65.
ROGERANDTOM
Try
to pay attention to this unusual play’s setup: Penny (Suzy Jane Hunt) and Rich (Richard
Theriot) are a young couple whose marriage is dissolving, and Rich has come to
their apartment to pack up more of his stuff in the white boxes that litter the
place. Soon, Rich and Penny are bickering. The apartment, ingeniously imagined by David Esler, and many of its principal features (like stoves and bathtubs), are depicted by
outlining them on the floor in ground plan style, but there are also several
simple pieces of furniture and even an actual toilet, sink, and fridge;
everything is black, white, or gray. There are no actual walls but we can tell
where they would be by the vertical strings running from floor to ceiling at
significant corners. There is also a practical door. The audience is in two
segments, sitting on either side of the apartment and facing both it and each
other. Penny is awaiting her brother, Roger (Eric T. Miller), who promised to come from upstate to see a play with her written by their brother, Tom, who has been estranged from Roger for five years, but she asks Rich not to let on about their marriage being on the rocks. She calls Roger and a cell phone ringing in the audience turns out to be Roger's, who has been sitting in the theatre (right behind me) under the impression that he has been watching a play written
by Tom. He leaves his seat and walks onto the stage where he discovers that he’s
a character in the play, and that, even though he and Tom actually have no
sister, Penny insists that’s who she is, while Rich, who is an actor named
William (played, of course, by Richard Theriot), serves to explicate the
situation for Roger, who agrees with great hesitancy to enact himself with
these made-up characters, so as to see where this is all leading in regard to
his being there in the first place. Get it?
Suzy Jane Hunt (left), Rich Theriot (center), and Eric T. Miller in ROGERANDTOM. Photo: Taylor Hooper.
ROGERANDTOM, Julien Schwab's exceedingly clever
puzzle of a play, was first done by the same company (Personal Space Theatrics)
in 2003, and now being revived at the Here Arts Center, is a surrealistic Pirandellian
exercise in interrogating the reality-illusion divide of theatrical
performance; as it progresses it gets only more imaginatively complex as it shatters
the fourth wall into many pieces and reveals even to its characters that they
can’t trust their own reality. Penny is totally committed to being the
character she plays, since that’s precisely who she is, and she is devastated
to discover that there’s an audience out there watching her (before this
discovery she has even peed as if in the privacy of her bathroom) and that she
can walk through walls. Rich is an actor-explicator with the ability to expressively
and good-naturedly explain to the befuddled Roger what he’s going through, even showing him the
script to demonstrate (as an audience member confirms) that everything they’re
experiencing is already written down and that nothing is left to chance. Roger is
supposedly a real blue-collar guy, who finds that he’s a character in a play
designed to reconcile him with his brother, Tom, the playwright, who has written previous plays about him.
He goes along, more or less, with playing at being this character while
simultaneously undermining all the theatrical conventions that we normally take
for granted in suspending our disbelief.
The three performers have the
challenging task of making all this metatheatrical trickery real on multiple
emotional and comical levels, without winking at the audience. It is to their
great credit that they do this with consistent truth and honesty, although, here
and there, one can detect minor actorly tics that threaten to but never do give away the game. Still,
the performances are enormously helpful in making the mystifying developments
seem perfectly natural within the world being portrayed, and for this director
Nicholas Cotz deserves warm appreciation.
ROGERANDTOM’s plot developments grow
increasingly complex but I find them less interesting for themselves than for
the opportunities they provide to enhance the playwright’s dramaturgical
conceit. This is one of the more novel Off-Broadway pieces on display at the
moment, one that I might have enjoyed even more had the air conditioning been
working. But perhaps the A/C in Penny and Rich's apartment had been turned off and I was simply sharing their reality. 0r maybe the A/C was blasting away in the apartment but, like the empty beer bottles the actors drank from or the unplugged-in phone they spoke on, I was supposed to imagine it was on. Or maybe . . .