BROTHERHOOD Hodge and LoCicero take it outside.
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The intense Hugging the Shoulder, by Jerrod Bogard, is the latest play presented by Theater of Thought (through August 8), actor and director Amber Kelly's vehicle for boiling-pot relationship dramas in inventively appropriate settings. This one takes place not quite in Pawtucket's Hope Artiste Village, but rather in a parking lot behind the complex, set up like a drive-in movie theater.Produced in conjunction with Elbow Deep Media, the location joins a list of other odd sites that avoid at all cost having audiences look upon a normal stage. They've consisted of having us perched on bleachers, peering like voyeurs through a motel picture window at angry bedroom conflict, and distributing us like curious mice inside a dilapidated cottage in the woods.
This time we are looking at two men arguing in a van. The one driving, Derrick (Michael A. LoCicero), is having a hard time calming down the one in the back, Jeremy (Jeff Hodge). Jeremy is going through the agony of heroin withdrawal, and the man abducting him for his own good is his brother. We are watching all of this from our own cars, listening to them through our radios, seeing their exchanges projected on a crumbling white wall. Occasionally there is a lull, and we witness a flashback, mostly exchanges with Christy (Amber Kelly), Jeremy's junkie girlfriend.
The acting here is up to Theater of Thought's usual high standards. The problem is with the play itself, which is too slice-of-life for its own good. Playwright Bogard has a knack for conveying casual speech naturally, making sure there's enough repetition, punctuated with F-bombs, to remove any sense of artifice. He makes it seem that each character rather than he is talking. Trouble is, the task of art is to simulate such wandering while laying out a path. There is little such direction here.
There's not much growth in these characters and our understanding of them, or at least not enough for me. For what seems like the first half-hour but may be only half that time, we are witnessing the screaming near-death throes of Jeremy, which understandably provide less illumination than heated atmospherics. The story spins its wheels while our empathy, which presumably is supposed to be increasing, numbs out. He had us at "Help!," you might say.
Derrick is driving around the country, using their mother's credit card, growing increasingly exhausted. He can't stop at motels, which frown on hysterical customers, and he can't pull over to sleep because he's afraid that Jeremy will flee. This goes on for five days, and most of the play, before his brother is no longer sick and they can have meaningful conversations. With Jeremy, occasionally we get a glimpse of character behind the addict poster boy, such as when he expresses his admiration for the skill he perceives in NASCAR, from drivers to pit crew, rather than resenting the stark contrast to his incompetence at life itself. Derrick has been an enabler, it eventually becomes clear, yet we can respect his adaptability and patience. When, after a political dispute about President Bush, Jeremy tears Texas out of their map, Derrick simply drives north instead.
