Brooklyn
by Peggy Tunick
Georgia Repertory Theater, Athens
(Notes written in July, Year 2)
Student playwrights at the University of Georgia keep turning out work of great skill and occasional brilliance, and Brooklyn fits the pattern. Peggy Tunick comes of a Brooklyn Irish family and writes perceptively about one in this two-act property. The production is equal to the material and maybe in some respects improves it.
The Healys are in a fix. The late Danny has left behind widow Marjorie and three children but no money. It's 1935, too. The older son, Jeffery, could easily go through ten times the pittance he's able to bring in; the younger, Francis, is a mentally disabled adolescent fixated on the Lone Ranger; Nana wins at Bingo but celebrates by treating her friends to drinks. When Marjorie applies for relief, the government makes her jump through hoops, and she won't ask her well-off sister Brigitte for help. So much just makes an off-the-shelf family drama. Two revelations lend impact to this play: Marjorie knows, though the children don't, that Danny killed himself after many disheartening attempts to find work, and Jeffery's girlfriend is married to the persecuting welfare official.
What Tunick does best, in my view, is make characters. Marjorie, played at several ages by Stephanie Cleveland, isn't simply Strong Center; she is Danny's ideal, a woman with a realistic sense of what religion can do for her, Jeffery's whipper-in, Francis' steadfast defender, Nana's impatient daughter. She has blood and spit. But she stands among a whole group of well-written characters. Francis, played chillingly well by Micah Buckley, isn't quick on the draw (sorry) but sees everything and has his own queer way of understanding everything. Margaret, the youngest child (Rachael Lambert, a grownup doing a terrific 7 or 8), has a full share of childhood experiences and utterly fails to put any adult interpretation on them. Jeffery (Michael Stille) doesn't mean to waste his life but can't get the initial grip. Even Hank the Junkman (Kevin Armstrong) has a clear moral place in Tunick's scheme.
The script is not overlong but runs into some difficulty with pacing. The three Little Girls who set and frame the action (Zakiya Stanley, Liz McGeever, Jenny Butler) unfortunately come back and stop the show twice, and although they are charming in their pinafores I don't mean that in a good way. Danny's appearances (Corey Loomis) mostly serve to move us along, but his 1970s-folk-singer renditions of "Pony Boy" are unwanted and unpleasant punctuation.
I especially enjoyed Cleveland's performance. She can move like an 18-year-old, then imperceptibly adjust her posture and Presto, she's 40. She owns the stage.
Tina B. Hantula's costumes and Bradley T. Hellwig's lighting design added finish to the production. The scenic design by Christopher Beineman worked, but the constraints of the Cellar Theater space told against it—so many doors, so few square feet. Director Kathryn Hammond did a fine job helping the talent discover what made the characters, and the play, tick.
There is talk of Brooklyn getting a revival on campus in fall 2002. The production has been entered in the American College Theater Festival competition. I'd have entered it too. It's good work and, I believe, will be even better one day.
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Brooklyn