God's Ear
The American issue play sometimes feels as dead as the children it so frequently conjures; stymied by political and social strictures, playwrights either censor themselves or, worse, have no ideas vibrant enough to cause a stir. A highly lauded recent entry, David Lindsay-Abaire's 2006 Rabbit Hole, treats the death of a little boy with aseptic sanctimony, offering no insight to its circumstance and no resonance beyond; its looky-loo exploitation is a tedious bromide, not mean-spirited but insulting on human and artistic levels. Our playwrights must at some point abandon popular ready-made situations, or drama will have the future of its present: largely stale, mostly regurgitative. How many more prefabricated kids, addictions, and political illusions must be sacrificed to our collective lack of imagination before we sicken of the cheap and easy, the unearned, in our drama?
How excellent then to find a corrective in Jenny Schwartz's God's Ear, especially under Rory Kozoll's exciting direction at the Echo. Just a year younger than Rabbit Hole, God's Ear also begins with the death of a child, and at lights-up one recognizes the familiar traits - parents staring bleakly, repeating the words of physicians. For just a second you might think you're watching a Lifetime movie. But then Kozoll transmutes the hospital deathbed into the grieving parents' master bedroom, and Schwartz spins us into a real Wonderland of pain and regeneration. Where Rabbit Hole blandly urged us to look at the parents as if at a Hallmark card ("So sorry for your troubles! It'll get better!"), this play insinuates us into their bizarre and fascinating psyches. Schwartz raises her head from immediate crisis to examine the surrounding universe, and to ask how our influences become our selves. There's no simple answer there, no "time heals" dictum; there's just the work of a lifetime.
Drawn to the empty pageant of language, Schwartz writes dialogue like the stubborn, scratched-record version of Samuel Beckett. Her characters play with the shells of verbal chestnuts, experimentally discarding and adding syllables, homophones, piling up echoes and counterstrokes until meaning is lost or, gloriously, discovered. The grieving mother, homebound with her surviving daughter, cries out in a desperate request for solace - but all her words are the stuff of quote-a-day calendars and motivational posters. Her husband flees this assault of banality, unable to see its human motive, and wanders a dark horizon of airplanes and bars, finding bitter communion in small talk with chance acquaintances. That he is briefly placated by strangers, though their insipid words are nearly identical to his wife's, generates the first inkling of transcendence in this play. When those cliches are personified and brought to swaggering life, but fail to comfort him, his wife, or one another, that transcendence expands to fill the theater. This play describes more than two people reeling from tragedy - it points out that the platitudes we use to offer condolences (and don't they feel inadequate then!) are equally unsuited to get us through everyday life. If toys and fairy godmothers talk more sense than your parents, if a transvestite stewardess offers comfort your spouse cannot, well, at least someone's trying. But fantasies of comfort do not keep us warm at night.
Amanda Saunders plays the mother as an ice queen, shellshocked into frigid sarcasm. That much is in the script. But she and Kozoll might trust the words a little more and soften her performance; the distance is already in the lines. It says much about Saunders' talent that from under her cool mask peeps a playful apology for her lack of connection to her family. As the miserable daughter, Alana Dietze does not pout or cry, brilliantly pushing the boundaries of restraint. Paul Caramagno's absentee father displays the appropriate alienation, but the actor would do himself a favor to give more of the performance to the audience than to the floor. I think his whole performance could be stronger than his confidence allowed as of opening night. He comes more to life during his scenes with a barfly pickup, Andrea Grano in a perfectly luscious comic turn positioned to buoy the show through its darkest waters. Jeremy Shranko, Tara Karsian and Troy Blendell flesh out other characters, fantastic and prosaic and all of them very well played.
The star of the evening, though, is the script. An absurd, postmodern landscape that manages to remain coherent? In the third millennium? In Los Angeles? It's an event. And when such a play is directed with economy and grace, it's cause for celebration.
Presented by the Echo Theater Company, January 14 - February 19 at the Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood - www.echotheatercompany.com