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| Show | Did He Like It?* |
Synopsis | |
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Kenny Barrett did something that has everyone worried. He wishes he could make it through the rest of his senior year unnoticed, but that's going to be hard since he has to publicly apologize to his entire high school. At home, his family is struggling with second marriages, surprise visits, school dances and forgotten dry cleaning. |
Have a Nice Day at School, Sweetie. Don’t Kill Anyone.
*By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Published: April 17, 2008
The dogs are yapping for their food. Stepdad forgot to pick up the dry cleaning. Mom is still half-dressed. The bag lunches are ready, but where are those darn car keys?
It seems like an average, cornflake-flavored school day morning in an American suburb. But the messy hubbub hums with an extra measure of angst in “From Up Here,” a timely comedy-drama by Liz Flahive that opened at City Center on Wednesday night.
Kenny, the high schooler slumped at the kitchen table using his shoulder blades as defensive shields, looks on disconsolately as his stepfather carefully searches his backpack. And Kenny’s mother is aghast when she sees a potential weapon in her son’s hands. “You can’t take sharp sticks to school,” she mutters in dismay. “They’re colored pencils,” he mumbles, shrinking still further into himself.
It turns out this is a painfully exceptional morning in the Barrett household. Add up the delicately dropped hints in the dialogue, and it becomes clear that Kenny is returning to school after being suspended for threatening his schoolmates with violence. The brisk cross-chatter cannot disguise a tension that everyone feels but no one wants to acknowledge.
Shootings in American high schools and colleges have become a gruesomely frequent occurrence in recent years, as anyone within earshot of a cable news channel surely knows. (The tragedy at Virginia Tech was only a year ago.) The misfit adolescent gone berserk has now become a familiar cultural villain.
Ms. Flahive’s play strips away the sensational surfaces of these incidents to explore the subject from an unexpected perspective, suggesting that there is a path back to well-being for the families of teenagers who come dangerously close to destruction. “From Up Here” is marred by basic credibility problems you just have to ignore if you can. (Would a family selling its house to escape the scandal blithely send a troubled boy back to the school where he nearly imploded? Would the school take him back? And if it did, would it be remotely sensible to put a disturbed student through the ordeal of making a public apology?) And the unfocused plot takes a few too many haphazard detours.
But Ms. Flahive’s casual avoidance of hand wringing and sententiousness brings a breath of fresh air to a subject more often accompanied by torrents of the hot kind. There is nothing of the after-school special in Ms. Flahive’s treatment of this Important Issue. The play has the bouncy humor of a quirky-family sitcom, but in this case the usual adolescent afflictions — acne and awkwardness, mean girls and cruel jocks — take a back seat to something larger, darker and more mysterious.
Directed with a light touch by Leigh Silverman, the play, presented by Manhattan Theater Club in association with Ars Nova, features an excellent cast led by the delightful comic actress Julie White (“The Little Dog Laughed”) in the central role of Kenny’s loving but confused mother, Grace.
Ms. White’s saucer eyes are the picture windows exposing Grace’s trembling psyche. The fixed smile may look strained, the brittle cheer occasionally strikes an off note, but Grace, who works at the mall in merchandising, is determined to barrel through this tragedy by fixing what she can and disregarding what she can’t. Since Kenny’s previously favored pastimes — things like brooding and plotting vengeance — are to be discouraged, she buys him a saxophone and suggests he join the marching band. And yet we can see that Grace’s perky optimism, occasionally undercut by a bleakly funny line reading by Ms. White, is essentially just window dressing.
The rest of the family similarly struggles to re-establish a veneer of normalcy as Kenny returns to school. His sister, Lauren, played with sardonic cool by Aya Cash, avoids the drama of his first morning back by catching the bus, but she sits down with him at lunch, making mordant jokes about the incident and trying to play down the awkwardness of Kenny’s mandated counselor meetings. “You don’t have to tell him anything if you don’t feel like it,” she says. “Seriously, he’s not a doctor. He used to sell insurance.”
His stepfather, Daniel (the sensitive Brian Hutchison), exudes friendly sympathy, making small talk while he searches the backpack in a voice that has the amiable, go-get-’em earnestness of a sports coach. And Kenny’s aunt, Caroline (Arija Bareikis), a granola globe-trotter who flies home to be there for Kenny’s first day back, showers him with frisky affection. In one of the play’s most moving passages Caroline, who like the others has mostly avoided Topic No. 1, gives Kenny a bit of prescriptive wisdom that teenagers all consciously know but unconsciously do not believe. “Listen,” she says. “I’ll make you a promise. All right? I promise you that soon you will be older.”
As Kenny, Mr. Segal contributes a performance of such squirmy verisimilitude that you feel yourself hunching and flinching in sympathy as this awkward kid faces a series of humiliating encounters. In addition to a gosh-golly counselor, Kenny is saddled with a student mentor (the scene-stealing Jenni Barber), a chirpy overachiever who volunteers to help Kenny with his speech of apology.
And yet while the physical details of the performance are achingly right, Mr. Segal cannot reveal much about the inner workings of this all-important character. We see how Kenny behaves, but we never quite grasp who he is; the character’s essence remains elusive.
This is not the actor’s fault. If the primary asset of “From Up Here” is its insouciant approach to its subject, this is in a sense a drawback too. The pain, anger and confusion that could drive a sensitive teenager to the extremity of brandishing a gun at school are not the stuff of everyday adolescent unhappiness, and Ms. Flahive shies away from exploring the depth of Kenny’s anger or the roots of his pathology. A single speech about his humiliating treatment at the hands of his classmates rings true but does not go deep enough.
Of course part of the horror of adolescence is the inability to put words to the pain, to come to terms with it by bringing it into the open. One of the most insightful aspects of Ms. Flahive’s writing is her understanding that even caring adults are struck dumb and left gaping for words in the presence of despair of such proportions.
Ms. White’s finest moment may be a silent one, as she and Kenny share a moment of emotional cleansing after Grace herself has suffered a minor breakdown. They sit together on a bench at the police station, slowly edging toward acknowledgement of Kenny’s turbulent past. But they shy away from the radioactive subject just as quickly. It is only in Grace’s fierce look of consuming love and inexpressible anguish that the depth of her feeling, its overwhelming immensity, can really be discerned.
FROM UP HERE
By Liz Flahive; directed by Leigh Silverman; sets by Allen Moyer; costumes by Mattie Ullrich; lighting by Pat Collins; sound by Jill B C DuBoff; music by Tom Kitt; associate artistic director/production, Mandy Greenfield. Presented by the Manhattan Theater Club, Lynne Meadow, artistic director; Barry Grove, executive producer; Daniel Sullivan, acting artistic director; in association with Ars Nova. At New York City Center StagesI, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; (212) 581-1212. Through June 8. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
WITH: Jenni Barber (Kate), Arija Bareikis (Caroline), Aya Cash (Lauren), Brian Hutchison (Daniel), Will Rogers (Charlie), Tobias Segal (Kenny), Joel Van Liew (Mr. Goldberger/Stevens) and Julie White (Grace).
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