Mud Blue Sky

Play (2016)
by Marisa Wegrzyn

With Leigh Barrett (Beth), Deb Martin (Sam), Veronica Anastasio Wiseman (Angie), Kaya Simmons (Jonathan)

Sam (Deb Martin) and Beth (Leigh Barrett) are staying over in a hotel in the midst of a trip while performing their duties as flight attendants and, as they begin to probe various issues about work and retirement, things get funny and more complicated as a third friend, Angie Veronica Anastasio Wiseman), now an ex-flight attendant, and a young student named Jonathan (Kaya Simmons), enter the fray.

This very funny play has no particular dramatic motif to it, other than that Beth is planning to take the airline’s retirement package and move on to the next phase of her life. Angie has already lost her job, presumably because she is overweight, and Sam rides somewhere between the two with a saucy, middle-aged gaiety and aggrieved attitude that roves between devil-may-care scampers into dangerous interpersonal terrain and sober maternal concerns about her teenage son.

Jonathan enters the scene as Beth’s pot dealer and after some funny hijinks emerges completely into the shenanigans that Beth and Sam have cooked up. Whether it is arguing over payments for the pot or more tender talk about girlfriends and romance, three-way conversation with *** that ensues is quite animating and full of sparks.

Angie is a more quietly tender and tragic presence, and with her accounting of how she now has to deal with an aged mother and a retelling of how she came into possession of an extremely expensive bottle of cognac, she paints offers a more darkly toned background for this otherwise sparkling and amusing set of interchanges.

The play’s drama emerges with little actual plot, but it does so quite ingeniously, and manages, without the fulcrum of a particular comic setup, to be very funny.

A lot of the credit for this, in addition to the quite witty writing, is the excellent acting.

Deb Martin is really a scream in so many ways. Her acting strategy, generally, here, as in other productions in which I’ve seen her appear, tends towards an extreme stretching of movements and expressions that might seem histrionic were it not done so artfully. Her often near-clownish demeanor stands just short enough of the extreme to enable her to be both believable and very funny. Her array of gesticulations and bodily movements, while stretching the limit, is articulate and full of inventive wildness.

Leigh Barrett has a more sedate kind of humor, though, she too, is wonderfully funny here in her variations on combinations of exhausted and doped-up states. When she simply moans in response to an aching back, she somehow draws laughs. Her interchanges with Jonathan are high-pitched and hilarious as she battles with him about money, comments on his prom date, or shuffles him off to hide in the bathroom. When she has to cover for Jonathan’s having put some porn on the TV while not wanting to acknowledge his presence to Sam, she is, again, funny as hell in a dry, unvarnished way that is very effective.

Originally, another noted Boston-area actor, Adrianne Krstansky, was supposed to play the role of Angie, but an injury sidelined her. At last minute’s notice, Veronica Anastasio Wiseman filled in. Before the performance, Bridge Rep artistic director Olivia D’Ambrosio cautioned that Wiseman had so little time to prepare for the part that D’Ambrosio might have to feed her lines from the wings. That turned out not to be the case at all, and Wiseman gave a warm-hearted and fluid account of the role.

Kaya Simmons as Jonathan is plain charming, a cross between a vulnerable young kid and a savvy dope dealer, one whose innocence provides an assured fulcrum for some of the gags that arise between him and the three older women.

Adding Jonathan’s character to the plot reflects an unexpected ingenuity on the part of the playwright. It allows an aspect of sexuality to be explored in a subtle and interesting way, and makes for an interesting reflection on innocence and experience, adventure and disillusionment for which the three middle-aged women provide the context and frame.

– BADMan