Dates
Jan 11 thru Feb 4Sarah Ruhl wrote this contemporary farce while she was still in graduate school, back in 2001. She wrote it before Garden State, before The Shins vomited a certain kind of sadness into our collective conscience. She wrote it before Nathan Rabin coined the character “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” The play is imperfectly crafted and top heavy, relying on both the director’s sensitivity and the actor playing Tilly, the sad-eyed lead, to see us through to a rather hasty end.
If one is familiar with her other work, Melancholy Play is a premonition of the themes she’d expand upon more clearly and with greater poignancy in The Clean House. If one isn’t, it’s an absurd delight— a kitten-clawed commentary on the beautiful-but-sad female characters popularized by film giants like Ingmar Bergman and Frederico Fellini. It is also a meditation on the very European idea of tristesse, or a sadness that originates within. Upstart Productions does it well, turning the Green Zone into something out of an antique, DIY dream where things get seriously strange.
Tilly (Natalie Young) wanders about with such an air of whimsical sadness that it attracts everyone around her, mocks every poor schmuck who’s ever fallen in love with thoughtless egomania masquerading as introspection and depth. Her sadness is sexy. Lorenzo (Brian Witkowicz), her European therapist with a vaguely Italian accent, is the first to fall. Frank (Duane Deering), her uptight tailor, is next. Then Frances (Diana Gonzalez), her hair stylist, and Joan (Lulu Ward), Frances’ older and somewhat overbearing lover.
The actress Natalie Young was excellent last year in downers like Oleanna and Red Light Winter, so it’s a relief to see her in comedic role. Her Tilly is only as irritating as she’s meant to be, and never insufferable. As Tilly grows happier and happier (so happy, in fact, it borders on mania), everyone else around her seems two seconds away from opening their veins. Things go way off the rails in Ruhl’s weird world, and director Jonathan Taylor is comfortable enough there. The tone is spot on, silly, surreal, and yet just grounded enough.
Witkowicz’s Lorenzo is the scene stealer, playing the most outrageously funny role with aplomb while still embodying the purest form of love the play has. He loves Tilly happy and sad, and the scene where they all (except Frank) play “Duck Duck Goose” for Tilly’s birthday made my heart ache. Everything works, from the lights, designed by Scott Payne and Tre Garrison, that perfectly complement Tilly’s moods, to the live mood music, performed expertly on a cello (what other melancholy instrument is there?) by Buffi Jacobs of the Polyphonic Spree.
But what are we supposed to take away from it? What lines are we supposed to remember and contemplate? Nothing solid fixes in my mind; I just see colors like the whitewash of the windows that made up the backbone of the, the bright yellow of Tilly’s dress. No one dies, there is no great tragedy or blessing. No one person is much better off than another. Like many very real things, it simply just ends.
Image: (left to right) Natalie Young, Lulu Ward, Diana Gonzalez (Photo by Mark Rouse)
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2 comments
What we’re meant to take away from it is that people have emotions. No one is right or wrong in how they feel, and no one should try to “fix” someone’s sadness. Or in this case, melancholy. It’s what makes us human, our ability to feel, our suffering. It’s why Tilly and Frank both refuse to take medication. Lorenzo does because he doesn’t know how to deal with the kind of melancholic unrequited love that Tilly has caused him–he has never suffered.
We’re meant to take away from it that melancholy is not depression, and not always is it sadness. It’s a deep pensiveness that not many people experience anymore, or even understand. In a world where everyone and everything else thinks for us, we have neglected to think. Ruhl and this production seek to challenge that.
You are correct: like many things in life, the play just ends. But you forget that like everything in life, we are meant to learn from it.
Good points, though I didn’t “forget.” My point was that while Ruhl flirts with an effective commentary on a certain female persona and the way that persona is alternately idolized and reviled by the people in her life, it’s not quite tangible. The first half of the play made me think; the latter, not so much. The ending, while entertaining, leaves something to be desired.