The Living Room pours one out for itself
Five years ago, the Living Room Theatre opened in the Crossroads. And, as any 5-year-old might, the Living Room is celebrating its birthday by binging, shouting and vomiting in a room of strangers.
The occasion is John Kolvenbach’s On an Average Day, a play the company first staged in its inaugural season. And though Kolvenbach’s script ultimately offers more to actors than it does to audiences, there’s nothing average about the Living Room’s remount, which showcases some of the company’s strongest design and acting work to date.
Lights up on the troubled Bobby (Matt Weiss), sitting alone in a kitchen as warm and well-appointed as a Russian prison. On the radio, an AM talking head prattles about the gold standard. Bobby shifts stacks of old newspapers around, leaves a pyramid of empty beer cans alone. He looks wild, hungry, like a stray dog.
Then, without warning, the screen door flies open. It’s John Kolvenbach, there to borrow a cup of sugar and a few plot lines from Sam Shepard.
No, sorry, it’s Jack (Rusty Sneary), Bobby’s estranged brother, barging in with a crumpled paper bag and a host of prickly questions. What’s with the newspapers? Where’s all the food? And what died in the refrigerator?
Bobby’s answers aren’t illuminating. He talks in meandering spirals that reveal anxiety, delusions and an erratic — occasionally violent — temper. (Weiss is almost too convincing in the role.) But Jack slowly pieces together enough fragments to grow suspicious. His brother’s newspapers are all about unidentified bodies and unsolved crimes. And he’s on trial, we learn, for pushing a fat man out of a moving car. (The man had it coming, Bob dodges — he had too many chins.)
As Jack grows increasingly frustrated by his brother’s deflections, the cramped kitchen becomes a pressure cooker, steeping pathos in Pabst Blue Ribbon. Rusty Sneary has never looked more grounded than he does here, lecturing calmly while wringing out his aggression with a quick crushing of an empty beer can. And those cans keep coming; the brothers throw as many beers as they guzzle, splashing the chaff-colored nectar around like blue-collar Jackson Pollacks.
Beer stains only augment the set (design credited to Matt Weiss, Jon Cupit and Marlin Deen), which depicts the brothers’ childhood home as a fully realized piece of gross: windows caked in yellow newsprint, walls streaked with black mold. A square flat, suspended from the ceiling, adds vertical definition and a sickly glow from an overhead fixture. Bobby can’t muster the energy to eat, let alone play house.
As the cans pile up, the set — and the brothers — grow wilder. Director Scott Cordes has harnessed all of the script’s potential energy, pushing his actors to feverish extremes as they sift through a childhood that was, in many respects, a fantasy. And he and his cast deserve special commendation for top-notch fight choreography and movement work. Sneary lumbers around stage like an injured bear, and Weiss’ hands seem to have a mind of their own, clawing the air or fluttering like trapped birds at his sides. The brothers’ physical clashing is like poetry (or porn) for acting nerds.
But chops-flexing scripts don’t necessarily make efficient theater, and Kolvenbach runs himself ragged showing us what he’s willing to attempt. Bobby’s sincere, hilarious non-sequiturs (“I’m like a social piranha”; You ever see a grown man in shorts?”) dry up when we need them most, leaving Jack to labor through monologues as subtle as an applause sign. Worse, the playwright is a backseat driver with his script’s heavy reliance on italicized emphasis: “You spend your whole previous Life trying to get someone to understand half a Sentence of what you’re Thinking and then all of a sudden you’re completely Seethrough,” Bobby raps at one point.
Still, the play’s second-act reversal is well-placed, and the dialogue is more often surprising than sentimental. Jack confesses to a crime worse than what’s already on the table, and the brothers trash the stage in a gritty, realistic fight scene. Weiss breaks a bottle; Sneary returns a little half-digested Pabst to the earth.
On an Average Day is an arresting tour de fortitude for its performers. For those merely watching, the result is a mostly satisfied exhaustion — a readiness, perhaps, to crack open a beer.
