Hello Failure

Oh, the horrors of being a submariner's wife. If we take Kristen Kosmas's word for it, every moment becomes excruciatingly poetic. If you're Rebecca (Kosmas), you feel submerged in a too-large home, until one day you can't ("I can't. Not today. Not today I don't think I can. Maybe never again.") bring yourself to get out of the bathtub. Or if you're Karen (Aimee Phelan-Deconinck), you feel trapped in the confines of a meaningless life, which you'd be fine with, if only the people at the soup firm could remember your name. And then there are the other four wives: Kate (Joan Jubett), whose self-obsession keeps her as closed off as submarine steel from the ocean; Gina (Tricia Rodley), who channels her frustrations into rage; Netta (Maria Striar), who tries to manage her own crises by carefully controlling everything around her; and Valeska (Janna Gjesdal), who has to maintain her own hippie-like perspective, lest the optimism chip away far enough for others to see her pain. Not to mention the New Girl, Margerie (Megan Hart), who -- in fear of her own fragility -- makes herself out to be incredibly strong in person. Perhaps you recognize something of yourself in them -- Hello, Failure, you might say -- or simply understand what might drive Karen to try learning Japanese, Kate to have an affair with her hairdresser, Netta to create another person out of her own happier past, or Rebecca to write letters to the long-dead, Civil War submarine innovator, Horace Hunley (Matthew Maher), in whom she feels she can safely confide -- even when he shows up in her bathroom.

All this is rich, excellent, substantive stuff. However, the way in which Kosmas has chosen to present it -- in overlapping scenes, fragments of introductory text, or gasps of self-confession that abruptly surface (and just as quickly submerge) -- is often hard to handle. These seams of isolation fit the characters more than they fit the framework of the play, and this self-inflicted style seems to be, like the characters, compensating for an absence of purpose. Ken Rus Schmoll navigates through those choppy waters with real purpose (and I suspect his work with Clubbed Thumb has well-prepared him for such deliberately damaged narratives), and as a result, there are pockets of scene work that hit like bursts of fresh air.

In one, Margerie leads the group in a meditative exercise: "You will never have a normal life," she says. "And that is OK . . . you will love your abnormal life the way an abnormal tiger mother loves its abnormal tiger baby. You can be at parties with other tigers who are normal tigers and you won't even bat an eye, it won't matter to you one bit because you are abnormal, and that is the way it was meant to be and that is the way it is and that is the way it will always be." What works here, and in the play, is that no excuse is made for the way these people are, and no easy solutions are offered: it's not so much learning to swim rather than to sink, it's learning how to breathe underwater once you've already sunk.

At another point, Karen, who often speaks in an aloof and distracted manner, tries to explain her recent enrollment in Japanese classes: "Because I. Because of my mind. Because I want to learn new ways of using my mind. Because I'm tired of all the old familiar ways that my mind wants to use itself. Because I want to make new pathways. Forge new paths. Like a barbarian almost, chopping away at the wilderness. I want to chop away at the wilderness of my mind. Like someone with a machete. . . ." She is having an affair with language in the same way that Kate is having an affair with Shlomy (Michael Chick), a gay hairdresser -- it's just another point of contact, a different approach.

I suspect that my resistance to the play is that it's too aware of itself, of its own structure: it's meta-realism, in which clever characters (and cleverer actors) speak well of the pain, but substitute the discussion of trauma for the actual experience of it, and leave with only the most artificial catharsis, having really dealt with nothing. These seven absent husbands are parts of the problem, but their stories are untold, and there's no way to make the expression of absence in a play ever feel complete. Kosmas compensates for this by injecting two men into the play: failing with Shlomy, a spineless character who comes across as a physical prop for Karen (and later, an improbable option for Karen), but succeeding with Horace, a quiet but commanding foil for everything Rebecca's struggling against (Mr. Maher, who has a distinct lisp, has the ability to making passivity seem either sweet or sinister, depending on the volume of his voice).

Ultimately, Kosmas has to turn to the present audience, turning her actors into a Greek chorus of tragically flawed (but suddenly -- unfortunately -- homogeneous) people who apologize for their inability to look within. It is, as they and Kosmas say, easier to look out, rather than look in. "Who wouldn't? Because sure / if you can think about all that out there / and there's plenty of it out there to think about / I say if you can think about all that then / why think about all this instead? / If you can think about all that then / you don't have to think about what is." But is that the sort of play -- the sort of ending -- that can actually challenge us to do something more? Hello Failure is most important when it's confronting what is; unfortunately, it's at its best when it's confronting what isn't.

