“The Big Wave”
The 2018 edition of the annual Brits Off Broadway season at
59E59 Theaters is here, starting with the touching We Live By [sic] the Sea,
a well-executed work of devised theatre created by the Patch of Blue company
and coproduced with the Hartshorn-Hook Foundation. It’s been seen in England, Scotland
(where it was a Fringe award nominee), Australia, and China; it even played a
week last fall at Off Broadway’s SoHo Playhouse.  |
| Alexandra Brain. Photo: Kale Pardey. |
For the project, the company did extensive research,
assisted by the National Autistic Society, and with the consultation of a
woman, Robyn Steward, whose personal story the program declares “inspired the
narrative.” Director Alex Howarth himself has been working as a drama therapist
with autistic people for 15 years.
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| Alexandra Brain. Photo: Kale Pardey. |
Males have long been considered more likely to be on the
spectrum than females but the gender gap is actually much narrower than that; We Live By the Sea gives voice to girls
with the disorder.
Devised theatre, for those unfamiliar with the term, refers
to collaborative works, usually with no credited writer, typically using
minimalist sets, projections, microphones, found objects that can serve
multiple purposes, original music (with the musicians—when they’re not the actors
themselves—part of the action), and a host of theatricalist conventions
mingling realism with fourth-wall smashing. A boat sail is the most prominent scenic
element, used mainly as a screen for images of the sea and of Katy on the
beach. (Amelia Wall is the videographer, Will Monks the video designer.)
In We Live By the Sea
the original music, just right for the material, is composed and played by the
two Mason Brothers, situated up left where they create the impression of
numerous instruments—listed by Katy at the top of the play. There’s also a
touch of familiar pop, like Abba’s “Dancing Girl,” given a dreamy rendition as
the play is about to start.
When the audience enters the enclave’s Theater B, two young
women are sitting on the floor just outside the auditorium, asking if they can
tap your shoes. These are the actresses who, once the play starts, will be playing
Katy and her imaginary dog, Paul Williams (Lizzie Grace). Paul is named not for
the American song writer but for someone whose identity is eventually revealed
in the play.
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| Alexandra Brain, Lizzie Grace. Photo: Kale Pardey. |
The shoe-tapping is part of the ritualistic behavior—similar
to OCD—that Katy engages in regularly, which includes the colors she wears daily,
her teeth brushing, what she eats at tea, and so on, all of it shared with the
conversationally adept Paul Williams, who gives her moral support and with whom
she speaks a secret language. Katy’s afraid of crowds, resists being touched, and
has a host of other dislikes. Among her likes are the sea, especially a big
wave she describes, and telling stories.
Katy’s a lonely girl, bullied and ridiculed at school, and
dependent largely on her older sister; her father died a year ago and her
mother, who’s mentioned but doesn’t appear, keeps her distance. Hannah,
luckily, treats Katy with infinite love and patience; however—as on a drive to
the zoo—even she can find it difficult to maintain her calm when Katy’s erratic
behavior threatens to become dangerous.
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| Alexandra Simonet, Tom Coliandris. Photo: Kale Pardey. |
A soothing influence arrives in the presence of a
nice-looking, 18-year-old boy, Ryan (Tom Coliandris), who has just moved to
this seaside place, with his mother, from a densely crowded urban environment.
Ryan bears the burden of an only vaguely defined tragedy involving his best
friend, Max, who appears to have died from drugs, a situation for which Ryan
feels responsible.
This background is only sketchily alluded to as a way of
giving Ryan his own cross to bear, but he otherwise appears as a deeply kind young
man who finds Katy’s lack of filters refreshing. His response to Katy is nonjudgmental and open, which allows the defensive girl (and Paul Williams) to
welcome him as a friend. Hannah, too, stressed as she is, finds in Ryan a
possible savior although he may not be quite as ready for the possibility of
romance as she.
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| Alexandra Brain, Tom Coliandris, Lizzie Grace. Photo: Kale Pardey. |
The dramatic plotting in We
Live By the Sea is arranged mainly to express Katy’s fantasies (she
self-dramatizes her involvement as a princess in a tale of knights-in-shining
armor battling dragons), her pleasures and her pains, and her difficulties in
accommodating herself to the way the world—particularly at school—perceives
her. Articulate and even poetic, despite her nonstop verbal tics, she can
instantly revert to infantile rhetoric.
Alexandra Brain, a gifted young actress wearing white, overall-style
shorts whose shoulder straps are constantly hanging loose, plays Katy like an
overgrown six-year-old, wearing large, headphone-like ear protectors to avoid
loud noises. She squeals, fidgets, shakes her hands tremulously, holds them to
her head as if to prevent it from exploding, and in many similar ways captures
a girl on a perpetual emotional tightrope. She can be sad, she can be funny;
with Katy, you never know what’s coming.
Grace’s Paul Williams, wearing a white T-shirt saying “Paul
Williams,” is like a smiling, friendly puppy of a teenage girl, only her
occasional scratching of her neck revealing her canine proclivities. Both Coliandris
and Simonet are wonderfully authentic and appealing; we can’t but help hoping
they’ll eventually get together.
The play’s message of the importance of accepting those who
may be different from us is old-hat but nonetheless important. We Live By the Sea has some lovely
visual moments, like the one with fairy lights (Rachel Sampley is the lighting designer) in Katy’s room, and, for the most part, does a nice job of expressing the play's moods without overkill.
On the other hand, the piece seems overlong at 90
minutes. Brain offers a tour de force portrayal of Katy’s mannerisms but, like
me, you may grow tired of them, no matter how well acted. Then again, maybe that’s
the point.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
59E59 Theaters/Theater B
59 E. 59th St., NYC
Through May 6