Theater

Perspectives

The shifts of Michael Kimball’s newest play

By MEGAN GRUMBLING | September 17, 2008

CHANGING POINT OF VIEW: Whitney Smith as Sally in Hideaway.

Many kinds of flight throw together the doomed characters of Hideaway, five troubled people on an isolated Maine lakeshore. First, Sally (Whitney Smith) relocates her alcoholic husband Ray (G. Matthew Gaskell) and their disturbed teenage son Chris (Dylan Schwartz-Wallach) far from the influences of the city. Five years later, trashy Sopranos ringers Bobby and Deadre (Chris Elliot and Christine Penney) pack up their bourbon and Bob Seger from locations-not-to-be-named and set up a tiki bar (“A tiki bar from a friggin’ kit!” as Bobby marvels) on what Sally considers the family’s beach. The diabolical conflicts that ensue far exceed property-rights disputes in Hideaway (directed by Joi Smith for the New YORK Theatre Company, at the Players’ Ring), a dark, somewhat overwrought new tragi-comedy by local writer Michael Kimball, author of the fine Best Enemies and The Secret of Comedy.

The play’s action is told in flashback and by way of a very twitchy narrative apparatus: a point of view that often shifts and overlaps between Chris and Sally as narrators, who often disagree with each other about how this or that really went down, before the plot zooms into enactments of the past. As a result of this device, there’s a vertiginous, unreliable quality to the play’s tone almost immediately, from our very first swerves into the basics of the family’s backstory: Ray knocked up Sally when they were 16 and 14, respectively; he gave up basketball prospects to marry her and raise Chris; at age 13 Chris had the “meltdown” that brought them all up north. We find out more about all this in frenzied piecemeal.

Ironically enough, Chris (in the nimble and intelligent hands of the excellent Schwartz-Wallach) seems to be the most together person at the lake. He quickly reads this slew of dysfunctional adults: his high-strung, haunted, OCD mom and well-meaning but deadbeat dad; the affable but volatile dumbfuck of a witness-protected criminal and his hot, hardened, sullenly blank younger wife.

These are certainly stock characters, but Kimball writes them so entertainingly and with such a good ear, and the cast inhabits them so dynamically, that they’re fresh and convincing. Although both script and production have character strengths in spades, the play has the weakness of certain excesses of craft as the families approach their long-foretold disaster. For one thing, the point-of-view shenanigans come to feel a bit overplayed, particularly as the climax approaches, and especially because these shifts end up being central to the play’s underlying conceit. As the frequency of this narrative funny business increases, so do its variety and intensity, in two main ways: Multiple variations of scenes are enacted; and as they dissolve or are rejected, characters fall out of the moment’s character and into meta-versions of themselves, capable of commenting upon the action. The first, revisionist tactic is a sharp one and serves the play well, but fooling with the characters is a little too much of a good thing, a little distracting, and a little less to the point. I’d argue that less, in the case of these strategies (and likewise in the case of the portrayed violence awaiting these characters), is more.

In any event, these narrative tricks serve a very specific and carefully crafted purpose (which I’ll allude to but not spoil): A twist of perspective, which isn’t fully spelled out until the eleventh hour. The conceit has dramatic implications for the actual setting of the lakeshore strife, and suggests interesting dual meanings for the disputes about “property.” It is clever. But it feels uncomfortably like the play’s raison d’être, rather than a device in service to it. Softer, more character-driven strokes would, I think, inspire more emotional response for what is actually hidden away.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com.