Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Much drama focuses on conflict. Two or more points-of-view building to the point where they bang away at each other. What we’ve come to expect from Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, August Wilson, Tennessee Williams and Tony Kushner. I’m not saying I don’t love it when the adrenaline kicks in and the metaphoric swords start clanging. I’m a playwright. I like writing scenes like this. Much of the fun of writing The Value of Names was getting to the point where two articulate antagonists armed with wit and passion begin to score points off each other. (I’m directing a production of it in London in 2025, and I can’t wait.)

But sometimes it’s a relief to see a play in which there is no clanging. I type this a few hours before I leave to see the new Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and, unless they’ve fiddled with the text greatly, I expect it to be a moving but clangless evening.

Last season, the Roundabout’s off-Broadway branch, based at the Laura Pels Theater, produced Primary Trust by Eboni Booth. Here’s a little of what I had to say about it then:

“ … [In] Eboni Booth’s Primary Trust … a man named Kenneth has been spending his days working with minimal social interaction in the stacks of a book store and his evenings sitting in a corner of a neighborhood bar where he drinks moderately by himself, at least as far as others can see. His perspective is different from theirs. They see a man alone. He sees an imaginary friend who provides him necessary comfort and company.

Then, because the owner of the book store has to sell his business, Kenneth finds himself thrust with few resources into a world he is unprepared to engage. Booth has prepared us for the worst. We worry what will become of an unprotected Kenneth.

Except Booth shows us he isn’t unprotected. The people of the town, recognizing the challenges he faces, spontaneously come to his aid. They don’t make a big show of it. They just time and again refuse to disappoint.

As I watched, I realized that I have come to expect characters in stories to disappoint. In plays, movies and high-end TV, so often the big plot twist involves a character we in the audience have been led to believe is sympathetic falling short ethically or selling out. I often don’t wait to see if a betrayal will be featured in the plot. I assume there will be. Frequently, I wait merely to see who the traitor will be. I’m probably overstating this, but I sense a crummy, low-level, ongoing hum of cynicism as the constant in a lot of contemporary storytelling.

This is part of what makes Primary Trust so refreshing. Kenneth is an oddball. In fact, he is a Black oddball in a small town which, according to the conventions we have internalized from years of consuming stories, means he is set up to be a target for abuse. But Booth refuses to go there. Primary Trust has the audacity to suggest that a lot of people–maybe even most–don’t capitulate to selfish or cowardly impulses but are pleased to help someone in need.

Primary Trust subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize.

I don’t know whether it was a conscious decision of the Roundabout to present a complementary piece, but it strikes me that Meghan Kennedy’s The Counter can be viewed as one. Paul, a retired firefighter in a small town, goes to the diner where Katie serves him coffee every morning. They talk, they share stories of increasing intimacy. And it turns out that Paul is very depressed and he would like Katie to do something unorthodox to relieve him of his problem.

As I watched the play, I couldn’t help but think of another play I saw in the Laura Pels some years back, the Roundabout revival of Lanford Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Talley’s Folly, starring Danny Burstein and Sarah Poulson. In Wilson’s play, the man works to rescue the woman. In The Counter, the woman works to rescue the man. And the women in both have similar secrets.

This sort of play inevitably can’t entirely hide its construction – we know it will be comprised of a series of scenes with escalating confidences of similar weight. Sometimes this kind of apparent calculation bothers me. This time, it didn’t. I cared about the characters, especially as played by Susannah Flood and Anthony Edwards (plus a potent cameo featuring Amy Warren). David Cromer (who, not-so-incidentally, directed a legendary production of Our Town) has scored their interactions with the delicacy of a minuet.

In fact, it feels a little as if someone had discovered a previously-unproduced Lanford Wilson play. The boundless sympathy for all of the characters, the lyricism of much of the writing, the authentic sense of regional America. This isn’t a play that aspires to knock you out. Like Primary Trust and Talley’s Folly, it reminds us that watching people who care about each other try to make things better can be a refreshing and encouraging way to spend an evening.