Rebecca – Memphis Flyer

I get Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and Jane Eyre confused. I always remember that Heathcliff and Catherine are in Wuthering Heights because of that Monty Python sketch where they act it out in semaphore. Obviously, as problems go, this isn’t a bad one. There are just all those wailing women and wives in attics and silent, deeply disturbed men; who can keep up? I tried to watch a movie adaptation of one of these not too long ago. I don’t remember which because they’re all the same, but this had Tom Hardy in it. I couldn’t pay attention to the story because of Tom Hardy’s lips. Have you seen them? Tom Hardy is to lips as Milton Berle was to, er, uh, comedy.

Featureflash | Dreamstime.com

Tom Hardy

Here’s the thing. For every John Irving or Henry James novel I read, I read about 10 Nora Roberts romances. I know I’m supposed to be all cool and hip and be like, oh, I only read David Foster Wallace out loud to Honduran orphans while eating organic acorn tofu in the porch chair my ironically suspendered husband carved from a fallen Appalachian birch maple — very rare — and drinking yaupon beer. Sometimes I’ll watch the movie first, then read the book. That way I can make my holier-than-thou friends’ heads explode. I’ve read some good stuff this way. I’ve also seen some bad stuff this way. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men comes to mind.

People love to rag on Nora because of her formula. There’s a meet cute, they hate each other, they acknowledge their mutual attraction but ignore it, and they end up in an adorable restored bungalow. Like John Irving doesn’t have a formula? Kid has attachment to strange object, there’s a bear, someone is horribly mutilated or somehow disfigured, something gets blown up, and they end up in Amsterdam.

Because I love Steve Yarbrough doesn’t mean I have to hate Vince Flynn. What would we do when we’re stranded in the Charlotte airport if it weren’t for Vince Flynn? Just because I absolutely have to have a bologna sandwich with mayonnaise and Doritos on pasty white bread a couple times a year doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate Amish chicken breasts stuffed with chard and turnips in a balsamic reduction.

I think women are particularly susceptible to secret shames because of Lululemon.

First, whenever I see that name, in my head I pronounce it “Lulu Mon,” and I imagine happy steel drummers and jerk chicken. I think even my father knows what Lululemons are, and he thinks a “crack whore” means she’s good at her job. But in case you get out even less than my father, these things I speak of are fancy, stretchy yoga pants. Except in Jackson, Mississippi, where they are fancy middle-aged-woman-running-up-to-Whole-Foods pants. These yoga pants are well-made, expensive, and their size XL is a 12. Gentlemen, you might be confused. It’s like finding a great pair of Sansabelts and they only go up to a 32. So ladies such as myself, who could really use a good yoga class or 10, can’t wear them. Did I mention they’re expensive? Less than a yard of Spandex that you can’t even put in the dryer, and they won’t make your Cow Face Pose any easier for you.

Anyway, you get your Lululemons and your mandatory copy of Eat, Pray, Love, and then you start eliminating stuff from your diet. And I’m not talking through digestion. You give up wheat, nuts, beans, rice, and start drinking green kale sludge with chia seeds sprinkled on top. Your friend, a reader of Important Books, gives you Deepak Chopra, and you’re off. You hide your Michelob Ultra behind your organic goat’s milk. You realize you’ve never read anything by Joyce Carol Oates, so you buy her entire oeuvre used from Amazon but act like they’re old and came from an independent book store. You start using the word “encounter” instead of “meet.”

You want cool, but let me tell you something: You will never be cool. Read what you want. Eat fast food every now and then. Preferably something with the word “poppers” in the name. You know what? If you love Red Lobster cheddar biscuits, order them! Those biscuits are delightful. If your so-called friends can’t handle the truth of you, dump them. You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life. What you need is more biscuits.

Susan Wilson also writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com. She and her husband Chuck have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.

