“…Many shows don’t hold up on a second viewing. This one does. Re-experiencing Huff’s tale of two Chicago beat cops caught up in a toxic tangle of crime, loyalty and protection is akin to rewatching one of the better episodes of TV’s ‘The Wire’ or ‘Deadwood.’” Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

For its second outing in its second season, The Reader’s Theatre is mounting Keith Huff’s A Steady Rain (recently seen on Broadway with Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman.) Starring Junito Cubero and Tim Perry under the direction of Artistic Director Anne Marie Cummings, the play runs one weekend only: Fri & Sat, Dec 2 & 3 at 8 pm and Sun Dec 4 at 6:30 pm at The SPACE at Greenstar. Ticket reservations can be made at 607.217.6272.
Two Chicago cops, best friends since childhood, take a domestic disturbance call that puts their friendship on the line in this “pressure cooker” of a play. The “hardscrabble street vernacular” (Time Out Chicago) may be reminiscent of another Chicagoan (Mamet), but Huff has his own unique voice. As Cummings puts it “The result is a difficult journey into a moral gray area where trust and loyalty struggle for survival.”
As usual, Cummings is adding live musical accompaniment to the production; A Steady Rain features blues guitarist Pete Panek. Cornell professor Richard Polenberg will comment on the play’s issues after each performance.
For more information go to www.thereaderstheatre.com

For one weekend only, catch the Ithaca premiere of Macarthur Genius award winner Sarah Ruhl’s Late: A Cowboy Song, a whimsical romantic triangle that presents a fable of a young woman married to her grade school sweetheart, yet yearning for the open skies promised by a Pittsburgh cowboy/girl named “Red.”
The play kicks off Incognita’s third season, and features the Ithaca debut of director Victoria Apodaca. The cast includes Abby J Smith as Mary and Brian Kolczynski as Crick (the young couple) with Siobhan Whalen as the mysterious, guitar-strumming Red.
Late takes stage at The Space at Greenstar, one weekend only, Fri-Sun, Nov 18-20. Evening performances are 8 pm on Fri & Sat, and 7 pm on Sun, with matinees at 2 pm on Sat and Sun. Seating is very limited. Advance tickets are just $10, available through Ticket Center Ithaca (607.273.4497). Tickets at the door will be $15.
The play is an early work by one of the nation’s hottest playwrights. Sarah Ruhl is the author of two plays recently seen in Ithaca, Eurydice and The Clean House and was a student of renowned playwright and Cornell alum Paula Vogel.
Famed drama critic Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune said of the Chicago premiere, “If you are drawn to Ruhl, there is a rare moment here in this little room to better understand her genesis, the insecurities that spawned her astonishing inherent theatricality.”
The play has “huge things to say about relationships, love, the elusiveness of happiness and, to a more subtle degree, the touchy subject of gender roles in society and the gendering of intersex babies. But it’s told so simply and directly that it tugs at the heartstrings and connects with the soul…” (New City Stage)
“Sarah Ruhl has been on my short list for years,” says Ross Haarstad, Incognita’s Artistic Director. “When I asked Vicky Apodaca to come on board, this was the first play she suggested, and I jumped at it.”
Seating is limited so advance purchases are encouraged.

Lithe and animated, Karen Pittman fills the Kitchen Theatre with a dozen or more characters as she brings to life playwright-actor Charlayne Woodard’s adolescence in Neat, playing through this weekend.

Neat is the second of Woodard’s autobiographical solo works to be performed at the Kitchen. Pretty Fire dealt with Woodard’s young childhood, especially her summers down south with her grandparents and her relationship to her sister. The ‘pretty fire’ of the title refers to a cross burning, which the child could only interpret as ‘pretty.’ Neat jumps forward to the teenager growing up in a middle-class black household in Albany, NY in the later 60s.

Neat is also the nickname of her Aunt Beneatha, who is brain-damaged as the result of an accidental childhood poisoning. The narrative, while rooted in Charlayne’s viewpoint, deftly entwines two coming of age stories as we also experience the upheaval in Neat’s life when she and grandma come to live in Albany and when, later, the eternally ‘innocent’ Neat gets pregnant—and proves to definitely have a mind of her own.

