It’s not a new story. A family grows
up in the kind of rural Midwestern town believed to be held in God’s palm,
where there are baseball games, nosy neighbors, and church on Sundays. It’s a
family with one son, one daughter, one overbearing but well-meaning mother, one
father who disappears as soon as anyone starts arguing. A boy with a paper
route, a girl who marries her high school sweetheart, hope chests,
grandchildren, wedding invitations; one child who moves away, one who stays
home. The belief that things would have turned out
differently.Secret unhappiness.And maybe secret happiness.
But while the story isn’t new, any
story told well can be amazingly satisfying — and maybe all the more so
because it feels familiar.
Iron
Kisses is playwright James Still’s fourth play for Geva,
and this is its world premiere. He draws the story with appealing symmetry,
slowly and elegantly revealing patterns, wounds, hope. Very simply, this is the
story of a family. At its depth, it’s the story of four people, their complex
connections to each other and to the generations that lie
on either side.
Two actors, Mary Bacon as Barbara and
Jacob Blumer as Billy, fill the four roles. In scene
one, Billy impersonates his parents talking about him. In scene two, Barbara
impersonates their parents talking about her. And in the final scene Billy and
Barbara are themselves, sister visiting brother, talking about their family.
Scraps of lines repeated between the
scenes, different versions of the same stories, and recurring themes (a watch
that stops, car accidents, handwritten notes, fights that get passed down
through generations) all hold the play together like a weaver’s shuttle. And in
the stories the four characters tell, the moments they remember differently,
the things each chooses to remember or ignore, complexities are revealed.
We find a son who made up for being
gay by being perfect. We find a daughter who treats her daughter the way her
mother treated her. We find a mother who believes her children aren’t equally
lovable. We find a father who started missing his son while he was still a boy.
Everyone on the cast and crew for
this production — except the playwright — is new to Geva.
And the result is fresh.
The lighting, sound, costume, and
scenic design are all rich and sophisticated, with a light touch. Stephanie
Gilman’s direction is invisible, soaking into the performance and moving it
with grace. Movement from character to character, city to city, home to plane
to wedding to car, is seamless and evocative. The
gestures of the play — from the bowlegged physicality both actors use to
depict the father to the smooth, cool lighting fixtures lowered to create
Billy’s San Francisco apartment —
suggest vistas of information and lay complete images on top of the script’s
frame.
The play’s orbit completes when Billy
closes the final scene with his opening lines. “Tell me a story about mom,”
Barbara says. So he begins again at the beginning, adopting his mother’s
mannerisms, telling the opening story in her voice. It echoes backwards and
forwards. It answers the mother’s cry at the close of scene two that she has no
one to tell her story to. And it instills hope in her favorite platitude,
letting brother and sister believe that things might actually be better in the
morning.
You
should go if you want to remember that nobody is perfect. But everyone is
lovable.
Iron Kisses through April 2 | Nextstage at GevaTheatreCenter,
75 Woodbury Boulevard |
$12.50 to $25 | 232-GEVA, www.gevatheatre.org
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2006.
