Sick: Disturbing Comedy at Berkshire Theatre Festival
A Suffocating Mother Creates a Prison for Her Children
By: Larry Murray - Aug 23, 2009
Berkshire Theatre Festival presents Sick by Zayd Dohrn, Directed by David Auburn, Stage Manager - Jess Kovell, Scenic Designer - R. Michael Miller, Costume Designer - Wade Laboissonniere, Lighting Designer - Dan Kotlowitz, Composer/Sound Designer - J Hagenbuckle, Assistant to the Direcor - Adam Dworkin. Cast: Rebecca Brooksher - Sarah, Lisa Emery - Maxine, Michel Gill - Sidney, Greg Keller - Jim, Ryan Spahn - Davey. One hour forty five minutes with one intermission. August 18-September 6, 2009 at the Unicorn Theatre of the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Stockbridge, MA. http://www.berkshiretheatre.org/
Context is everything, and the history of playwright Zayd Dohrn is critical to understanding the roots of this fascinating play. It would be easy to suggest the author is recycling the basic elements of The Glass Menagerie, which this play resembles. But there is far more going on here than that. Both plays offer wonderful insights into the human condition.The author, Zayd Dohrn, is the son of Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, the former Weather Underground radicals of the 60's. The poor guy spent his childhood trapped "on the run" with his parents and was always careful to hide his true identity. Dohrn was also in Beijing during the height of the SARS epidemic when he wrote this anaphylactic shock of a comedy. The play asks questions indirectly, as a child who is hostage to runaway parents might have been forced to do.
The story relates to the day a college professor brings his star student home to meet his antiseptic and cocooned family. The wife is so obsessed with cleanliness that she sees threats behind every stranger. Including anyone who lives beyond the door of their urban, rent controlled apartment. The story preys upon our post 9/11 fears, both real and imagined. As might be expected, even the set has sheets of plastic dividing the clean rooms from those contaminated with books and other outside influences.
Within minutes of the opening, the professor, Sidney is blithely reading from the Earl of Rochester's dirty poems, and we are treated to a section detailing the artificial nose on the Earl's syphilitic face. That is until he becomes aware that his disapproving wife Maxine is listening, and immediately stops. There are different kinds of dirt, one cultural and the other germ-laden. She likes neither.
It comes as little surprise that the children have been restricted to this small place, eating a vegan diet, being home schooled, and having no contact with the outside world, except for, presumably, doctors. If there is a fault to the play it is that we learn absolutely nothing more about the family. We don't know how the professor and the doting wife met, if there is any real love between them, or just some sort of sick dependency. Secrets seem to be deeply buried and never explored. The audience is left to fill in the blanks.
The comparison with an overbearing Amanda Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie and her dependent children and the gentleman caller is almost automatic, as is the coincidental name of the visitor, Jim. Greg Keller, who plays Jim here was also the Tennessee Williams Jim in the same theatre several years ago.
As Maxine, Lisa Emery conveys a cold and distant wife, manipulative and controlling rather than concerned and caring. Her every impulse is to maintain the status quo and prevent the children from leaving her contrived sanitary sanctuary. It was occasionally difficult to make out what she was saying, especially when she had her antiseptic mask on. Even at low volume it was clear she was in charge. At other times hair hid her facial features.
Her character of Maxine hides from the world. She smothers her children, but never, not once, with genuine love. One wonders what kind of childhood the playwright Zayd Dohrn must have experienced. In the play, the only way they get attention and nurturing is by having their allergies act up. It is apparant that what few allergies might have actually existed were blown way out of proportion by Maxine in order to maintain control over everyone. She uses the warning of a "delayed reaction" strategy as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Troughout the course of the play, the son got sick on cue, whenever she - or he - got upset.
For all his scholarly and literary achievements as a poet and professor, Sidney, the father (as played by Michel Gill) has little real substance. He too is a manipulator, deferring the signing of a letter of recommendation for the undergraduate until the end of the visit thereby holding him hostage.
While Greg Keller as Jim is the student, he is also the only adult in the play. But he is more anxious to please than to challenge the status quo. When he talks with the two children, Davey (Ryan Spahn) and Sarah (Rebecca Brooksher) he opens a bit of the real world to them. He develops a special interest in the young Rebecca when she lets him read her offbeat and strange poetry. She reveals that she's won a college scholarship, and he encourages her to act on it. When she does Maxine, feigning motherly concern, immediately douses her hopes.
Dramatically, Dohrn's Sick takes the embers of the developing feelings between the outsider and the daughter and fans them. We all want her to escape the smothering mother and impotent father and join the outside world. The quiet and assured performance by Brooksher as the daughter is a masterpiece of understatement and yearning. Together with David Auburn's direction it makes a haunting evening of theatre.
As the son Davey, Ryan Spahn delivered the most authentic croupy cough I have heard in years. It was genuinely alarming. There was also his masterful clanging of the oxygen tank as he slowly made his way down the stairs one clunk at a time. It was the second funniest moment of the evening. I won't reveal the first, except to say it was brilliant and closed the first act.
The mother treats Jim as an agent of infection, polluting her "clean" space. In her mind, he is teeming with impurities. She attempts to rid her household of him several times without success. Of course, in the end, he is the purifying agent. The only real danger he presents is a threat to her warped ideas.
Sick is a play that leaves many questions unanswered, but in a good way. It speaks to our fears of the unknown, echoing some familiar refrains. There are many sad people who are not only out of touch with reality, but think the outside world is a place to be avoided. They believe the hysteria portrayed on television is happening just down their street, around the corner, in another part of town.
The Berkshire Theatre Festival has once again found a play that speaks to our lives and times. That a play so thought provoking can be completely entertaining and funny results in an evening theater-goers will enjoy and treasure. The time passes swiftly and provided plenty of conversation for the hour long ride back to the Northern Berkshires. The most interesting question is this: who is really sick, the children or the parents who are supposedly protecting them. Now there was a discussion!
Best of all, the BTF season is far from over. Next up is a community production of Peter Pan with 150 local performers taking the main stage September 4 in the classic children's story. That will be followed by Red Remembers, a nostalgic trip back to Red Barber and the Brooklyn Dodgers and the core values of humanity in an every changing world which begins on September 11 at the Unicorn Theatre.