Pots@TheWorks – Memphis Flyer

Astrid and Kate

There’s a specific Chicago train platform where Howard goes to connect with his past. That’s were he meets Mike and, after first mistaking him for a panhandler, it’s where Howard learns that this bearded transit stop vagrant is the same person who broke his heart four years ago. Only back then Mike was a woman named Kate.

Filled with questions, Howard becomes immediately desperate to rekindle romance where there was never more than friendship in the first place. It’s awkward for a number of reasons, but primarily, because he’s theoretically cis/hetero and already married to Astrid, an unsatisfied artist with a “stripper name” and a history of dancing her problems away. Howard’s basically a nice, confused doof of a guy, who wants to make his fantasy crush work out for everybody without hurting anybody, or making things weird for the people close to him. He does both of the things he doesn’t want to do pretty quickly.

How weird does it get, you ask? Aprons and fuzzy handcuffs weird.

Back When Mike Was Kate is a promising little play that might be better as a quirky little film with art direction bordering on OCD and a vintage indie rock soundtrack. Ben Kemper’s script whips elements of mystery, suspense, coming of age, and farce into a kind of romantic comedy with easy charms that almost make up for stiff expository dialogue and plot points that test belief. Also, Astrid’s not very likable, Howard is either clueless or selectively insensitive, and while Mike’s presented as something of a pleasant cypher, Kate’s so cool and complete it’s hard to imagine why he might want to enter/re-enter these evidently unhappy lives.

Howard and Kate

In keeping with past POTS@TheWorks premieres, Back When Mike Was Kate contains top notch performances by a tight ensemble comprised of Joshua LaShomb (Mike), David Hammons (Howard), Brooke Papritz (Astrid), and Ronnie Karimnia (Cameron the transit guy), with a terrific performance by R. Franklin Koch,* whose Kate is the grounded “old soul” tying the whole play together.

Mike/Kate may be the titular character but Howard and Astrid are the play’s dueling protagonists. It may even be Astrid’s play, ultimately, though she’s also the least developed among principle characters.

Director Claire Rutkauskas’ production doesn’t draw hard lines between present action and things that happened four years ago. It’s only a short temporal span, sure, but a disproportionately big leap forward in terms of where all the characters are in life. This huge juxtaposition of time-versus-change brings a faintly surreal and potentially lovely edge, like something by Sarah Ruhl, minus the flights of poetry. These possibilities are unfortunately never rigorously explored in a show that tidies up and refines threads that might want to be woolly and teased out.

Following deliberately provocative scripts like Crib, extraordinary productions like All Saints in the Old Colony, and well-crafted plays like Evan Linder’s Byhalia, Mississippi, this latest winner of Playhouse on the Square’s New Works@TheWorks series feels a little undercooked. It knows where it wants to go, but not always what it wants to say or how to accomplish its goals believably. New works are often still works in progress — even after the “world premiere.” It could be that the script remains a draft or two away from done or maybe there were some finer points glossed over in this finely acted but often chilly production. Maybe it just needs enough warmth to mistake for heat. Either way, it’s nice when playwrights find new wrinkles in old storylines, and nicer still that POTS is identifying nifty new scripts with potential to grow and go places outside the 901.

And I do hope this romcom makes it to celluloid eventually, where it can build past relationships out of something other than words and recollection.

Mike

*UPDATE: R. Franklin Koch was originally identified as Rebekka Koch per the cast list on the Playhouse on the Square website. Intermission Impossible sincerely regrets the error.

Historians have speculated that All Saints Day — a solemn observation honoring saints of the Catholic church who’ve died and attained heaven — was developed as a means of de-paganizing an ancient rite. The Roman feast of Lemuralia was originally a springtime event, wherein offerings of food were made by individual households to exorcise restless, tormenting spirits of dead family members.

Julianne Homokay’s pitch-black comedy All Saints in the Old Colony may be a piece of contemporary theater, but it harkens back to this ancient rite. And even though it’s a classic slice of kitchen-sink-style social realism and not a supernatural horror story, this is very much a play about curses, demons, death, desire, and unshakable disappointment.

It’s a fantastic POTS@TheWorks world premiere that finds laughter in some extremely dark places as it introduces audiences to a broken Irish family from Boston’s rapidly gentrifying Southie neighborhood. It’s a bleak but loving exploration of tradition, ritual, memory and the meaning of family that is, by turns, hard to watch and impossible to look away from. With subtle, effective direction by Jeff Posson, and a top-drawer cast, All Saints is an exciting, emotionally charged way to say hello to a new year of theater in Memphis.

All Saints in the Old Colony feels like Homokay’s New England-flavored answer to Katori Hall’s housing project drama Hurt Village. The Old Colony, Boston’s second oldest housing project, has changed quite a bit in recent years, but was once a dense cluster of brick towers populated by poor Irish families. As with Hurt Village, All Saints is set against a backdrop of gentrification and change. It tells the story of Kier, an Irish-born immigrant and disabled dock worker who, in the absence of parents, raised his siblings as best he could, making hard decisions that still haunt his malnourished, whiskey-soaked brain.

More specifically, it tells the story of an attempted intervention where the whole family comes together — including sister Fiona who was given up for adoption at an early age — to help Kier into a healthier lifestyle. But, in the words of playwright Sam Shepard, whose work is also reflected in All Saints, there’s no hope for the hopeless. Opportunities for temporary escape abound, but for these siblings normalcy will always be relative, and there’s no hope that these four — five, counting an offstage brother too unforgiving to appear — will ever find peace, let alone happiness.

In an early moment, Greg Boller’s Kier opens the refrigerator and waves off the stink of rotten food as he dives in looking for a pack of baloney to make offerings to his household Saints. Even if we didn’t see all the garbage piled up in corners, Boller’s relationship with the smells in his environment tell us exactly where we are. His is a strong, physically-committed performance at the heart of an incredible ensemble.

As Ronan, Keir’s brother who never left Southie, John Maness offers a master class in honest, unflashy character acting. Marques Brown is similarly compelling as brother Mickey who left Catholicism to become an Episcopal priest and fully embrace both his West Coast lifestyle and his wife Tiffani. Or is it Tiffanii?

Ronan’s known his long lost sister Fiona for some time, even though they didn’t know they were related. Like a character from some Hawthorne short story, Fiona, in spite of her separation from the family, lived a parallel life. She became a bartender. Ronan frequents bars. Stuff happens. Their introduction is uncomfortably hilarious and a real twist to Fiona’s story, which may ultimately be the saddest of them all. In an ensemble full of great performances, Erin Shelton’s Fiona is, perhaps, the most deeply satisfying.

All Saints is a boisterous play about a family that drinks, squabbles, fistfights, tells old stories, sings old songs, and doesn’t clean up very much. It’s about real people, real problems, and real places. And it’s haunted by unwholesome spirits who refuse to stay dead. POTS@TheWorks has brought Memphis some solid world premieres. All Saints in the Old Colony is the best yet.