Palm Beach Dramaworks has staged a new highly charged family drama by Bruce Graham, The Duration. It is the outcome of its successful Dramaworkshop. The play was given a virtual reading by Drama (in the) Works last year and the process shows collaborative dramaturgy at its best. Bruce Graham is not new to PBD, having had his play Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar and Grille staged in the 2003 - 2004 season.
Although “duration” refers to a time period, its etymology means “to harden.” There is that and letting go in this affecting, but frequently unsettling drama of love and loss, the consequences of 9/11. As serious as it is, the play is laced with humor, some dark and some laugh aloud a welcome balance, the way real people cope with heartache. You also could call this a murder (of the spirit) mystery play and Graham keeps the audience in suspense as to where it might lead, to a startling climax, and a touching resolution.
Audrey Batten is a history professor at a catholic university, FDR’s administration being her forte. She’s well-known, but a “low budget Doris Kearns Goodwin” as she self-deprecatingly acknowledges. She is an advocate for sharp rational thinking and liberal values at least until 9/11, which resulted in the death of her son in the World Trade Center (her husband had been killed by a drunk driver only a year before). Her former scientific reasoning is not helping her grieving heart.
Seeing someone in a hijab at the university soon after 9/11 serves as a traumatic catalyst; suddenly Audrey leaves her academic surroundings, without notice, and rents an isolated cabin in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Has she lost her mind in a crisis of anger and values? In pursuit of an answer is her daughter Emma, suffering as well for the double loss of father as well as brother.
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| Caitlin Duffy and Elizabeth Dimon Photo by Tim Stepien |
PBD veteran Elizabeth Dimon is ideal for the part of Audrey Batten, expressing a strong sense of nurturing, as she symbolically does with the feral cats she adopts around her rural oasis, while she deals with the indescribable pain of losing a child. Dimon reaches into the depths of her character’s inner self to reveal hatred for the people who caused it, projecting a tough exterior to her daughter, Emma, and her good friend Douglas, as well as to herself. She even finds redeemable virtues in her new rural neighbors, ones she would have normally dismissed as rednecks, but Audrey now sees just regular people, even artists among them. (“These people are out there in the real world,” she exclaims.) Dimon effectively projects two personas, one nurturing, and the other an all-consuming rage.
Emma shares her mother’s grief about the loss of her brother, especially as they were twins. She’s in the academic world as well, a poet, (“Nobody ever retired on a hit poem” she’s reminded by her mother). She frequently retreats to a support group in Newark, dealing with her pain and suffering over the death of her brother Eddie and her fear about what has happened to her mother, heretofore a rock of stability. In her PBD debut as Emma, Caitlin Duffy effortlessly glides from tense scenes with her mother into talking to her support group, effectively delivering monologues to the group the audience imagines.
Emma’s favorite poet, Pablo Neruda, was known for his nightmarish surrealism. Duffy skillfully projects her character’s sense of confused hopelessness. She feels her world falling apart, her mother even buying a gun, taking target practice in the woods, Duffy channeling Emma’s incredulity: “Where did you get the gun?” Answer: ”Walmart. It’s America, Emma!” Here is yet another layer to the play, the role guns play in the American sense of power. Caitlin Duffy reaches real emotional depth on stage particularly at the denouement when she cries out “I need my mother!” Audrey and Emma are then finally able to move towards one another in a healing reconciliation.
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| Elizabeth Dimon and John Leonard Thompson |
And she’s not the only one who is worried about what has happened to Audrey Batten. There is Douglas, her colleague and close friend, whose life in academia seems to have reached its own boiling point, bored and frustrated, considering stepping down. He is not only a college administrator, but a priest and there is clever banter back and forth between him and the scientific thinker, Audrey. He is incredulous that Audrey is living in such a ramshackle place, unkempt and looking like a bag lady. It’s good to see John Leonard Thompson as Father Douglas Kelly back on the PBD stage again. He is a gifted actor who can play a wide range of characters. He is frightened for his friend and mines that concern in a somewhat fractious manner as only a skilled actor could do.
There are so many themes running through this inventive, moving play, but the arc is the divisiveness in this country that has only magnified since that unspeakable event of 9/11. “Political correctness” permeates the timbre of discourse. While the play ends with hope, what these characters go through to get to their resolution, will have the exiting audience wondering whether we are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. Can we endure? Good theatre is universally relevant. As Audrey so movingly articulates, throughout history every generation seems to have its crisis. Isn’t at least one generation entitled to relax? What is to become of our children and grandchildren living in constant tension?
J Barry Lewis, directs this play with a sure hand as always bringing his insightful intelligence into the action, always challenging with a world premiere. This is his distinctive vision of the playwright’s intent, examining the issue of loss of a child by a parent, and the implications for a woman such as Audrey Batten. He focuses on the power of anger to blind her to this new wrenching reality and her need to go through the stages of grief to find release.
The striking scenic design is by Michael Amico, who beautifully captures the rustic cabin with its dilapidated décor, reflecting on the sadness of the characters. There are subtle atmospheric reminders of the Twin Towers with trident shapes embedded in the set. The highly functional design has an outdoor so perfect for relocating action and of course where the feral cats visit.
Kirk Bookman’s lighting design shows the dappled leaves, changing to deeper colors of the fall, and follows the action from Audrey’s cabin to Emma’s therapy sessions with distinctive lighting changes. There is a cinematic flow, with no blackouts, making for highly effective theatre keeping the audience’s attention.
Sound design is by Roger Arnold who skillfully incorporates some subtle sounds of the rustic scene, some birds, cricket, and those of the feral cats. His sound design signals Emma’s transition from the cabin into her group therapy in Newark, replete with urban sounds. And there are the disturbing gunshots off stage as Audrey delights in her new-found “power.”
Award-winning Brian O’Keefe’s costumes reflect the times and the emotional state of the characters. Audrey arrives at the cabin more professionally dressed but as her spirit hardens, and days turn, she slips into a disheveled state, both physically and emotionally. Emma‘s numerous outfits are an eclectic, bohemian look but towards the end, as the characters reconcile, their dress becomes more harmonic.
The Duration by Bruce Graham is a highly relevant new play. This is what Palm Beach Dramaworks does best: family dramas and, in this case, having had a hand in its development. To see it all come together in the world premiere, from the initial readings, and now the fully staged version is nothing short of thrilling. The Duration will surely be discovered by other theatres, so those in the West Palm Beach area can continue to see it at PBD through March 6.
