the theatre are connected by a low bridge that spectators on the far side use to reach their seats, and that actors use to represent the play’s ever-changing locales.

The rectangular central playing area, which extends from one wall to the other, is covered in rich, dark dirt, which represents the fens, the potato fields where the community labors. Even when scenes move to various characters’ homes or other social settings, the dirt remains, a palpable reminder that these people are always mired in the manual labor that provides their only livelihood.

To establish the stultifying, physically challenging effort of potato farming, Churchill sets the first scene in the field, where the workers bend over metal buckets, pulling potatoes from the earth, wiping dirt off their skins, and dumping buckets of them into bins. The workers murmur among themselves while the forewoman watches from above, until Val, her face open and alive, declares that she’s leaving. None of the other workers know where Val intends to go, but they respond with a grim understanding that she’ll no doubt be back.

In fact, when Val presents herself and her two young girls, suitcases in hand, to Frank, and begs him to go to London with them, he instead persuades her to stay. He doesn’t know what he’d do in London, and although she seems game for a romantic adventure, willing to move into an unknown world to free herself, Frank is differently stuck in the local and thwarts what turns out to be her last chance to escape.

He suggests they live together, which requires Val to leave her children with her ex-husband (who’s never seen) and her mother, Mavis (Rosie Thomson, who’s excellent in each of the four roles she cycles among). The girls are just old enough to resent Val’s absence; they punish her emotionally when she tries to visit them. Val’s choice to give up her children’s love to gain Frank’s demonstrates Churchill’s unsentimental view of motherhood, which is still refreshing, given other playwrights’ tendency to valorize women with children.

Family relationships in Fen never provide a haven for this community. The play tells parallel stories of a group of women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who work in the fields, and a group of young girls, perhaps eight, ten, and twelve, who are still growing up. One of the girls, Becky (Elicia Daly), has been left in the care of her cruel stepmother, Angela (Nicola Harrison). Angela taunts Becky with brutal antipathy and begins to beat and abuse her physically, finally putting out her cigarettes on Becky’s arms. Their relationship signals a kind of horizontal violence among people in such desperate straits.

In one of her few moments of contrition, Angela asks Becky how she can continue to love her, since Becky tolerates Angela’s abuse with a peculiar yet moving, quiet generosity. Angela explains that she hurts Becky so that she can reassure herself that she’s alive at all. Brutality becomes Angela’s only agency; without being cruel to Becky, and seeing the marks she leaves on her skin, Angela has no evidence that she exists.

Churchill interweaves public and private spheres in Fen, so that the women’s domestic worlds are always formed in relation to their field work. Across the set from the low bridge, a dirty, worn kitchen unit stands against the wall. An ancient sink, with cabinets above and below it, and an old ironing board nearby, frame the women’s domestic labor as clearly as the tin potato buckets on the fen ground their contributions to capitalism. These spheres aren’t separate, Churchill suggests, but thoroughly interpolate their subjects in both.

The play’s first monologue, for example, is delivered by a Japanese businessman (also played by Thomson), who describes the genealogy of ownership in which the land is entwined. This global investor, with a camera slung around his neck, can only see the fens through the dividends they accrue. The local landlord, Mr. Tewson (Beckett, playing both Frank and Frank’s boss), on the other hand, is caught in an economic bind, trying to make ends meet by negotiating a sale with a middle-person sent to buy out Mr. Tewson’s share.

In these scenes and the others in Fen, the cross-casting illustrates that none of these characters are villains and none heroes. In Frank’s first monologue, he practices a speech in which he intends to ask Mr. Tewson for a raise. When Beckett later plays Mr. Tewson, Churchill clarifies that the man Frank thinks has so much power actually has very little in the scheme of the corporate, global capitalism that’s squeezing him out. Churchill doesn’t lay individual blame, but constructs a social constellation in which each character is interdependent with the others, even if their access to power and wealth differently marks their experience.

