Two to see — after the storm!
THE MODERATE now onstage at Central Square Theater is a tale of toxicity from within and without, mirrored by the darkest corners of the web. Ken Urban’s play – A catalyst Collaborative@MIT Production–plunks us down in the middle of a multilayered crisis: internal and external, physical and spiritual, individual, familial, generational, global, digital. Frank and Edyth Bonner– played by the unfailingly excellent Boston actors Nael Nacer and Celeste Oliva– are in trouble. They’ve separated, they’re angry, their son is caught in the middle and confused, and they’re isolated in COVID lockdown. Frank is also unemployed so he turns to the internet for a job as a moderator of potentially harmful content online which tests the limits of his ethical boundaries and leads him to confront his own demons. His supervisor (Greg Maraio) carefully threads the needle to both recruit him, then manage him when what Frank sees begins to threaten his psyche and the powers that be.
I had no idea these jobs existed, let alone were performed by human beings. I imagined– or wanted to imagine– such tasks were palmed off to entities without palms–AI bots. Not so. Sentient beings do the dirty work wading through all manner of death, violence, exploitation, physical, sexual, and psychological abuse, etc.etc. Jared Mezzocchi’s direction puts us inside and outside the toxicity, Frank center stage sitting behind a scrim at a lonely desk choosing what malignancy to excise. We are surrounded by tranches of images, harmless to horrifying, projected front, center, and sides, which we glimpse just long enough to feel how corrosive the onslaught. It’s grim and gruesome.
Frank finds support in a savvy co-worker, Rayne, (Jules Talbot) who has managed to remain grounded. She heightens his awareness of the venal entities in whose employ they toil. They are on the front lines of this metastatic hellscape, de facto guardians of some semblance of decency, though sometimes the unwitting agents of unscrupulous and unseen corporate and political forces.
Within this web, an opportunity for healing connection emerges in the person of a young man in trouble Gus (Sean Wendelken) who cries out for help. That Frank’s response is at all controversial within the context of his job, is a snapshot of how endangered our humanity is now. How he reacts suggests a ray of light in the void. This is not an easy play to experience, but a well-executed and necessary one. In a relatively brief 90 or so minutes, this slice of theater allows us to face a tough complex world, with an audience, and recall our own individual capacity for processing the anxiety the era engenders. See THE MODERATE At Central Square Theater through MARCH 1!
Will Conrad and Amy Resnick / Photo: Annielly Camargo
WE HAD A WORLD now onstage at the Calderwood presented by THE HUNTINGTON takes a very personal and penetrating view of one man’s family and the secrets buried there. Playwright Joshua Harmon –who wrote last season’s family saga PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC– has now served up his own immediate family, and he has done it at the behest of his own grandmother who in fact asked him to write a play about her and make it as “bitter and vitriolic as possible.” He did. But he has also made it riotous and revelatory. Above all, while these characters and situations are very personal and specific to one family–its time, place, and milieu–the play speaks worlds to families everywhere and how our families shape us. We KNOW these characters instantly. Harmon cuts to the quick of his dysfunctional family with precision and compassion. I was heart-locked in from first scene to last.
The play rests on three legs of a wobbly family triangle: Joshua (Will Conard) who tells the family tale; his titanic grandmother Renee who has just been diagnosed with cancer but is not going down without a fight; Renee’s daughter and Joshua’s mother, Ellen (Eva Kaminsky) is sorry/not sorry to see her go. Joshua flashes us back to his five-year-old self who delighted in his flamboyant grandmother’s company. She introduced him to theater (MEDEA), movies (DANCES WITH WOLVES) and art (Mapplethorpe) before he was 10! These outings no doubt stimulated his young brain and blew his mother Ellen’s mind. And so we begin to see the cracks in the family unit as they move through pivotal moments and adventures…
Nimbly directed by Keira Fromm, Joshua’s recollections take shape on a sprawling set (Scenic Design Courtney O’Neill), a panorama of memories, food, and furniture of significance as this family and especially these three– move back and forth in time and space. This open plan of a stage is significant, suggesting a continuum of experience which is not chronological but rather simultaneous: Joshua carries his past with him as he unravels its secrets onstage.
As Renee, Amy Resnick is both quirky and relatable. She plays Joshua’s charismatic and eccentric grandmother like Auntie Mame crossed with Ruth Gordon. Resnick toggles deftly between robust middle age and frail but feisty elder with a different “do” and a simple shift in gait. Eva Kaminsky as Joshua’s mother Ellen is coiled and tense, the exasperated and enraged daughter to a loose cannon of a mother. Joshua is finally privy to what put this “very old dance” between mother and daughter in motion long before he was born. The revelation fills in some of the blanks, and breaks open his understanding of who and why these people he loves are the way they are. The past cannot be changed; there may be no resolution to dysfunctional family dynamics ingrained long ago. Clarity and acceptance are the wisdom of this play, and awareness tempered by compassion for the limits of those who shape us and whom we carry with us moving forward.
See WE HAD A WORLD at THE HUNTINGTON through March 15 !
