Bethany Brilliant at City Center Stage II
America Ferrara Tops Off First Rate Cast
By: Susan Hall - Jan 19, 2013
BETHANY
by Laura Marks
Presented by the Women’s Project Theater
Directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch
Emily Ackerman (Shannon), America Ferrera (Crystal), Kristin Grffith (Patricia), Ken Marks (Charlie), Tobias Segal (Gary), Myra Lucretia Taylor (Toni).Laura Helpern (sets) Sarah J. Holden (costumes), Mark Barton (lights), Leon Rothenberg (Sound)
City Center Stage II, 131 West 55th Street
New York City
January 18, 2013
Thru February 17, 2013 bethanyoffbroadway.com
Michael Moore in Capitalism: A Love Story showed us people who didn’t know they were being taken by companies like EMC, the Bear Sterns owned mortgage vehicle that issued mortgages to people with No Income and No Assets, and also had a foreclosure arm, armed and ready. Many people got kicked out of their homes.
All of us know people whose homes went under water. Many people simply had to vacate. These homes have become “Bethany-s’ – the Biblical term for poor houses. In our parlous economic times, another group of people our economy has left behind are occupying the new Bethanys.
Playwright Laura Marks tackles complex issues in a compelling, wonderfully wrought play which twists and turns on moral dilemmas for which there are no answers. A mother always wants to protect her child. To do this, she sometimes suspends commonly held rules. Is she wrong?
In the newly-vacant homes of exurbia, people who try but can’t earn a living, are beginning to camp out. In the old, rundown tenements on the once tattered Lower East Side of New York, poor college students and young people looking for jobs, squatted decades ago. The new Bethany-class is more varied.
One such home, brilliantly imagined by set designer Lauren Helpern as a glass front door and kitchen, brings two improbable people occupied by the same idea together. Projected behind the interior wall is a town which appears to be a cross between the stifling sets of Edward Scissorhands and The Truman Show, but cast in monochromatic blue green tones.
As a struggling car saleswoman Crystal pushes open the door, tugging her life’s possessions in a suitcase, a scruffy young man emerges from the shadows. Horrified, Alice Munro’s story Free Radicals comes to mind. A young ne’re do well drops into the home of a solo widow. “For a second I thought you were going to try and trick me with the husband stuff. Wouldn’t’ve worked, though. I can smell it if a woman’s on her own. I know it the minute I walk in a house. Minute she opens the door. Instinct.”
Terrifying.
This kind of teasing of expectation is one of Marks' many talents.
The young man Gary is just a revolutionary, and a sweet one at that. Crystal tames him easily, getting him to do her bidding, sort of, by offering hamburgers and friendship.
Framing the play is a circuit lecturer on Transformational Power. Charlie has all the answers, apparently. Mae West summed up his philosophy: "I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and rich is better." Though Charlie does not swagger like Burt Lancaster, and seems more like the stage manager of Our Town, he is preparing for Chautauqua. He is also in the market for a brand new car and some solace.
Crystal in her job as a car salesperson at Saturn works for commission only and needs a sale. What will she do to make it?
Playwright Marks is in complete command. Her use of language, sense of timing and pacing are all spot on. She twists and turns you, surprises and moves with facility. No one is stereotypical. Even the squatting is a new idea for the post subprime mortgage crisis into which massive unemployment has been mixed.
Performances throughout are of the highest order. Direction by Upchurch highlights the thrust and parry of edgy relationships and displays the wit, humor and pathos of the language.
If big thoughts pop up while you are watching the show, they in no way interfere with the pleasure of the performance of this first-rate play.