I
read only part of an interview with playwright Adam
Rapp about his new play, Kindness, at Playwrights
Horizons, but accompanying his
admission that he wrote it,
in part, to come to grips with his relationship with his mother, there
is also
a good deal of background information particularizing what the
relationship
entailed—and it seems to be a far different story than the one Mr. Rapp
has served up.
On
the one hand, there’s no reason why it should be biographical; I can
tell you
first hand that I’ve examined many personal things in works that were
even
adaptations, even in an Alien Nation novel,
of all things; you tap into a character’s deeper symbolic meaning, and if the outward particulars
are different
enough, you can do the equivalent of dancing naked in Times Square
without
anyone noticing. On the other hand, I wonder if Mr. Rapp—like most of
us—lacks the perspective (or the courage?) that would let him tell even
a
disguised version of his own story that might reveal Glass
Menagerie type universalities.
There’s
a different kind of courage inherent in Kindness, the (false?) bravado of the dystopian
dramatist, who
refuses to let hope exist without its potential to be horribly dashed.
While
this has worked to his advantage in some plays (and not at all in
others), here
dystopia seems to be force-fed. The story’s about two Midwesterners, a
divorced, middle aged mom dying of cancer (Annette O’Toole)
and
the 17-year old son (Christopher Denham)
burdened with the responsibility of looking out for her on a trip to
NYC she’s
taken against doctor’s orders—but she’s insisting on what will
certainly
be her last hurrah. The setting is their generic hotel room in midtown.
The
contrivances begin right away in that the inchoate surliness that
colors the
sons dutifulness is dramatically unearned, making it seem as if he’s
possessed
by an only vaguely interested demon. But it gives him the “motivation”
to refuse
to see a musical with her (Survivin’ a gleeful jibe at Rent,
in whose original cast the
playwright’s brother
Anthony created a lead role), and her the permission to invite a
friendly cab
driver (we’ll meet him later in the person of Ray Anthony Thomas)
who has apparently befriended her this day and admitted he’s never seen
a
Broadway musical before. And this lets
mom take off, so that when sonny goes off for ice, a young, enigmatic
and
potential femme fatale (Katherine Waterston) can enter
the room
and have sonny all to himself upon his return. But the wiles she works
on him
are not sexual (save in the way of a slightly older woman teasing a
younger man
with a tacit promise she never means to fulfill) but rather
psychological, as
for reasons that pass rationality, she draws out of him his bleakest
fantasy
about freedom from his burden, and offers the possibility of making
them
manifest.
Because
Kindness is well acted, by
the women
especially (under the playwright’s able direction), and does, however
implausibly,
offer us the suspense of wondering whether this eccentric little
comedy-drama
will fall off its tightrope into a miasma of misanthropy and
despair—and,
not meaning to spoil anything, leaves
us with that question, pulling a
Roald
Dahl/John Collier-type twist at the end—it’s never dull or
uninteresting.
But nor does it ever seem a believable or illuminating story of
mother-son
issues.