| . | 05/04/2008
Substitution
By: Deirdre Donovan
To look on the bright side first, Substitution is a stunning acting achievement for Jan Maxwell. If you want emotional depth and verve, flexibility and range, the renowned actor delivers all that in a soul-wrenching portrait of a mother grieving over the death of her teenage son. And though the play itself is flawed, Maxwell, in interpreting her character, breaks the glass ceiling of Hallmark sentimentality about death. What’s more, her superb acting rescues a difficult play from sinking into its own ponderous depths.
Playwright Anton Dudley penned the play with the Tony award-winning actor in mind. And Dudley clearly puts the actor to good use, tapping into her solid talent. But his new play, the first production of Playwrights Realm theater company at SoHo Playhouse, is woefully deficient as a four-character play. And when not centered on Maxwell’s character, it often seems to be at crosscurrents or adrift.
To be sure, the show opens with an emotional wallop. Maxwell’s character addresses the audience as soul mate. She begins with the bleak awareness that “there are no words” for her grief experience. Nonetheless, she supplies us with the grim details of Calvin’s death, which spew out like shards of raw emotion. We learn he recently died, along with his classmates, in a boat explosion on a school trip along the Northern US coast. Everybody was grotesquely dismembered, including her son. The monologue (the best-written in the play) is sublimely touching with no false pathos.
Playing opposite to Maxwell’s character is Paul (ably played by Kieran Campion), Calvin’s substitute teacher. Paul is the character who throws the monkey wrench into the story. He challenges everything that Calvin’s Mom believes, and cherishes, about her son. Calvin’s Mom at first distrusts this teacher half her age (she’s in her mid 40s), but she soon discovers that only he can offer solace to her bruised heart. And why? His understanding of Calvin is uncanny, almost mystical. And, in her fragile state of mind, Paul becomes an anchor of hope.
Wait, there’s another story tucked into the lining of this play. Just as Paul and Calvin’s Mom are outlined for us, they vanish from the stage. And the lights go up on Jule (Shana Dowdeswell) and Dax (Brandon Espinoza), teenage classmates of Calvin. We first glimpse these two characters in an elevated window (like in Pillowman) approximately 6 feet above the stage floor, dressed up as superheroes, Merboy and Winged Girl. We get to eavesdrop on their romantic tete-a-tete on a school bus. And, gradually, we begin to understand the world they inhabit, and the future they are reaching for. True, they bend the linear narrative (and realism) of the play. But their innocent maunderings add a lot of texture to the larger story, and effectively frame the tragic boating accident. In fact, Jule and Dax become like alternate narrators, and chronicle the star-crossed bus journey to the boat. And in an arresting final monologue, Dax poignantly describes his (and his classmates) handshake with death when the boat explodes. True, the play’s prevailing atmosphere is dark. But Dax illuminates, and argues, in this coup de theatre that love is not time’s fool.
The main problem with the play is that it’s too short (at 90 minutes) to fully realize its complex themes of love and death. There are also times when characters act too impulsively or implausibly. And the play often tries too hard to connect its grief-stricken characters.
Surely, one can accept Calvin’s Mom being frazzled over the recent death of her son. But is it actually credible that only weeks after the accident, she could be seduced by her son’s substitute teacher? All right, Paul is very likable and available. But one must suspend oceans of disbelief to see her embark on a serious romantic relationship with a substitute teacher fresh out of grad school. Early on, Calvin’s Mom shows “iron in the blood.” But after Paul invites her for a drinking stint at a nearby Bennigan’s restaurant, and she finally agrees, their romance goes into dangerous fast-forward. And it serves to destabilize everything that was building so delicately in the story.
Despite its lapses, the play is not boring. Jan Maxwell is just too amazing an actor for the play to be a total waste. This show gives her a terrific opportunity to showcase her talent. And she doesn’t disappoint, even when the drama does. In her two Tony-nominated roles in Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang! and Coram Boy, she played characters that both seemed like strapping Amazons. In this play, however, she gets her chance to play mom with a capital “M.” And ever since Eve arrived in the world and gave birth, has there been a more profound role to play in literature or life?
Directed by Katherine Kovner, Substitution is the inaugural production of the Playwrights Realm Theater Company, which is committed to presenting works from the classical canon as well as contemporary playwrights’ works. Interestingly, the company’s name was inspired by a line out of Emily Dickinson’s poetry: “except through this extent: the realm of you.” Don’t ask me to explain that line. But in light of Dudley’s play, what could be more fitting than adding Dickinson’s simple palindrome on love: “That love is all there is/ is all we know of love;”
For every caveat that you can raise about the production, you can still find some diamonds among the ashes. Dudley has an unswervingly good ear for dialogue. And his monologues are brimming with poetic intensity. But the real reason to see this show is to see Maxwell in the leading role. She plumbs new emotional depths with her character. And she not only proves to be a stage-taker, but becomes a genuine life preserver for Dudley’s new work.
The SoHo Playhouse , 15 Van Dam Street, New York, NY 212-691-1555 or http://www.sohoplayhouse.com
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