Life’s Just Great

A few weeks back, in its challenging The Syringa Tree, the Kansas City Repertory Theatre presented the first in an unannounced series of bouts pitting young girls — well, adult actresses playing young girls — against the horrors of the 20th century. In that play, the girl won, of course, licking apartheid on technicalities and, in the process, growing into a tough-minded woman.

Now, in Under Midwestern Stars, the Rep offers Round 2, pitting another plucky, observant girl-woman against both the Holocaust and the American immigrant experience. This time, a rabbi (Mark Mineart) and his family flee Hitler’s Germany for Springfield, Missouri. Again, the terrors of history are subordinate to the pleasures and perils of girlhood — by the climax, girlhood has triumphed. That triumph comes more easily here than in The Syringa Tree. Under Midwestern Stars is a gentle, good-natured play about adapting to life in America — which, apparently, ain’t no thing at all, just a string of pleasant experiences in pleasant towns in an idealized heartland where even third-act death threats are no cause for concern.

Cheerful to a fault — it would probably be a better fit at the New Theatre than it is at the Rep — the show is as impossible not to like as it is impossible not to follow. We even get explanatory dialogue that sounds right out of a sitcom coming back from a commercial: “We have to send money to my parents in Tel Aviv and your parents in London,” a husband explains. Minutes later: “That was Mr. Olaffson, our landlord,” the wife announces as she hangs up the phone.

The couple’s daughter, Rachel, dominates the show. She’s played with unaffected cheer by Autumn Dornfield, who resists the kind of squeaky horseplay that often makes adult portrayals of children so grating. Instead, she trusts her own wide, dark eyes and Esther Blumenfeld’s evocative script to communicate. “We ran over a big snake on the way home,” Rachel tells us in a typical moment. The family has just suffered its first encounter with American racism, and even though her parents worry whether this new world might contain hate proportionate to the old one, Rachel is lifted by the strangeness of a Midwestern childhood.

She’s often lifted literally. Director Stephen Rothman has tricked out the family’s various homes with an elevator, of all things, which lowers and raises their parlor for minor set changes — a distracting, absurd extravagance for a three-character drama set in the ’40s.

Under Midwestern Stars teems with incident but has little plot. The family schlepps across the Midwest, with the rabbi father worrying about his congregation in Europe and the practical mother attempting to scare up some extra money. Shtick abounds, with conversations between mother and father (Mineart and the appealing Crista Moore) coming off like little vaudeville routines. Sometimes, on train rides, the mother will recite the names of towns they pass through while the father lists the names of Nazi death camps. This satanic “I’ve Been Everywhere” is meant, I suppose, to demonstrate the distance he feels from the real world, but it comes off as strained and pretentious.

This stands out because the show is anything but depressing. For two hours, we watch everything work out fine for this family, but, through persuasive acting and richly detailed writing, we come to care. The result is a nostalgic lark to which you could bring the dumbest people you know.

Under Midwestern Stars takes place in that old, swell America that talk radio keeps wishing back. But I keep wishing to see some treatment of what happens when the promise of that America sours. Such cynicism urged me out to a garage on Walnut last Friday night to catch the Metroplitan Ensemble Theatre in the final weekend of a daring matchup of its own: local actors vs. Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, characters so huge and overheated that their mere existence probably fucks up the tides.

They certainly fuck up actors sometimes. But the leads in this production of A Streetcar Named Desire — directed with exciting bustle by Karen Paisely — veered from satisfactory to superb. Sometimes they were even recognizably human — a challenge, given Tennessee Williams’ overwrought prose poetry. As Blanche, Jan Chapman played with her hands as she spoke, hiding behind them more and more as each illusion was stripped from her. Mateusz Lewczenko was appropriately brutish as Stanley. He flashed a tiny smile that made clear why Stella loves him, and his anguish during the famous “Stella!” scene ripped through the audience.

Unfortunately, however, Chapman and Lewczenko were at their best apart. When Blanche and Stanley were going at each other, they often seemed tentative, disconnected, two actors performing separate monologues at the same time.

The show still accumulated a power, and both Ashlee LaPine and Patrick Du Laney did excellent work in the second-tier roles of Stella and Mitch. Still, at almost 60 years old, Streetcar shows its age, even if it does offer vital insight into the irreconcilable demands that American society places on women. Walking Williams’ New Orleans is like walking on Jupiter: Everything’s dense and heavy, and an alien turbulence worries the air. Its purple darkness is almost as impossible to believe as the uplift of Under Midwestern Stars.