Sweet and Sad
Written by Richard Nelson
Directed by Joe Jahraus
at Profiles Theatre, 4139 N. Broadway (map)
thru Oct 7 | tickets: $35-$40 | more info
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Characters out of context make for unfocused voyeurism
Profiles Theatre presents
Sweet and Sad
Review by Lawrence Bommer
Created almost entirely by their own conversations (and not by anything they do or choose), the discursive characters in Richard Nelson’s Sweet and Sad are also taken out of a larger context that could help us to comprehend them. This one-act is in fact—and feels it–only one part of a planned series of four works about the Apple family living in the historical village of Rhinebeck in upstate New York. Their shared experiences can only be guessed at as we glimpse excerpts from a dinner party reunion held on the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attack on America. The family has returned from a memorial service for the victims of 9/11, leaving teacher Barbara (Kate Harris) to marvel over how many names were remembered.
The result is much like looking at a family album whose every snapshot tells you, subtly or blatantly, that this is not your own.
However persuasively Joe Jahraus has found the right cast to offer urgency to this talkfest, it only catches fire when its private doings make contact with the public realm. That takes a while, given all the small talk, family in-jokes, dead-end exchanges, dysfunctional family dynamics, and furtive allusions that loved ones inevitably pick up and audiences necessarily miss.
But gradually the Apples’ determined discourse intersects with our collective memories from 9/11/2001. Richard (Darrell W. Cox), a lawyer with Republican sympathies, nonetheless worries about the civil liberties lost in order to provide an illusion of national security. When he thinks of the World Trade Center, family friend Tim (Eric Burgher) prefers to remember how tightrope-walker Philippe Petit connected—and domesticated—the twin towers by subduing them with his awesome athleticism. Sister Jane (Harmony France) inveighs against the arrogant Gotham plutocrats and their trust-fund brats.
We get references to Lafayette’s 1820 return to America and the excitement it triggered, “Richard III,” village politics, and an engagement calendar whose last entry could be a fatal meal at the Windows on the World restaurant. All this detritus merely reconfirms Yeats’ burning phrase about public calamity, “A terrible beauty is born.”
Fittingly for a playwright, Nelson’s most pressing concern is how something as prepared and processed as theater can do justice to senseless tragedy. Can we capture the crisis by comparing it to a “candy explosion” or does that just trivialize the suffering? Can anything as temporal as drama keep alive the raw evil that erupted one gorgeous September morning?
It’s up to the amnesiac uncle Benjamin (Robert Breuler) to forget his forgetfulness enough to turn a halting reading of Walt Whitman’s “The Wound Dresser” into a paean for all the lost souls no longer with us a decade after the disaster.
But these revelations are thinned out by a script that wastes our time on family matters that never earn our eavesdropping: The other three plays in Nelson’s quartet must make more sense of them. That’s not the case with an unfocused script rather obviously entitled “Sweet and Sad.”
No question, Jahraus triggers very believable performances from this palpable family and their actor friend. Their work experiences, apt anecdotes and even the bustle of assembling and taking apart an entire dining room feel right during each of these 100 minutes. But so many stories here don’t connect to each other, the characters, or any theme, let alone us. A play about forgetting shouldn’t be quite so forgettable.
Rating: ★★½
Sweet and Sad continues through October 7th at Profiles Theatre, The Main Stage, 4139 N. Broadway (map), with performances Thursdays-Fridays at 8pm, Saturdays 5pm and 8pm, Sundays 7pm. Tickets are $35-$40, and are available by phone (773-549-1815) or online through PrintTixUSA.com (check for half-price tix at Goldstar.com). More info at ProfilesTheatre.org. (Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes, no intermission)
artists
cast
Darrell W. Cox (Richard); Eric Burgher (Tim), Robert Breuler (Uncle Benjamin), Kristin Ford (Marian), Harmony France (Jane); Kate Harris (Barbara)
behind the scenes
Joe Jahraus (director); Shaun Renfro (set), Mike Durst (lights), Jeffrey Levin (sound and original music), Erica Griese (costumes), Jordan Muller (stage manager), Sarah Nutt (asst. director)
12-0829
