Sticky Traps bogs down in its own anger
Sometimes, Meryl Streep just isn’t available.
That’s one playwrighting lesson worth internalizing from the Kansas City Repertory Theatre’s world premiere of Sticky Traps, a promising play that makes superhuman demands on its actors and suffers here from inattentive direction.
Written by KC Rep playwright-in-residence Nathan Louis Jackson and directed by Kyle Hatley, Sticky Traps centers on Linda, a grieving mother who has recently lost her youngest son, Cameron, to suicide. The bulk of the action is confined to a small chapel in Kansas, where Linda and her two surviving children — Montrell, a former college football star, and Charlotte, an Atlanta lawyer — prepare for Cameron’s funeral.
The opening scene plods as characters deliver exposition as though rattling off baseball-card stats. But the script gathers momentum when two unwanted guests intrude. The first is a church mouse, squealing helplessly on a glue trap. The second pest is larger and louder: Linda’s estranged brother, the not-called-Fred-Phelps-but-definitely-Fred-Phelps Rev. Pratt.
Pratt frames his arrival as a courtesy: He’s there to warn Linda that his church will be picketing Cameron’s funeral. Like Phelps, Pratt was once a civil rights lawyer. Also like Phelps, he has spent his twilight years peddling hate as a godly virtue. But Jackson imbues Pratt with a little more charisma and a little less brimstone, skillfully sidestepping cartoon villainy.
Mark Robbins is tenacious as the shrewd reverend, condemning sinners with jocularity and a disarming smile. Robbins has a composure that belies Pratt’s “God hates fags” fanaticism. A sham offer to his sister — cancel the funeral and avoid the picketers — sounds almost diplomatic in his care. But a late-play monologue (well-crafted by Jackson and flame-thrown by Robbins) lets us peek at the internal combustion that drives him.
Jackson’s dramatic engine roars with a similar intensity, for better and for worse. Over the course of the 90-minute show, his characters flip through a Rolodex of family secrets, culminating in a shocking act of violence.
But Jackson stakes too much of the conflict on Linda; his play sails or fails on whoever acts the role. Blair Sams is capable, but her Linda is too brittle, evoking little beyond canned rage.
Directing missteps compound Sams’ troubles, and the play’s. The energy onstage is hamstrung by lateral blocking and too little for the actors to do. For much of the play, the cast members cling tightly to the pew ends, like frightened passengers on a plummeting jet.
The technical elements are humble but handsome. Christopher Kriz’s sound design escalates tension with the commingled jeers of protesters and the revving engines of the Patriot Guard Riders. Meghan Raham’s pitched-roof chapel and Jeffrey Cady’s rosy lights warm the nave while draping corners in solemn shadows.
Although Jackson devotes the most time to the battle for Cameron’s dignity, an alternate storyline — Montrell’s and Charlotte’s diverging views on race — is subtler and more compelling. Jackson is smartly attuned to the ways in which both sexuality and race can fuse (or, in some cases, fracture) our identities. Dawn-Lyen Gardner finds a soft side to the pragmatic Charlotte, mounting a spirited challenge to Montrell’s “Halfro-American” taunts. Joshua Boone makes an especially strong impression as Montrell, layering humor and disappointment in a nuanced performance. Boone’s entrance noticeably buoys the rest of the cast.
Sticky Traps doesn’t feel ready yet. But Jackson has avoided familial-tragedy clichés and, in the process, penned something inarguably bold: an acerbic, often surprising tale of ties that cleave instead of bind.