Gender, too, is determining in Fen. In one of the production’s most effective scenes, the young girls make up a song and dance to a disco tune—the music of the 80s poignantly punctuates the production—that describes what they want to be when they grow up. They dance and laugh to their music, singing that they want to be nurses or hairdressers. But because these pre-teen girls are played by the same actors who perform the middle-aged women characters, it’s obvious that their fates are pre-determined. Like their mothers, aunts, or neighbors, they’ll work the fields, gathering potatoes and onions just like everyone else, and will never achieve their dreams of other, more glamorous-seeming occupations.

The dirt on which the whole story plays out is a constant reminder of the characters’ gritty lives. And because it pulls the production away from realism, the dirt, like the other singular, totemic objects brought out to help the story signify its themes, becomes itself a kind of currency. Most of the characters wear tall rubber boots necessary for mucking about in the often wet fields. Those boots remain constant, underneath other changes of clothing accessories that help the actors signal their various characters.

Every implement they use—a rake, dragged across the brown dirt; a dart board, at which the characters play in a rare moment of dingy leisure; a basket of laundry—has a place on stage, hanging from a hook or revealed inside a cupboard, waiting. The scene design evokes the furthest thing from plentitude; there’s no outside in which a wealth of other things might be gathered. Every object that exists is to hand; there’s no more. Everything on stage, then—whether prop or gesture, word or image—becomes a Brechtian gestus, emblematic of a set of social relations forcefully captured. Nothing is wasted. The acting and direction mirror the economy of means that the characters require to survive lives of blistering emotional and physical scarcity.

The six actors perform beautifully, capturing the feminist Brechtian acting style that Churchill’s plays demand to be effective. They don’t play the characters’ psychology, since Churchill doesn’t fill in individual backstories to excuse or even explain their behavior. But the actors make clear performance choices that center each character in the action of the scene, whether they’re gathering potatoes, making up dances, caring for a baby, or ironing a shirt. The actors flesh out the characters without writing them into a personal narrative. The story they collectively tell is an intensely shared, social story about people whose every move is dictated by economic necessity rather than personal desire, dreams, or choice.

And yet, Fen is wrenching because even in the midst of such lack, the characters do dream. Val isn’t the only woman with desires; they’re all simply at different stages of reconciling to the fact that they’ll never be fulfilled. After Val, finally hopeless, asks Frank to kill her and he complies, the play ends with Val’s mother, Mavis, left with the children. In earlier scenes, the girls have asked their grandmother to sing to them, as Val did, but Mavis can’t seem to produce a note. At the play’s end, we learn that Mavis can’t sing because she wanted nothing more than to be a singer. In Churchill’s final, ambivalent and ambiguous imagining, Mavis stands alone on the bridge, her face lit with hope, lip-syncing to a beautiful melody. She’s singing, but not really, moving her mouth, just as she moves her hands, in the service of someone else’s production.

Ultimately, no escape is possible from lives that offer few options. One of the characters describes how people take out their rage on animals, which, sadly, calms them down—they have nothing else to do with their feelings. Val dies because she can’t see any way out of her predicament, but it’s more a function of the play’s sense of over-riding destiny than it is her own psychological dictates that determine her choice. Love isn’t escape; the best Frank’s love can do for Val is to direct the ax he finally uses to kill her.

Yet in such a bleak landscape, this production of Fen ends as oddly hopeful. The intimacy of the ensemble’s acting; the subtlety and sureness of the direction; the tactile, evocative set design; the haunting soundscape; all these choices create a theatrical experience that’s alienated in the positive, politically inflected, Brechtian sense of the word. They also paint a rich world with very specific brush strokes and a grounded, humane perspective on the wages of economic determinism in a social scheme where laborers toil hopelessly.

Fen deserves to be revived often, as it continues to resonate across the global social landscape.

The Feminist Spectator

Fen, Finborough Theatre, London, March 13, 2011.