“When Bad Things Happen”
Like such recent plays as Scott Z. Burns’s The Library, Julia Cho’s Office Hour, Simon Stephens’s Punk Rock, and Nathaniel Sam Shapiro’s The
Erlkings, Lindsey Ferrentino’s This Flat Earth is about schools and gun
violence; however, it can’t quite make up its mind as to just what it wants to
say about the issues.  |
| Above: Lynda Gravatt. Below: Ella Kennedy Davis, Ian Saint-Germain, Lucas Papaelias, Cassie Beck. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
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| Ian Saint-Germain, Ella Kennedy Davis. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
The most striking thing about This Flat Earth, whose 90 minutes take place in a New England
seaside town, is Dane Laffrey’s
impressive two-story set, craftily lit by Christopher Akerland. It shows a
walkup whose upper floor is the flat of an elderly woman, Cloris (Lynda Gravátt),
a widowed former cellist; the lower is the residence of Dan (Lucas Papaelias), a
failed comedian with a low-paying job at the water company, and his 13-year-old
daughter, Julie (Ella Kennedy Davis). An actual cellist, Christine H. Kim, sits
at audience left, accompanying some scenes with classical selections.
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| Ian Saint-Germain, Ella Kennedy Davis, Lucas Papaelias. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
The building is on a hill in a working-class neighborhood,
overlooking the more affluent homes closer to the ocean. Dan, despite where he lives, has somehow managed
to get Julie into the seaside area’s prestigious school, where she plays
violin in the orchestra.
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| Lynda Gravatt, Lucas Papaelias, Ella Kennedy Davis. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
As Julie and her classmate/incipient boyfriend, Zander (Ian
Saint-Germain), hang out in her room, carrying on in typically awkward adolescent
ways, we discover that their school has recently been the target of a mass
shooting, and that their friend, a wealthy girl named Noelle, was one of the
victims. Earlier in the day, a nationally publicized memorial ceremony was held, with the
vice-president (Zander jokes about his bad breath) attending.
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| Lucas Papaelias, Cassie Beck. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Dan, a caring, single dad, whose wife’s death is barely
touched on, is a nice guy who delivers Cloris’s paper and always stops to tell her
a joke (from his cellphone). He also helps Noelle’s grieving mother, Lisa
(Cassie Beck), store the boxes of fundraising popcorn Noelle sold, despite his
obvious lack of space. She reciprocates by inviting him and Julie over to her
fancy house for a barbecue, an idea Julie finds “creepy.”
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| Ian Saint-Germain, Ella Kennedy Davis. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
The walls in the building are so thin, we’re asked to
believe that the tenants in one apartment can listen to what’s happening or
being said in another, which is partly why Julie, using the fire escape outside
her bedroom window, eventually begins to enter Cloris’s apartment.
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| Ella Kennedy Davis, Lucas Papaelias. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
There she befriends the old lady despite the latter’s avowed
dislike of kids and insistence that her place is a “kid-free zone.” In one of
several feeble grasps for laughs, Ferrentino has Julie confuse Cloris’s
name with a certain brand of bleach.
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| Ella Kennedy Davis, Lucas Papaelias. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
This clichéd relationship between the uptight child and the cranky
but inherently maternal senior becomes even harder to accept when Cloris,
having no instrument (she sold hers for a dishwasher), teaches Julie to play
the cello by miming the movements.
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| Ella Kennedy Davis, Lynda Gravatt. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
The big crisis comes in a thoroughly implausible scene after
Lisa—preoccupied with guaranteeing the school’s safety—discovers that Julie
doesn’t belong there and that Dan must send her elsewhere. “Heads up” or not,
such decisions are not delivered by one parent to another at their home.
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| Lucas Papaelias, Ian Saint-Germain, Ella Kennedy Davis, Cassie Beck. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Just as hard to buy is Julie’s anger at learning that the
massacre at her school wasn’t an isolated incident but was one of countless
others. Zander reminds her of all the safety drills but we’re expected to accept
that this otherwise intelligent girl had no idea of what they were for because
she doesn’t watch the news.
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| Cassie Beck, Lucas Papaelias, Ella Kennedy Davis. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Early on, based on Julie’s insecurities (she refuses to go
back to school until the problem is “fixed”), it seems the play is going to
explore the effects of trauma on schoolkids exposed to gun violence.
But This Flat Earth keeps
shifting subjects, like a playwright’s garage sale of disposable ideas: these include
adolescent sexual stirrings, flat-chested Julie’s preoccupation with breasts, the
differences between the haves and the have-nots, school zoning, the contrast
between adult childishness and childish adultness, and even a discourse on the
superiority of the cello to the violin.
In the penultimate scene, Julie makes two quite touching
speeches in Lisa’s presence, one of them offering a hint as to This Flat Earth’s title. They appear in
the play at a moment that might have brought satisfying closure to what’s come
before. The playwright, however, has chosen a less propitious way to end her
play.
This comes in a scene between Cloris and Julie, wafted on a
cello-accompanied breeze of magic realism mixed with a sprinkling of Thornton
Wilder: the old woman looks into the future and describes, with heavy irony and
a dash of humor, what lies in store for Julie, Dan, the town, and the world in
general. She even offers a familiar bromide about why terrible things happen.
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| Lynda Gravatt, Ella Kennedy Davis. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Gravátt, with her lovely combination of gravity and
lightness, and the baby-faced Davis, a deeply impressive, delicately sensitive young
actress in a breakout performance, carry the unnecessary scene off nicely. But it's not enough to rescue the unmemorable This Flat Earth, which even lauded director Rebecca Taichman (Indecent) can do little to inflate.
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