The Play That Wasn't There, or: Are We Pinter Yet?

Rebecca Harris, Dennis Parlato, and Jay Ben Markson in Mrs. Whitney.  Photos: Meghan Moore.

With John Kolvenbach it always seems to be "one step forward, two steps back."  This prolific playwright keeps getting produced, and so I keep getting exposed to him.  And I keep being mystified by the fact that he keeps getting produced, and that I keep getting exposed to him.

Or at least I felt that way until I saw Love Song, which Orfeo Group did last summer, and which had at least one great idea, and some sharp writing, to recommend it.   Love Song also sang with something like a theme - call it "romantic autism," or "relationship autism," if you will - that I suddenly realized had been a component of everything I'd been seeing by Kolvenbach all along.  This playwright seems obsessed with relationships that are in the end impossible because of the perceptual or emotional deficits of his characters; what made Love Song so witty was that it turned this gap on its head; the play's romantics learned to conduct the most passionate of affairs with themselves, and their own fantasies - indeed, it turned out the script's central love object wasn't even there.

So I actually began to think - you know, maybe there is something to this guy after all.

But now I've sat through Mrs. Whitney (which closes this weekend up at Merrimack Rep), and I think I'm ready to throw in the towel again on Mr. Kolvenbach, even though in some ways Mrs. W. counts technically as a step forward for him.  He does juggle more characters here than he has previously, and attempts to connect to a longer timeline, while conjuring an unstable sense of the past; he's trying to expand his range.

And yet at the same time a kind of playwriting autism seems to be afflicting him; for his superficial new accomplishments in Mrs. Whitney are all undermined by deep dramatic lacunae - that's a fancy word, btw, for voids.  As in empty spaces.  Vacuums.  We leave this play, in fact, never quite comprehending what it has been about, or whether it was even intended to be about anything at all.

Which, yes it has occurred to me, may be the larger point.  Is Mrs. Whitney actually a huge conceptual-art gambit, one whose clever surface conceals the fact that it is actually another "show about nothing"?  I often pondered this during the course of the performance at Merrimack (which seemed obsessed with actory surface, btw), and I got the feeling it had also occurred to Campbell Baird, the production designer, as he'd built a cheery winter homestead out of plastic and drapes, with fake snow on the windowpanes and holes in the walls opening onto - well - black, empty voids.  This house isn't really here, the set all but screamed, because these people aren't really here, just like their relationships aren't really here - because this play isn't really here.

So if that was your intent, Mr. Kolvenbach - to write a play that wasn't really there - then congratulations!  You have succeeded!   You have expertly shrink-wrapped a good deal of clever dialogue around absolutely nothing at all (except possibly denial).  Oh, I know there are things that seem to be here, like - well, alcoholism; and infidelity; and lost love and loneliness and despair.  But none of those things are actually there, are they.  No, I'm quite sure they're not.

The only question for me is - do you think they're there?

Ah, perhaps there's the rub.  For I'm afraid there's at least one other explanation for Mrs. Whitney.  The first is that John Kolvenbach has brought off a brilliant aesthetic illusion.  The second, however, is that he just doesn't realize he has left out everything that counts about a play.  And I admit that when I learned Mrs. Whitney was actually the second part of dramatic diptych (the first play of the duo is called Goldfish), I did begin to lose faith in that first explanation!  For in interviews Kolvenbach has actually opined that Mrs. Whitney was written to further explore the background characters of Goldfish.  And in the Merrimack program, he muses that his script "is a comedy.  About heartbreak."  Okay, but he goes on: his  plays are "scored," he explains; the empty spots in the script "serve the same purpose as the lines in the play . . . they convey information . . . the audience will only receive the play if the music is in place.  The plays should sing."

Oh, no.  Oh, shut up John Kolvenbach.  Please shut up.  Because all that makes the conceptual gambit explanation a little hard to swallow.  I mean . . . you don't really think you're some sitcom Pinter, do you?  That your gaps and lacunae operate with some sort of resonant mystery?  Oh, no.

But - oh well!! I'll go through the set-up of the drama anyway, and let people decide for themselves.  We meet the eponymous Mrs. Whitney (Dierdre Madigan, at left) just after Christmas, when she's brooding on her empty nest (her daughter is now grown, and AWOL).  We sense that we're entering the scene after some sort of crisis (Gap #1), but we've no idea what it might be (my advice is: check the script of Goldfish).