PLAY: "Have You Seen Steve Steven?"

Photo/Jim Baldassare

Remember that time when you were a kid, and you thought you knew better than your parents? Or that other time, when you got older and you realized that, for all your rebellion, you were becoming your parents? Or that last time, when you were really old, and you didn't remember either of these times? Anne Marie Healy's new play, Have You Seen Steve Steven? is appropriately funny as it dredges through the truths of the first two things, reflected in a homey Midwest McFamily, the culturally klutzy (yet obsessive) Clarksons. But it's the third thing that at last turns the work into a frightening satire, with an affectingly disaffecting series of onstage dismantlings of both family and memory, those tenuous connections to actual life.

Unlike other modern satirists like George Saunders, Ms. Healy grounds her work in the laughable concerns of the Clarksons as they prepare for their old friends, the Dudleys. But wait! They're out of Shiraz, there's a bean dip stain--pimento!--on the sofa, and neither Mary (who's been boastfully preparing a "hot dish" to go with the Ritz Bitz) nor Bill (who's been basking in the glow of his SONY 9877 projector system) has showered yet. If anything, things are too normal, which leads us, along with the daughter, Kathleen, to suspect (in that Eerie, Indiana sort of way) the intentions of the soft-spoken, neon-orange-hatted, bear of a neighbor that is Hank Mountain. (Rightfully so, but still...)

Our concerns are whisked away, however, by the speedy and efficient pace of Healy's script, and Anne Kauffman's disconcertingly cheery direction (similar to that in The Thugs). Our concerns are set aside by the arrival of Jane and Dudley, who come across as a slightly more in-the-know (i.e., pretentious) version of Mary and Frank. In other words, they're the sort of people who "order" an exchange student so as to seem concerned, but can't pronounce her name (Anlor), nor care to learn it. Tommy, their son, doesn't buy into their consumerism, for which he is rewarded with the sobriquet "Mister Ex-Pat," nor is he especially interested in reliving old times with Kathleen, except for mentioning their old imaginary dog, Steve Steven.

The play operates at first as a farce, with pratfalls from Frank as he tries to cover up the bean-dip stain and sight gags from a parade of personality-stealing puffy coats. But between the creepy neighbors (Hank is joined later by a sprightly old maid, Vera) and Tommy's gloomy realism, the show keeps transforming into something more sinister. The smiles we took to be genuine are quickly exposed as screw-on, and though there's love between the parents, it's one of deadening comfort, not livening passion. At first, the mispronunciation of Anlor's name (Rumbone, Rambone, Randor, Ranflor, ultimately the commercially captivating Rambo) is amusing, but as the night goes on, it becomes more like a sick joke on everyone involved.

As for Have You Seen Steve Steven? itself, Kaufmann has nailed the mood, Healy has caught the rhythms, and the cast has vibrantly brought it all to life. There's certainly room for the quirky discomfort to be repetitious, and the play's conclusion is so extremely--almost militarily--staged that it's hard to follow ("NETWORK IS PANINI!"), but the production itself is so crisp, so genuinely warm, that we follow these families into the hell of growing up (as Thomas puts it, right before breaking down, "Yeah. I'm. Totally taking this like a man..."). By no means is Steve Steven an easy play (I'm not sure I understand it all), but it is enjoyable, especially in the quiet, honest and awkward moments between the performers--moments where, for a second, it looks like they're just about to really connect, only to just as suddenly dismiss the impulse with a well placed Midwestern "wull." The whole cast is exceptional, but Alissa Ford and Tom Riis Farrel (Mary and Frank) pivot between needs particularly well, and Matthew Maher (Hank) is easily one of the year's most memorable villains.

The one gripe I will take up with the play is that it's hard to take Anlor seriously, and her role in the play's conclusion confuses more than it coheres. It's not the actress's fault--Jocelyn Kuritsky is alarmingly funny--but given that there are already two strangers at the dinner party, and that the play is mostly an attack on the walled-in American lifestyle, there just isn't any need for another Other.

What there is room for (as fresh young plays like God's Ear, The Thugs, and Dead City have demonstrated) is for discomforting comedy, for we are now, more than ever, living in a world where our laughter comes veiled in the shadow of our collective nervousness.