Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Jake Brasch has done exactly what I constantly recommend my playwriting students not do.

I urge them to avoid writing autobiographically-inspired plays. We tend to think of ourselves as acted upon rather than acting. We don’t usually say, “I did something interesting today.” We’re more likely to say, “Something interesting happened to me today.” We tend to think of ourselves as coping with whatever crap comes our way rather than venturing out on initiatives.

So autobiographic characters tend to be reactive, passive. This is not useful for a play’s central character. If your central character is not motivated to act, it’s like having a car without an engine.

The great central characters are those who are driven to accomplish something. The action of a play is usually comprised of how they overcome (or don’t) the obstacles they encounter in trying pursuing their goals. And a play ends when the audience finds out whether or not the goal has been accomplished (and whether it’s been worth the effort).

In contrast, lots of autobiographic plays are about the lead characters enduring the insensitivity, evil and stupidity of others. We are invited to sympathize with them because of their suffering. Sometimes, a skillful writer (Tennessee Williams, Lanford Wilson and Larry Kramer come to mind) can pull this off. Mostly, such plays try the patience. My patience, anyway. Very often the lead character in such a play gets drunk in the second act and has a speech filled with bitter truths.

Well, Brasch’s Reservoir doesn’t wait till the second act. The lead character, Josh, begins the play lying on the stage, sleeping off a drunk. He wakes up back in his home town of Denver having bailed on his latest attempt at rehab. His mother is willing to supply shelter and secure for him some undemanding employment while he figures out his next step. Also in town are his four grandparents. As he is dealing with blackouts and memory lapses rooted in his alcoholism, they are coping with what age too often does to the memories and the ability to function.

This is Reservoir’s glory. The four grandparents are all vividly written and are played by four of the most gifted older actors in our community – Peter Maloney, Mary Beth Peil, Chip Zien and an acerbic Caroline Aaron. Brasch doesn’t quite dispel the reactive nature of the autobiographic character, though Noah Galvin (under Shelley Butler’s swifty and unfussy direction) makes Josh an engaging lens through whom we watch the foursome. There is refreshingly little overt moralizing in the play. But as we watch age steal away aspects of character we come to love, we cannot help but hope Josh will realize that time is too precious to be allowed to waste in oblivion. (What does Shakespeare’s Richard II say? “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”)

If Brasch hasn’t been able to entirely avoid the traps inherent in the autobiographically-based play, the compensation of these four characters engaged me on a deeper level that most of what I have seen in recent weeks. It’s playing at the Atlantic Theater.