At any rate, there's a neighbor on hand, Francis (Joel Colodner) who is eager to make her less lonely, but she sets her eye instead on the former Mr. Whitney, whom she divorced for very good reasons something like two decades ago.  We have reason to doubt Mrs. Whitney's judgment on this score, of course - just as  we have some reason to doubt her judgment on everything.  We get the impression, in fact, that we may have caught her in the middle of drinking herself to death (she actually orders Francis to take the food he has brought her out of the house and leave it in the snow).  But then again - maybe not; she certainly seems to be entirely in hand, indeed, she's a model of crisp, ironic control.  Hence - Gap #2:  What's up with Mrs. Whitney?

But onward.  Mrs. W. pursues the former Mr. W. to the aforementioned cheery homestead, where the current Mrs. Whitney (Rebecca Harris) is waiting to brain her absent husband - or whoever walks through the front door - with a shot glass.  It seems that Mr. Whitney has gone missing, as he often does - indeed, it seems one key reason why all the various Mrs. Whitneys (there have been four or five, I can't quite remember exactly how many) have left this serial divorcer is that he's simply often missing. (Hmmmmm.)  Why he goes missing is unclear - although he seems to be on the wagon now, so maybe his absences have been alcoholic benders; or maybe they were meant to prevent him from going on alcoholic benders (that was Gap #3, btw, and probably Gap #4; are we Pinter yet?).

Now taken together, these various vacuoles do suggest some sort of thematic profile that (normally) a playwright might be interested in exploring.  But not Kolvenbach.  He keeps his 'action' - essentially a zillion variations on denial - humming, that's for sure - Mr. Whitney shows up, the current Mrs. Whitney walks out, the previous Mrs. Whitney moves in, etc., while Fin, a forlorn son of Whitney by some previous Whitney, tramps in and out, cracking mighty wise.  There's a short diversion with Francis, which of course comes to nothing.  There's a hint that Mrs. Whitney actually has completed her emotional mission, perhaps unawares, by connecting briefly with Fin - but if you blink, you miss this.  By now you can almost hear the clock ticking . . . will the playwright make it past 90 minutes without actually revealing anything?  Hurrah!  He does, and the script can end - with a restatement of its opening line; the whole pointless exercise has been circular - get it?

Yes, we get it.  But to answer my rhetorical question - no, we're still not Pinter.  You see, in Pinter (and Beckett, and any number of other absurdists)  the mysterious gaps around which the action revolves seem to expand as we watch; the lacunae grow in significance, because the playwright is steadily delineating their form and pressure; statements about faith, and power, and knowability are ultimately made - just indirectly.  But no such luck in Kolvenbach.  He seems to think that simple denial is theatrical subject enough.

And it ain't.

Still, you do get to enjoy some finely wrought superficiality at Merrimack; this theatre pulls in the best actors from all over, and they've wasted some fine ones on Mrs. Whitney.  I'll say this much; Kolvenbach can write banter; everybody in the play speaks with the same self-aware, sitcommy voice, but these actors make at least their jokes sing. As the heroine, Deirdre Madigan was all tart/bitter wisdom masking - well, something, but who knows what; despair?  Self-hatred?  Your guess is as good as mine, but at least she's dry as a good martini.  There was an arguably even sharper turn from Rebecca Harris as the fourth or fifth Mrs. W. - we last saw Ms. Harris being equally good in Kolvenbach's godawful Fabuloso; please, please can we see this fine actress in something other than John Kolvenbach?  Rounding out the cast, Jay Ben Markson gave a precise spin to Fin's one-liners, Joel Colodner did what he could with Francis, and Dennis Parlato remained likably, knowingly poised while revealing absolutely nothing of himself (of course) as Whitney.  I'm not sure what to make of Kyle Fabel's emotionally under-realized direction; I guess that's what the play called for, but still - that's kind of the problem, isn't it.  Sigh.  And I notice that yes, the Merrimack has programmed another John Kolvenbach for next season.  Which I think is evidence of a certain lacuna in the decision-making of this normally reliable theatre!  But who knows - perhaps the next Kolvenbach will be another Love Song.  At any rate, the mystery continues . . .

Deirdre Madigan and Jay Ben Markson actually connect, briefly, in Mrs. Whitney.

Gabriel Kuttner, Liz Hayes, and Daniel Berger-Jones get romantic in Love Song.

I admit that up until recently I kind of hated playwright John Kolvenbach.  I detested his Fabuloso, and felt that his On An Average Day should really have been credited to "Harold Pinter, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, as told to John Kolvenbach."

So I dragged myself to Orfeo Group's current production of his latest, Love Song (at the Charlestown Working Theatre through this Saturday) with a heavy heart.  And determined to jump ship at intermission (as is my current habit!) if things headed south.

Well, there was no intermission.  (Ha!  Fooled again by that old A.R.T. trick!!!) So I had to stay till the end.

But I was glad I did, and I also admit that the production made me change my mind about John Kolvenbach.

A little bit.

