We're all in our own little lifeboats, eyes facing forward as we put-put in the direction of whatever source of sustenance we seek. But be it a ship of fools or saints, it still must leave behind it a wake that will splash in incalculable ways into the journeys of others. Lisa Kron has titled her new play at Berkeley Rep In the Wake, but the more obvious title would have been The Blind Spot, a term repeatedly invoked by the central character as she steps out of the play to directly address the audience. Then again, an appropriate title might well have been All Human Experience Is a Miserable Fraud, but Can I Freshen Your Drink While We Discuss?
Kron, who first came to attention as a member of the Five Lesbian Brothers, is much like the lesbian brother Tony Kushner never had. Dizzyingly complex discussions of economic theories, social constructs, and historical paradigms whiz by in high-voltage conversations that don't allow eyes to glaze over because of the skillful use of language and the recognizably comfortable circumstances in which ideological friction gets messed up with the everyday clatter of folks just trying to figure out mundane coping techniques.
The play opens on Thanksgiving Day, and the year is unmistakably 2000 because Ellen (Heidi Schreck), the intense hostess of an imminent dinner party, can't detach herself from the cable-news umbilical cord. Video projections on a flattened false proscenium provide news clips about the election in limbo, and keep us updated on current events through to the present. Her malleable, wisecracking boyfriend Danny clucks sympathetically about hanging chads, trying to focus her on the celebration at hand while the lesbian couple (Andrea Frankle and Danielle Skraastad) in the same New York semi-slum, semi-chic apartment building flutter in and out with their comestible contributions. They are all nice, friendly, and reasonable people, politically in the same chapter if not exactly on the same page.
We, the audience and the characters, are in a safe and familiar place where hairline fractures are known, noted, and kidded about. But this sympathetic quartet becomes a less harmonious fivesome when the fearsomely hangdog Judy (Deidre O'Connell) turns up en route from volunteer work in African refugee camps to her mother's funeral. She is, as one of the guests notes, a serious buzz-kill, and her cynically monosyllabic mutterings provide a comic relief, at least until her jet lag wears off, and she verbally wrestles the optimistic Ellen into a say-uncle hold that fairly convincingly undermines all the America-the-beautiful props that have kept the country's founding dreams afloat. It's rough stuff, but Judy's monologue even earned a smattering of applause from an opening-night audience so clearly in her crosshairs. Please stay for the wine and hors d'oeuvres once your entire belief system has been eviscerated.
Kron, who performed in her savvy play Well at ACT a few years back, shows growth as a playwright who can leaven the thoughtful with the comedic, and Leigh Silverman is again the adept director. But there are occasionally skids in the superior first act as Danny (Carson Elrod), the only male character, is reduced to a non-stop wisenheimer who might remind you of the Chandler Bing character from the Friends TV series. Danny does finally get serious in the second act, but in response to a bisexual dilemma introduced for his girlfriend Ellen, and the streams of bracing ideas supporting the play largely flatten out as Ellen and her part-time lover Amy (Emily Donahoe) go the soap-opera route as they argue over their unsustainable affair.
Other than an entertaining scene in which the group mistakenly assumes that a young black girl (Miriam F. Glover), being fostered by the usually curmudgeonly Judy, must be a racially oppressed liberal with gay-friendly views, the sexuality of the various characters is more red herring than red meat, as the characters chew at the remaining gristle of the American dream. But digest we must, Kron seems to be saying, for either we shit or we explode. The waste will always remain in the wake. It's the blind spot that lets us imagine there is an unspoiled island always just ahead. Playwright Kron is the thoughtful, theatrical, and altogether messy captain of this wayward cruise to a crumbling paradise.
In the Wake will run at Berkeley Rep through June 27. Tickets are $33-$71. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to www.berkeleyrep.org.