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April 15, 2005 > Arts & Entertainment > Show offers accessible take on a ‘Reckless’ play

Show offers accessible take on a ‘Reckless’ play

By Julia Bursten | Thresher Editorial Staff

Pull Marcia Brady out of her eerily cheery sitcom suburb, set a hit man after her and have a fugitive and paraplegic cross her path. Turn it into a two-hour play, and things are going to get a little bit Reckless. Brown College’s production of the 1988 Craig Lucas play, which was revived on Broadway last year, is directed by English Lecturer Matt Schlief and gives students a fresh yet approachable taste of American theater of the absurd.

Like many contemporary plays, Reckless starts out harmlessly. Rachel Fitzsimmons (Hanszen College sophomore Tatum Clinton-Selin) and her husband, Tom (Brown College freshman Jim Ross), settle into bed on Christmas Eve. As Rachel babbles excitedly about the next morning’s festivities, Tom sits stoically and waits for a break in his wife’s monologue. She stops to catch a breath, and he announces he has put a contract out for her life.

After that, the play turns weird. While running from the hitman, Rachel meets a stranger, Lloyd Bophtelophti (Brown sophomore Phillip Hodge) at a gas station and goes home with him to his deaf and wheelchair-bound wife, Pooty (Brown freshman Merrill Turner). Rachel moves in with the couple, begins to learn sign language and assumes a new name, the first of many identity changes Lucas forces on his characters.

The play evolves over subsequent Christmases and each year introduces a brilliantly bizarre series of coincidences that are almost random enough to seem real.

After almost two decades and a journey through every town in the United States named Springfield, Rachel is reunited with one of her two sons, Tom Jr. (also played by Ross), in a psychiatrist’s office in Alaska.

As often as themes reappear in Reckless, so do actors; seven cast members portray 19 characters. Brown freshman Sarah McDonald takes on seven roles herself, playing a progressively idiosyncratic series of psychiatrists. McDonald and Brown freshman Robert Rainey pull well-deserved laughs from witty one-liners and surprisingly successful physical comedy. Both move seamlessly from one role to the next, and Rainey stands out as an especially impressive sleazeball game show host.

To counter the comic relief, Lucas sprinkles the dialogue with Waiting for Godot-style quips. While he occasionally waxes nihilistic, he avoids the heavy philosophical debates that pulled playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee so far out of the mainstream. Reckless also has a definite — if somewhat bewildering — plot, so unlike most Beckett plays, the audience is provided with a sense of resolution.

Before giving viewers that satisfaction, though, Schlief disorients his audience members further by forcing spectators to interact with the performance. A call-and-response game show scene and an actor’s unexpected entrance are just two of the production’s theatrical tricks. Behind the scenes, Brown junior Kyle Raegan orchestrates an impressive and colorful lighting system on an all-white stage he designed. The constant fade-ins and fade-outs between scenes work well to keep wandering eyes trained on the stage; unfortunately, though, the Brown commons’ all-glass windows provide more than ample distraction. Luckily — due in part to wheels affixed to scenery and large props — the scene changes themselves are quick and distract very little from the performance.

During the longer breaks around intermission and before and after the show, an omnipresent mix-tape of Christmas carols loops over the set’s sound system. Ian Garrett (Will Rice ‘04) controls the sound board, inserting effects ranging from gunshots to recordings of cast members’ voices giving news broadcasts. This particular doubling of characters via technology is by far the most unsettling aspect of the play and another homage to the absurd. After all, it is not often in real life that someone turns on a television to hear his own voice. Contemporary American plays are often difficult for a company to undertake. They take on challenging issues in unconventional manners, and sometimes their relative obscurity make them difficult to publicize. These natural obstacles make the success of Brown’s production even sweeter. A little recklessness is sometimes just what an audience needs.

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