For believe it or not, there's at least one really good idea - and maybe two - banging around inside Love Song.  The trouble is, John Kolvenbach himself doesn't quite realize how good these ideas are!  So inevitably, after initially striking out into truly original territory, the playwright slowly returns to the familiar "whimsical" tropes of (wait for it) . . . . Fabuloso.  Before our eyes, he turns back into . . . John Kolvenbach.

Aargh.   It's really too bad there's no intermission!  Still, there is that first half .  . . which convinced me that Kolvenbach has a spark of actual talent - as opposed to mere facility.  But thinking back, even in the sitcommy Fabuloso, there were cold glints here and there that hinted at the playwright's weird sense of emotional isolation - and he pushes that angle to amusing new heights in Love Song, which centers on a kind of metaphysically-autistic hero, "Beane" (Gabriel Kuttner) who is so relentlessly reductive he can't see the point of raincoats (since your skin is waterproof already!) and rants at the redundancy of owning a fork when you've already got a spoon.

Needless to say, "love" has no place in Beane's worldview - although "fear" certainly does; he has begun to imagine the walls (or in designer Cristina Todesco's brilliant re-working of the CWT space, the ceiling) have begun to close in on him.  His Nazi-yuppie sister (Liz Hayes) and her whipped, but wise-cracking, husband (Daniel Berger-Jones) aren't much help when it comes to human connection, either; it takes them several minutes to even notice Beane when he arrives in their white-on-white apartment, and their idea of "relating" to him is to give him a personality test (which he fails hilariously, in the play's funniest set-piece).

So far, so good; but Kolvenbach has an even better gambit up his sleeve - he pushes his lead character all the way through the emotional keyhole, as it were, when a female thief, "Molly" (Georgia Lyman) invades his apartment and subjects him to her own interrogation.  Molly is a funny kind of burglar, though: she specializes in stripping from apartments that special vase or painting people have carefully chosen as a personal statement; she's a kind of personality thief - the reductionist turned inward.  And as Beane has nothing to steal in his apartment, in a way she's forced to take him instead.

The resulting "romance" at first feels just as freshly astringent as what has come before - even though it's rather obvious (particularly to those who remember that high-school chestnut Harvey) what big "twist" Kolvenbach has rolled up his sleeve.  Still, the playwright keeps up an admirably conflicted tone as Beane at first rejuvenates his own life, and then his sister's, with what amounts to joyful self-delusion.  The trouble is, the script steadily grows more sappy, in the manner of King of Hearts and Harold and Maude, and Kolvenbach again doesn't seem to appreciate the quirky originality of his own second theme - that the blossoming of Beane's sister "Joan" is a troubling kind of emotional vampirism.  By the time the curtain is rung down (at ninety minutes, roughly the limit of the millennial attention span), there has been some chatter about light and dark, and a few perorations about bodily fluids and other gross stuff, and we have been regaled that "all you need is love" - and the clever, cold quirk of the piece's opening scenes has all but been forgotten.

Oh, well!  From the response of the audience, it was obvious that the hipsters of today, beneath their jaundiced 'attitudes,' are just as sentimental as the hipsters of yesteryear, and it's certainly hard to fault Orfeo's slickly enjoyable production.  As noted, Cristina Todesco's set is a stroke of genius, and Katherine O'Neill's costumes were nearly as good; meanwhile Peter Bayne's music and sound design, though over-amplified, seemed to hit all the right notes.  Director Risher Reddick kept his foot firmly on the gas, and directed with a tight technical flourish - which, frankly, the Orfeans seem to like; only Kuttner came through with a fully interior performance, it seemed to me (but then a "lack" of visible technique has long been his specialty).  Indeed, for a while the contrast between Beane and the other characters was all the more resonant because the respective actors' performance styles were so different.

This worked less well, however, as the show progressed, but the high finish always kept the show moving, and light on its feet.  Still, I wished the confident Georgia Lyman could have been a little spookier as Molly.  And surely there are more dimensions to the horrifying Joan than the talented Liz Hayes limns here (funny as she is); likewise, the perennially clever Daniel Berger-Jones found a zillion ways to launch her husband's zingers, but never really drew out into genuine (if covert) drama his horrified hostility toward his driven wife.  And just beneath the surface, isn't Joan just as lonely and reductive as her brother?  I think that's the idea - but you would have been hard-pressed to pick that up from these performances (the set designer got it, but the actors didn't).

Still, it was apparent from the response in the house that Orfeo has a hit on its hands, and they're certainly talented and hard-working enough to deserve one.  And I'll admit that Kolvenbach half-deserves the accolades he has received for Love Song.  The question now is - can he go the distance through an entire play? Only time will tell.