In a Word
Lauren
Yee
Words and
the memories they struggle to recall piece themselves together like puzzles with
missing and/or wrong pieces in Lauren Yee’s In a Word. Guy, a husband, struggles to persuade
his wife Fiona to go out for her birthday celebration dinner. She stubbornly resists, rooting herself
in tangled and tortured memories involving their son, whose second-year
anniversary of a still-unsolved disappearance at the age of eight corresponds
with this, her birthday. Their often-frustrating,
real-time battle of words is continuously interrupted by their internal
playbacks of past conversations and events related to the son, his
disappearance, and the 2-year investigation.
We enter
the muddled world of their mind’s eyes through many short scenes played out
before us with the help of a third actor, Greg Ayers, who takes on multiple
characters of their dreamed scenes.
He comes and goes and often just watches from the sides, filling out the
casts of their memories by becoming the missing boy, the principal of his
school, the detective searching for him, or a number of other players on their
minds’ stages. What is real
and what is not becomes confusing for us (and clearly for Fiona) as we try to
figure out when are we in the now and when in the past and what in the past is
actually recalled accurately.
Scattered props like kid’s toys may be in the room before us or may only
be in the mother’s recall. Sounds,
visitors, a tree in the front yard may or may not be real. Words increasingly cannot be relied on
to describe inner pictures of what happened or what is happening now. They morph mid-dialogue (“leave of
absence” becomes “leaf of absence” becomes “abstinence”) or are entirely
missing as Fiona continuously refuses to talk to her pleading husband about
what is really going on inside her head.
Fiona’s
and Guy’s words are failing to answer what happened to their son, what is going
on now inside them, and what is increasingly wrong with their marriage. The words said and perhaps some not yet
said are deeply rooted in Fiona’s mind and create a reality only she seems to
know. We see their power in a
front-yard, gnarled, almost ghostly tree (which is maybe real, maybe not) whose
leaves are random words and blanks ready to be filled in.
Giovanna
Sardelli aptly creates an air of mounting tension and mystery as she directs
the cast of three. The multiple
scenes and even scenes within scenes (as memories push their way into reality)
transition without pause and at times in near crazed, frenetic pace that
suggest racing thoughts. When we
first meet Jessica Bates as Fiona, her eyes are already red and swollen from
much crying; and real tears continue to flow freely throughout her powerful
portrayal of this mother who alternates between blank, silent stares and
emotional outbursts. Through his
multiple personages, Greg Ayers skillfully becomes her haunting memories,
taking on sometimes-exaggerated forms as she remembers events and people in
ways that fit her present reality and story. In expressing Fiona’s thoughts, his to-date, unsuccessful detective
is right out of a bad TV series, a “B” version of Columbo; his principal
(Fiona’s former boss who puts her on leave) is a bit too prissy and increasingly
unfeeling; his Tristan is just too docile and perfect to match the ADHD boy we
learn he actually was. Mr. Ayers masterfully
switches to take us also into Guy’s head where his tantrums of the ADHD Tristan
or his beer-guzzling bravado of Guy’s best friend (“You just gotta do this”
type of advice) give us a glimpse of the father’s own internal conversations
with himself. As Guy, Cassidy
Brown is appropriately sympathetic to and exasperated by his wife’s paralyzing
sorrow. Mr. Brown seems to give us
our one hold on realism; and yet we cannot be sure if he too is creating a mental
storyline that interprets the past in ways to help meet his own needs. Together, cast and director weave an
intriguing ‘what can we believe’ ‘where is he,’ ‘who did it’ mystery.
The
rolling, world premiere of In a Word will makes its way to three more
cities, during which time Ms. Yee will probably continue to tighten and shape
what is already a compelling ninety minutes. There are elements that are not clear to me why they need to
be brought to bear so often (like repeated obsession with the adopted Tristan’s
birth mother and her story). The
symbol of the tree pops up in somewhat weird ways in various forms, disrupting
my own train of thought as I tried to figure out ‘now what does that mean?’ But, these are only minor diversions in
what is a gut-wrenching portrayal of what of the difficulty to face, accept,
let go, and move on from life’s inevitable disappointments and tragedies.
Rating: 4
E’s
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