"The Thing About Jellyfish" is a Tiffany gift box with a beaded Swiftie friendship bracelet inside. While fundamentally well-intentioned, it often seems at odds with itself.
Now playing in a world premiere engagement at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, this stage adaptation of an acclaimed young adult novel (The script is by Keith Bunin, the source material by Ali Benjamin), wraps a story of adolescent angst and growth in polished, high-tech stagecraft. It over-sleekens the tangle of tweendom.
Poetry versus gimmickry
An ultra-processed feast for the eyes, the production leads with visual panache. We meet 12-year-old Suzy Swanson (Matilda Lawler) on a class trip to a world-class aquarium. The scene is brought to life with astonishing versimilitude by designers Derek McClane (set), Lap Chi Chu (lighting), and Lucy Mackinnon (video) under the direction of Tyne Rafaeli.
Surrounded by deep sea darkness, we join Suzy, gazing up through glassy walls. Magnificently lit jellyfish rise and fall in slow motion, tentacles trailing translucent exo-umbrellas. Throughout the play, these resonant images recur, Suzy's thoughts drifting along with them. Currents of intellect and imagination carry her through time and space, fact and fantasy, grief and healing.
Struggling to understand the recent accidental drowning of her best friend, Suzy seizes upon a notion that Franny (Kayla Teruel, beautifully delineating her character as both a youngster and a teen) was killed by the sting of a poisonous Irukandji jellyfish. Existentially upended by the death of her peer, she's trying to regain a sense of control, to impose logic upon the inconceivable.
Preparing a school science report built around her theory, Suzy spends later scenes obsessively researching the topic. Here, the previously poetic production design shifts into excess. Suzy's forays onto the worldwide web explode into kinetic stage-swallowing projections. Streaks of light, streams of computer code, clips from nature documentaries, and glowing portal-like frames clamor for attention.
Why? To a contemporary seventh grader, doing research on the internet is hardly the stuff of sci-fi spectacle. It's routine.
The submarine projections woven throughout the show offer elegant allusions to the unfathomable, but this online stuff is just superficial whiz-bangery. Rather than drawing you into Suzy's sincere interior world: it pushes you back against your seat and focuses you on theater's artifice. It saps impact from the show's more genuinely affecting effects.
Missing messiness
Lawler, the 16-year-old actor who plays Suzy, delivers a remarkably layered performance. Her nuanced facial expressions and body language reveal the character's near-constant internal confusion, melting from social engagement into solitude, flipping from studious concentration to shapeless outrage, abruptly downshifting from speedy teen energy to depressive lethargy.
Unfortunately, we don't get to see her wrestle with more of the messiness that's part of Benjamin's plot but glossed over in Bunin's too-tidy script.
Suzy is processing not only the death of her friend, but also the recent divorce of her parents. Yet we get no real sense of how these traumas are entangled in her subconsciousness. Lawler's scenes with mom Meg (Stephanie Jannsen) and dad Dan (Andy Groteluschen) do little other than remind us that the elders exist.
Because Suzy has been giving them the silent treatment since Franny's passing, she offers no illuminating dialogue, and her folks speak in empty platitudes ("Sometimes things just happen"; "There is nothing you could ever do that would make us love you any less.")
Relatively late in the play, we begin to understand that Suzy's relationship with Franny had significantly changed in the months before her passing: They'd matured at different paces and their interests had diverged. Suzy felt left behind well before Franny's death.
There's a lot of rough psychological terrain that could be explored here, but it's handled too smoothly and simplistically to have much of an impact. You'll definitely remember those projections though.
'The Thing About Jellyfish,' through Mar. 9. $63-$139. Berkeley Rep, 2015 Addison St. www.berkeleyrep.org
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