God’s Ear

Play
by Jenny Schwartz

With Tamara Hickey (Mel), Gabriel Kuttner (Ted), Josephine Elwood (Lanie), Marianna Bassham (Lenora), John Kuntz (Flight Attendant/GI Joe), Ann Carpenter (Tooth Fairy), David Rich (Guy)

Husband Ted (Gabriel Kuttner) and wife Mel (Tamara Hickey) have lost a child and their relationship is suffering. He dallies with prostitutes and she froths mentally, at loose ends with her thoughts and with her words. As they play out their neuroses, measured by the presence of their surviving daughter Lanie (Josephine Elwood), the panic of verbiage and dalliance heads towards calamity. Surrounded by Lanie, the Tooth Fairy, Lenora (Marianna Bassham), the prostitute/floozy, a transsexual flight attendant (John Kuntz), GI Joe (John Kuntz), and another errant guy (David Rich), each half of the couple desperately seeks something from the other.

Jenny Schwartz has written a play which, in its better moments, is effervescently verbal. There is something fun and exciting about the constancy of the reverberation of odd phrases and enunciations, sometimes executed with miraculous rapidity and virtuosity, especially by Tamara Hickey. It works well until it begins to get wearing. The bet seems to be that the overabundance of words is going to wear thin with the characters before it does with the audience, but I’d say the race is neck and neck.

The current production of this miasmic swirl of playwriting is excellent. Director Thomas Derrah, the long-time company member at the American Repertory Theater who has spread his talents widely in the Boston theater scene since Diane Paulus took over that institution and reshuffled the deck there, has done a superlative job with a script that is interesting but inconstant. He draws from his talented array of actors a fine set of performances.

Gabriel Kuttner’s Ted provides a kind of anchor, not verbally infected as is Hickey’s Mel, but emotionally drawn and penetratingly depressed. He’s got a quite difficult job to do onstage, since his dour character has to match, in some sense, the verbal pyrotechnics of Tamara Hickey’s Mel and the lurid histrionics of Marianna Bassham’s Lenora.

Hickey’s Mel has the greatest benefit of Schwartz’ verbal cascades, barely coming up to take a breath between tirades. Her delivery is rapid, assured and sometimes blindingly compact in its delivery. Schwartz’ words often have a random sequencing, so for Hickey to capture them emphatically and present them coherently is quite a coup. She does a great job.

Marianna Bassham, as Lenora, is a great actress with tremendous stage presence and can turn on a kind of leering, ironic humor which works wonderfully well here. Her character is somewhere between floozy and clown and she pulls it off with panache. She is marvelously entertaining.

Josephine Elwood as Lanie, the daughter, has, apart from her acting capacities, a great singing voice, which she uses to great effect here. She does a fine job when she too has to follow Schwartz’ nonsequential verbal directives in outlining a long list of interesting, but not tied-together, observations about everything under the sun.

For fear of leaving the stage too bare in this drama of less than an hour and a half, Schwartz adds several characters not crucial to this tale but which add elements of whimsy that Schwartz so earnestly seeks. The Tooth Fairy (Ann Carpenter), GI Joe and a transsexual flight attendant add a dimension of weirdness to the roster, but not too much else. John Kuntz, the great comic actor who plays GI Joe and the transsexual flight attendant, is very fun to watch; despite the superfluity of the roles, one can easily appreciate his performances, particularly under Derrah’s guiding hand.

Someone along the way must have approved of Schwartz’ wildly random writing style, no doubt appreciating the glistening of its overflowing prose. She is a writer with great energy, a sense of fun, and good potential, but she needs some serious editorial help shaping text that is often indulgent, and which frequently overflows its dramatic banks. Obviously, that overflow is meant to make a vivid dramatic point in this play, but it would have been far more effective with some judiciously applied restraint.

– BADMan