The Living Room’s Columbus Day is no holiday
Forrest Attaway’s Columbus Day dissects our fascination with narratives of conquest and redemption. A strong cast and production team, led by director Bryan Moses, tease connections from a world-premiere script that’s splintered at times. But as scenes alternate between two story lines that initially appear unrelated, it’s clear at least that — as with Christopher Columbus himself — reality is often less palatable than the stories we tell.
The first story line opens on a chorus of whimpering adolescents, shaking behind their school desks. Their teacher, Josh (Ben Auxier), paces the room with a shotgun, chasing a nervous breakdown. Josh’s monologues are a production highlight, a comic marriage of Attaway’s devilish imagination and Auxier’s deadpan delivery. The actor powers through Josh’s speeches with controlled fury, staying sympathetic despite offering ruminations on the virtues of statutory rape and tuna.
The second story line follows Bree (Christiana Coffey), a pregnant addict who enters a halfway house after her boyfriend, Mason (Jeff Smith), beats her. Alliances with her testy roommate, Blanca (Meredith Wolfe), and a counselor named Doug (Coleman Crenshaw) help her shake, for a time, the specters of her former life.
Director Moses and sound designer Joe Concha supply connective tissue through smart scene transitions. Live whispers from the chorus mix with recorded voices, echoing fragmented lines from the script to create an aura of anxiety. Moose Kimball’s lights add to the ominous atmosphere, especially during the school scenes. The compound cues are always crisp, courtesy of stage-management team Neil Andes and Kelsey Kallenberger.
Those design elements lend an artificial momentum to the first story line, masking its structural plateau. Though the school-shooting scenes offer some of the most original, arresting writing, the play’s dramatic arc unmistakably belongs to Bree.
The opening scenes between Bree and Mason are a bit stilted, the setup familiar: A controlling lover plays out power fantasies on the object of his scorn. Once Bree enters the shelter, however, the playwright and the performers hit their strides. Coffey is at her most relaxed and responsive in scenes with Wolfe, and the tactics that their two characters use to reclaim their agency are as surprising as they are inevitable.
Wolfe gives a committed and explosive performance as Blanca, a self-proclaimed “crazy” mother with a thick Dominican accent. Crenshaw makes a comically brittle Doug, letting panic seep through fissures in the counselor’s tidy exterior. And Smith is chilling as charismatic abuser Mason, though the abusive-asshole archetype affords him little depth to plumb.
The two story lines converge in the second act with disastrous consequences. The play effectively ends with a somber final monologue from Auxier, an exquisite moment handled with gut-punching restraint. But the production pushes on anyway, stretching for a pitched denouement that demands too much of Coffey. Heart-rending epiphanies are often better imagined than staged.
But despite a few rough edges, Columbus Day succeeds as a dark character study, with a worldview that feels fully formed. Attaway works from a palette of likable but deeply flawed characters. No matter our intentions, his script seems to suggest, our actions — like Columbus’ — tend toward destruction. Our vices bubble always under the surface, waiting for their chance to wound and weaken.
It’s not much of a spoiler to say no character escapes that deterministic knife. “People need demons,” a character explains early in the play. “It makes them well-rounded.” That’s the pragmatic edge to Columbus Day‘s pessimism: We’ve all got baggage, after all.
