By Linda Winer
STAFF WRITER
January 26, 2004
It begins with an intentionally terrible, oddly poignant, unexpectedly amusing
little song. The two youngish women and the two youngish men in Melissa James
Gibson's "Suitcase," which opened Jan. 25 at the Soho Rep, take turns
delivering dislocated lines of a shaky tune.
Some lines are about feelings, as in "This funny feeling's really not that
funny." Some are about the uncertainties of happiness, as in "Is this
house of love just bricks without mortar/I should have been a Doctor Without
Borders." Quite a few are about the semiotic mysteries of language, as in
"Some words sound better in other tongues ... and longing is a
seven-letter word."
After 90 minutes of funny feelings, longing and weirdly exhilarating wordplay,
the future of these four unsettled urban settlers is hardly less certain than
it was at the start. What is clear, however, is that Gibson - whose
"sic" had its beguiling premiere at this same theater last year - is
a thoroughly original talent, a stylist who appreciates the musical impact of
words as much as she can simultaneously love and mock her overly articulate,
emotionally conflicted characters.
There are moments, very few moments, when the verbal self-consciousness makes
us want to run screaming into the night. Far more often, however, the effect of
her internal polyphony has the giddy, exquisite feeling of an extremely
high-strung string quartet.
Jen (Colleen Werthmann) and Sallie (Christina Kirk) are stuck in the parallel
universe of dead-end dissertations. Each one's home is a perch high atop
industrial-looking contraptions. Each sits at a drawing table and is attached,
almost without end, to the receiver of old-fashioned blue telephones with
curlicue cords. Jen, whose dissertation is about garbage, is being courted by
Karl (Jeremy Shamos), a sweet adoring fellow who brings her garbage in a
suitcase. Sallie, whose paper is about "alternative means of
storytelling," is courted by Lyle (Thomas Jay Ryan), whose feelings are
more confused.
The women keep the men out in the cold, literally. Louisa Thompson's ingenious
set often has them freezing outside a door, begging on Jen's intercom to be let
in. There are tiny pop-up doors on the women's desks that are as impregnable as
a castle with the drawbridge drawn over the moat. The poor guys, stranded in
the stairwell, agree that it will be "nice" when "our
girlfriends' dissertations are finished." When Jen reminds Karl that he
always liked "complicated women," he says, yes, "but in a fun
way."
These women cannot be fun to love. But they are unpredictably delightful to
watch and overhear. Much interaction, such as it is, happens in the collision
of conversations on those blue phones and over the intercom. Then, too, Jen is
listening to an unknown girl's taped Christmas diaries on an old-fashioned
yellow tape recorder from Jen's garbage research. And Sallie, who wears her
winter cap with knitted braids in the house, spies on old happy-family home
movies being shown in a neighbor's apartment. (Blissfully eclectic realistic
downtown costumes are by Maiko Matsushima.) Sallie is hilarious about the
problem with house sitters and, with a candor we rarely get to hear in from
women in the theater, sadly admits "I want to sleep with a lot of people
I'll never sleep with."
As in 'sic,' which was also acutely directed by Soho Rep's Daniel Aukin, Gibson
establishes her subtle understanding of a generation both transient and stuck
in containers that the city calls home. There is more nostalgia for a happiness
that these women may not really want. In a program note about the company,
Aukin explains, "We hunt for the play that is only a play, not a
television show or a film." Good for us.