THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
My adoptive home state seems to be having a moment, or at least the rural corners of it are.
This past summer we had Therese Rebeck's brilliantly dark familial comedy, Mad House, brought to life on the London stage with spectacular verve by David Harbour and Bill Pullman; then we played a pivotal electoral role in ensuring sanity in the Senate by electing John Fetterman to the upper house over a celebrity carpet bagger; and now, Stephen Karam's poignant exploration of grief, and a desperate search for a sense of connection set in the unsettlingly familiar Northeast Pennsylvania (NEPA for those in the know) of my adolescence, in the humble town of Nazareth, bringing a powerful and peculiarly American measured mix of bathos and pathos to the narrative.
I have to admit, when I first heard Juliet Cowan's nasally tones as publishing house manager Gloria, I did start to roll my eyes and wonder if this was another night in which I was in for hamfisted attempts at the twangiest and most hackneyed impressions of Fran Drescher to ricochet off the walls of a playhouse, as has happened on more than one recent occasion here in the metropolis.
I need not have worried.
As it turned out, Cowan's standout-like-a-sore-thumb-New-Yorkness is part of Gloria's charm as a character. She is a fish out of water desperate to be visible and important and to sell books in this most un-cosmopolitan of American towns. And also as it turns out, as with so many actors in this cast, Cowan has an astounding aptitude to stretch her character's brashest qualities into an endearing sympathy in some surprisingly tender moments, especially in a character who is, by in large, a well intentioned but socially clumsy liberal who practically exudes microaggressiveness at everyone around her.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
The play is not about Gloria. It is about her assistant, the washed up marathoner and cynically acerbic gay, Lebanese American Joseph Douaihy, played by Irfan Shamji with cool and subtle comic timing and even more nuanced ability to curve our amusement to evocative and stirring pity on the merest of halfbeats in Karam's excellent script.
And if that list of modifiers doesn't tell you something of the depths this play bravely dives into the identity politics of the moment, the dilemmas that Joseph faces over protecting his family's sense of identity and exploiting their distant family connection to famed Lebanese-American poet Khaleel Gibran in order to continue to pay for treatment for his ever growing litany of health complaints – in a searing indictment of the infamous iniquity of the American healthcare system – surely will.
Yes, there's something resonating out of Pennsylvania right now, something that captures that perpetual struggle between the rural and the urban, the native and the other, liberal and progressive and it swirls outward into a touching and mirthful narrative that sees the only salvation is finding an even rhythm of human connection, as we struggle, but continue to move forward.