“Gentle” is the word I hear over and over again in reference to 4000 Miles, Amy Herzog’s funny, thorny play about geographical, emotional, temporal, and political distance across generations. Director Tony Isbell dropped the word when we chatted online. It’s popped up repeatedly in conversations with friends who’ve seen the play at TheatreWorks. Even New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called it a “gently comic drama” in his review, so there must be something to the idea that it’s a gentle play. But that isn’t how I experienced 4000 Miles. The play I saw was an uncomfortably real snapshot of a generational moment, a sound thrashing of lifestyle-lefties and a similarly-bracing critique of our elders and their astonishing ability to idealize the past. 4000 Miles is a quiet play, mostly. There’s no sustained shouting or violence to speak of, though death looks out from every corner of the room. Genuinely sweet moments are shared between a self-absorbed millennial and his grandmother, an old lefty at the tipping point of senility. But gentle isn’t the first word I’d choose to describe this subtle, one-act reminder that the reward of a long life is outliving everyone who might attend your funeral.

Did I mention that the show is also funny? It is. What it’s not is tightly plotted. Nor is it full of the archetypal characters that tend to populate the classic American family drama. To that end, 4000 Miles — a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist — is a chamber piece, more meditation than assault. But it’s an uneasy meditation, almost never serene.

The play opens with a scruffy, baggage-laden Leo waking Vera, his elderly grandmother in her Greenwich Village apartment at 3 a.m. The last thing she expected was an early-morning visit from her Left Coast grandson, and she doesn’t seem all that happy to see him. Leo has been cycling across the country with a friend, but when that friend died in a horrible accident on the road, he broke off communication with his family in Minneapolis and went off the grid.

Leo’s not intentionally malicious, but the young trustafarian is a natural manipulator: a wounded rugged outdoorsy-type quick to use his personal tragedy if it buys some sympathy or helps get the hot Chinese girl who looks like his adopted sister into bed. He takes up residence with his grandmother on a temporary basis, but makes her promise to not tell the family where he is.

Over the course of the play we watch Leo lose his girlfriend Bec, making one final douchey request to “remember how our bodies were together.” We also witness an attempted hook-up with a rich girl named Amanda who flips out when she discovers she’s in the huge, rent-controlled apartment of a card-carrying Communist. Amanda says she doesn’t think she can have sex in a Communist’s house, allowing that she’s usually kind of slutty. Her drunken anti-Communist rant is one of the show’s best set pieces. Replace the word Communist with any racial descriptor and the monologue would leave audiences slack-jawed. Then again, Amanda is Chinese, and there’s family history.

4000 Miles took its first Off-Broadway bows about three months before the Occupy Wall Street movement moved into Zuccotti Park. I mention that because somehow that real-world occurrence seems more like the ending of Herzog’s play than its actual ending. She uses the outdoorsy Leo and the urban Vera to look at how far the easily-identified tropes of the American left had evolved. Class-conscious collective action had become a lifestyle choice for people who can afford to protest GMOs and oil companies with their purchasing power. There is some suggestion that Leo is growing by the play’s end. It’s not hard to imagine him leaving for his new job out west only to get caught up in the massive street protest brewing in Manhattan. Nor is it hard to imagine him moving on following a fashionable arrest during some clash with the New York police.

Every character in 4000 Miles is a prisoner of perspective, Leo most of all. He’s loveably disheveled, despicably self-centered, and difficult to like. His grandmother, Vera, can be abrasive and muddled, but she clearly has the more sympathetic role, and Karen Mason Riss is spectacular in the part.

Christopher Joel Onken is completely believable as Leo, although his more cloying antics come across as being downright sinister. Carly Crawford is also effective, if a little stilted as Leo’s girlfriend Bec. Then again, if the show has a thankless part, that’s it.

Ron Gordon’s scenic design gives the impression that Vera’s not-so-Manhattan Manhattan residence is infinitely large on the inside. That’s a quibble, not a deal-breaker.