SUMMER IN AMERICA: Time to figure out what's really going on. |
| Roadside America by Susan Morse | Directed by Ralph Morang | Produced by the Players’ Ring, in Portsmouth NH | through June 1 | 603.436.8123 |
Sucking on an impressive succession of Popsicles, Maggie Leland (Sarah Kennedy) nurses malaise. Her husband Joe (Scott Degan) is contemptuous and two-timing, and they’ve just moved from upstate New York to a small New Hampshire city where Maggie has neither friends nor meaningful work. She’s a woman devoid of connections. But the world intrudes on her with rather bewildering melodrama in Roadside America, an original work — and first play — by Seacoast writer Susan Morse, staged at the Players’ Ring, under the direction of her husband, Ralph Morang.Into the vacant house next door move assertive, New Age-y Grace (Kate Kosteva) and her eight-year-old tomboy daughter Sam (Larissa Fogg), who have uprooted suddenly from the South. Grace and Maggie share a brief communion over lemonade, but much is puzzling about the new neighbors. Soon Grace is scarce to be found, Sam’s paying the rent in cash, and Maggie has to step out of her own anomie and deteriorating marriage to figure everything out and, perhaps, try to better it.
That’s a tall order, as there’s a lot going on in Roadside. In fact, the script’s most admirable aspirations — to address a slew of such big issues as marriage, family, self-realization, spirituality, prejudice, the American people’s propensity for rootlessness, and its attraction to blank slates — lead to its weakness: a plot line so busy that it crowds its characters. As the action builds, the script introduces elements and alliances that sometimes feel forced — as when, within a single scene, Officer Grimaldi (Richard Harris) introduces himself, serves Maggie her divorce papers, and amorously asks her out. The unfolding drama of Grace and Sam ratchets Maggie ever tauter, but so much happens that all the plot twists start to feel less like catalysts in the evolution of a character, and more like the main event; what might have become a more nuanced character study reels into a breakneck progression of dramatic reveals.
However, Morse does have good instincts in balancing all this fraught drama with comedy. Maggie’s sarcasm and self-deprecation play well as her coping mechanism and our comic relief. In Kennedy’s hands, Maggie is high-strung and often shrill, but has a clear and sound center of compassion. As the young girl who finds herself depending on this damaged woman, Fogg seems to have been directed to play a bit young, but conveys both Sam’s toughness and her susceptibility.
The world in which Sam and Maggie meet is nicely evoked by Ed Hinton and Ralph Morang’s simple, realistic set — the back porch of a New England-ish white and red house, and a door that leads to Grace and Sam’s place. There is nothing beyond these fragments of their rented homes to show the context of community or environment, and the absence does well to suggest their insularity and alienation.
