112. feeling.
A
wide-open stage, a wall of white vertical blinds running on a slant from
upstage right to left, and an open doorway for entrances and exits. A double bed.
A kitchen table and chairs up left. A coffee table and chair down right. Large
spotlights on the floor at either side. A young woman, Emma (Meredith Burns),
lies crumpled on the ground. A man stands there with a suitcase. “I do love
you,“ he says before walking out. Blackout. So begins feeling. , a sometimes
creepy, memorably well-acted, but not fully satisfying psychological
thriller presented by the Glass Bandits Theater Company at the New Ohio Theatre.
Meredith Burns. Photo: Hunter Canning.
Ben Mehl and Meredith Burns. Photo: Hunter Canning.
Three more brief, slowly done scenes follow, all ending in
blackouts. Two are silent but, in one, Emma, a doctoral student, calls in to her
college teaching job complaining of a stomach bug. These scenes set us up for
the arrival of Emma’s brother, Oliver (Carl Holder), a gay grad student, who is worried about her and comes to
help out; Emma is not suffering from a bug, but is
sunk into a deep depression because her boyfriend, Alex (Ben Mehl), seen
in the first scene, has left her after a 9-year relationship. By now, the
smart director, Eddie Prunoske—in collaboration with set and lighting designer Josh
Smith, costume designer Andrea Hood, and, most especially, Erik T. Lawson, who
created the atmospheric sound effects (could those be bones being crushed?) and original music—has established an
ambience of dread as we contemplate Emma’s collapsing state of mind. On the one
hand, she tries to shrug off her gloominess and to deny she needs her brother’s
care; on the other, she gradually displays signs of an obsession that possesses
her and that she struggles to rationalize to those who care about her.
Emma’s bizarre
obsession is with Jeffrey Dahmer (Luke Robertson), the gay serial killer whose deviance
before he began killing his victims included doping young men in bathhouses,
lying next to them, masturbating over them, and leaving them to wake up alone. Ultimately,
he killed 17 men and ate some of them. Having come across a book
about Dahmer in the library, she cannot get him out of her mind to the point
that he becomes her imaginary friend (that increasingly familiar convention
again) and visits her for lengthy, beer- or booze-guzzling conversations, assuming, as such theatrical delusions
usually do, the role of caring advisor. Attempting to discuss their
mutual fixations, Dahmer, always polite and respectable, states: “These are scary compulsions. I scare
myself. That jogger? I used to fantasize about kissing him. And I fantasized
about cutting him open and feeling his insides in my hands. Masturbating into him.
Have you ever pictured yourself opening somebody up like that?” (She has not.)
Meanwhile, Emma tries desperately to
convince her seriously skeptical dissertation adviser, Janet (Donna Haley),
that she simply must add a chapter on Dahmer to her dissertation, although Janet
insists it's totally irrelevant. In an
attempt to legitimize her Dahmer interest in academic terms, Emma explains: “I'm
interested in portrayals of premeditated violence committed by homosexuals, differentiated
by both gender and sexuality of author.”
Her behavior continues to grow more erratic, yet she
is able to somehow stand outside of herself and observe her own emotional
breakdown, indicated by her taking cell phone pictures of her face after she’s
had some traumatic experience. Janet and Oliver do their best to shake her out
of it but to no avail. Finally, she invites a 19-year-old student she's been advising, Ben (Quinn
Meyers), to her apartment, where she greets him in red herring fashion, and what
happens during their encounter takes Emma’s desperation in an unexpected
direction.
Meredith Burns and Luke Robertson. Photo: Hunter Canning.
Ultimately, however, Dahmer’s imaginary presence wears
out its welcome and the play loses its edge as a potential bloodletter (Dahmer himself has been neutralized, since he isn't real),
becoming instead a case study in a woman’s psychological disintegration following
a romantic breakup. The writing is always intelligent but the dramatic arc fizzles during the overlong Dahmer scenes and the play, even at 90 minutes,
begins to drag; if 15 minutes were shaved off, the evening would profit greatly. At one point, I wrote a note: "Where is all this going?" We are left as puzzled by the Dahmer connection as Oliver
and Janet, although the playwright may be trying to equate Dahmer the presumed
demon, who killed all those people, with the demons that can possess any human
being against their will; in other words, just being human can turn you into a
demon. As Emma tells Dahmer: “I hate
that you are a human being. That there is no such thing as demons. That we
share the same emotions. Do you know how hard that is?” Perhaps Alex, whose
leaving triggered Emma’s condition, is the demon who truly possesses her.
Meredith Burns. Photo: Hunter Canning.
Whatever the
explanation, the catalyst that makes this play worth viewing is the acting. I
can’t imagine how a lesser cast could glue an audience to the script as this one does,
especially the riveting Meredith Burns, whose sometimes neurotically rapid speech, occasionally too rapid
to follow easily (which, in this context, is okay), self-justifications, and
irrational reactions, always while fighting to seem reasonable and in control, make
this one of the best performances I’ve seen this season. She is teamed with
a superb supporting cast, beginning with Carl Holder, whose affect as the
friendly gay brother, quick with a quip, goes far deeper than any stereotype.
His totally sincere wish to help Emma, his frustration at her resistance, and
the confrontation they have when her preoccupations prevent her from giving full
attention to his own academic work, is fraught with raw, honest friction. Donna Haley, as Emma’s seriously concerned mentor,
trying hard to be supportive but maintaining her necessary role as an authoritative
advisor, brings total believability and depth to what could easily be a
hackneyed role, while Ben Mehl’s Alex is fully credible as a guy conflicted
in his need to separate from the woman he still loves. Luke Robertson
brings just the right quality of offbeat friendliness to Dahmer, making him a
combination of android and human that embodies both this maniac’s insanity and
his humanity. In the play’s smallest role, Quinn Meyers, as Emma’s student,
handles a role that could easily come off as shallow and uninteresting, capturing
just the right touch of vulnerability to make what happens to him convincing. My
companion felt he nearly stole the play.
feeling. (God, I hate typing
these pretentious lower-case titles; see stop.reset.) has lots of feeling, but
without talented actors to embody them, this play might never have gotten off
the ground. Regardless of my reservations about the play, about which others
may feel differently, I still recommend seeing it for an example of the kind of
thoroughly grounded acting one sees too rarely on local stages.
