[ad_1]
Technically, there are only four characters in Rebecca Gilman’s “Swing State,” a melancholy new drama, now at the Minetta Lane. There’s a retired guidance counsellor, Peg (Mary Beth Fisher); her troubled young neighbor, Ryan (Bubba Weiler); the local sheriff, Kris (Kirsten Fitzgerald); and Kris’s niece and deferential new deputy, Dani (Anne E. Thompson). They all cause problems for one another, even as they try their clumsy best to offer help. But the fifth character—and the one we should really be worrying about—is Wisconsin. Is anyone doing anything for Wisconsin? In 2021, the swing state of the title is teetering, both socially and ecologically, and Gilman deposits us in that trembling landscape, even though her play takes place entirely indoors.
Peg’s sprawling house sits on more than forty acres of so-called remnant prairie, a rare sliver of the tallgrass Plains, an endangered ecosystem that dates back roughly ten thousand years. “There used to be millions and millions of acres of it, all down the middle of the country, but there’s only about four per cent left now,” she tells Dani. Sheriff Kris hankers after the untilled property—she’s dying to see it “put to good use” as productive cropland—but Peg is committed to protecting her wild remnant from the corn and soybean monocultures that threaten it on all sides. A biome doesn’t necessarily obey boundary markers, however, and nitrates from huge farms are leaching into Peg’s groundwater, as pesticides drip over her fence line.
Prairies, though they appear simple, are miraculous beneath the soil—thanks to complex root masses that descend as deep as fifteen feet, they can survive grazing, fires, and drought. Peg, as played by the graceful Fisher, possesses that quality, too: her selfhood goes beyond what we see. She has been knocked sideways by the sudden death of her biologist husband, a year earlier, and, in her friendship with Ryan, who has recently finished a prison term for felony battery, it’s unclear who needs the other more. (“All we do is apologize to each other. We got a weird relationship,” Ryan says to Dani, as he sticks a note on Peg’s fridge.) Gilman sketches in a web of neighborly stewardship. But that social web, already weakened by the pandemic and vitriolic political division, begins to tear once Peg notices that she’s missing some tools. When the police investigate, everything violently unravels.
The director, Robert Falls, has brought his 2022 Goodman Theatre production to New York from Chicago; here, the show is produced by Audible, and will be released as an audio drama after its run. The ensemble’s long process has polished some aspects of the production to a deep shine. Todd Rosenthal’s farmhouse set is imaginatively detailed—we can see, on a high shelf, a jar of gumballs that Peg must have kept on hand in case her students dropped by—as is Eric Southern’s lighting design, a series of gray skies outside and plucky little lamps inside, which reflects the characters’ sense of embattled isolation.
Among an experienced troupe, Weiler, as Ryan, is still settling into his part; he seems so bent on conveying “troubled youth” that he attacks the soup Peg makes for him as if he’s never held a spoon. Fortunately, Fitzgerald and Thompson both do precise, naturalistic work with Gilman’s delicately shaded dialogue, and manage to make the community just offstage seem populous and real. In the end, though, “Swing State” rests on Fisher’s shoulders: she starred in the original production of Gilman’s most famous play, “Spinning Into Butter,” from 1999, and this part was written for her. The production trusts her to hold our attention even as she’s wandering in and out of rooms, alone. The play can be immensely moving when Peg lists her prairie’s vanishing species—whip-poor-wills, nighthawks, chorus frogs—and we see her yearning to join them in oblivion.
Gilman has written an intermissionless play whose events swell to a climax, but it’s difficult, sometimes, to impose conventional action onto the abyss of her heroine’s death urge and the spectre of the sixth mass extinction. For all her extraordinary subtleties of characterization, Gilman can be a bit conspicuous, as a plotter, when she tries to hurry things along. “Swing State” is the third play I’ve seen this year to use a panic attack or a stress-induced seizure as a dramaturgical accelerant. (The others were Christina Masciotti’s “No Good Things Dwell in the Flesh” and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “The Comeuppance.”) It’s certainly handy for a playwright to have a character whose response to a tense situation is to hyperventilate and get loud, but Ryan’s breakdowns show us Gilman’s craft too clearly. Here is a turning point, they say. Crescendo here.
Still, “Swing State” is a model of structural restraint compared with Theresa Rebeck’s tonally haywire “Dig,” which is busy shovelling itself into a hole uptown at the 59E59 Theatres. Rebeck also wants to use plants—their resilience, their need for space and care—as a metaphor, but this show is a mind-boggling misfire. Rebeck has written dozens of tartly observed social dramas; she has noted that she is “the most Broadway-produced female playwright of our time.” (Her fifth production there, “I Need That,” arrives later this fall.) In a prolific career that has included writing for a number of television shows, such as “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” she created the catnip-for-musical-lovers dramedy “Smash.” Whether you’re delighted by her other work or not, it’s sturdy. It follows certain laws of cause and effect.
But the characters in “Dig” run so counter to recognizable human behavior that they’ll say and do anything. The play’s title refers to the name of a plant shop, which some people onstage inexplicably seem to find confusing. “You don’t actually know what kind of store that might be,” a customer says, even though she has, clearly, managed to figure it out. The shop’s owner, Roger (Jeffrey Bean), claims at one point that he hadn’t been selling flowering plants because he found them “too eager to please.” What? And, when Megan (Andrea Syglowski), the local pariah and the daughter of his only friend, tries to seduce Roger, she does so by haranguing him with a non sequitur. “You act like a virgin,” she says. No, he doesn’t. And who says that?
We know two core things about Megan: she insists on telling the truth about her self-destructiveness to everyone she encounters (“This is totally my mandate,” she says, blaming her oversharing on A.A.), and she is tortured by guilt for having let her child die in an overheated car. When her evil ex-husband, Adam (David Mason), slinks in like a mustachio-twirling nineteenth-century villain—Rebeck, who also directs the play, makes sure the performances are visible from outer space—we discover that she has been lying about her culpability. But Megan’s actions and even the first half of her scene with Adam don’t make sense without that guilt. It’s as if the actors, the characters, and the playwright herself are all finding out about the twist at the same time.
I’m as capable as the next person of enjoying a play going cattywampus, but “Dig,” with its barmy melodrama and sickening, torn-from-the-headlines violence, eventually becomes repulsive. It’s one thing to be lazy about researching what goes on in a plant store (it’s not all repotting and pruning), and quite another to be slapdash while staging the sexual assault of a blacked-out woman. Roger, whom Rebeck has chosen as her Do-Right hero amid a wilderness of wicked men, interrupts his onetime employee Everett (poor, poor Greg Keller) mid-attack, and accuses him of taking advantage of Megan’s broken heart. Her heart? Instead of calling the cops or a doctor, let alone telling Megan what has happened to her when she asks the next morning, Roger shouts at her, then apologizes, then looks meaningfully at a fake African violet. “It can be saved,” he says. Oh, Roger, no. Maybe your phony plant is gonna make it—but that potted metaphor you’re holding has been dead for around two hours. ♦
[ad_2]
Source link