Charlayne’s attitudes toward Neat shift from childhood adoration for a fearless, tough playmate, to teenage embarrassment to be associated with someone different and “uncool”, to a growing awareness of Neat as both a fellow rebel negotiating a bewildering, sometimes hostile world and as someone completely separate and fully human.

This arc is set neatly against the burgeoning political awareness of Charlayne, who moves from wanting desperately to belong to a group of white and Jewish girls at her school to fighting to bring black literature to her high school library and adopting Angela Davis as a role model—plus her own brushes with sex, boys, and being ‘bad’.

Under Sarah Lampert Hoover’s typically adroit direction, Pittman makes each incident burst to life, with fine attention to shifting ages and attitudes. Sections set a the high school auditorium under assault by riot police, a teenage party, and a blizzard are particularly breathtaking. Pittman/Hoover also have plenty of fun with the men occasionally portrayed (Pittman has an amazing pitch range, with a velvety baritone at her command.)

A graceful set and lights from E.D. Intemann, with a backdrop of windows with distinctly different white curtains, and a floor flooded with colorful streaks that hint at red clay nd sky alike, catches the tenor of Woodard’s script superbly.

Not so the thick soundscape of Lesley Greene, which verves away from the theatrical into the cinematic. This desire to “enact” each possible detail also seeps into Pittman’s performance and pacing.

The Kitchen production, beautiful, funny and moving as it can be, falls short of Woodard’s writing. There is a strong element of magical realism in this story, and the tone eludes director and performer in this case, most evident in the uncertain cadences which end  each act.

I believe it is in part a distrust of simple storytelling; an unwillingness to  back off the ‘acting’ and keep a narrative voice at center; a distrust, for lack of a better word, simplicity. Sometimes the language itself is enough to carry us into another world as an audience. Yet plays at the Kitchen, while most often engaging, too often favor bold over intimate in their delivery. Sometimes less is really more.

Yet still Neat is a rich story, anchored by a strong performance and worth a trip.

Karen Pittman, foreground, with director Sara Lampert Hoover. The Kitchen Theatre's production of the Charlayne Woodard play begins Wednesday, October 19 and runs through November 6. Photo by Ed Dittenhoefer / Free Air Photo

NEAT, BY CHARLAYNE WOODARD is masterful storytelling richly drawn from the playwright’s own life.  The play focuses on the teenage years of an African-American girl whose family moves from the South to the North in the turbulent 1960’s. Part of the family is Aunt Neat, who was inadvertently poisoned as a baby resulting in brain damage and a life-long disability. Initially, young Charlayne adores her Aunt Neat, who seems like another child, but their relationship is tested as Charlayne becomes an adolescent. The story of the bond between these two is set against the struggles of typical teenage angst made tougher by outside prejudice and misunderstanding.
Directing the piece is Kitchen Theatre favorite Sara Lampert Hoover, director of last season’s The Tricky Part, as well as Yellowman, Souvenir, The Syringa Tree, and numerous others. “When Rachel offered me Neat by Charlayne Woodard to direct next season I immediately said ‘yes.’   I was first introduced to Woodard’s plays when I directed Pretty Fire at the Kitchen in 1999.   Her work presents a director’s dream of theatrical possibilities.  I am excited to re-connect with her intimate, soulful and joyous storytelling.”

Karen Pittman, in the one-woman show "Neat," which runs at the Kitchen Theatre starting Wednesday, October 19 through Sunday, November 6. Photo by Ed Dittenhoefer.

Playing all the roles, from the teenaged Charlayne, to the guileless Neat, to tough guy Charles Bowman and a host of relatives, teachers, and friends is Karen Pittman (member, AEA). New to the Kitchen Theatre, Pittman’s credits include film and television roles (30 Rock, Law and Order, One Life to Live and more) and onstage roles at the Kennedy Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, and McCarter Theatre, among others. She also understudied the role of Mom for the Broadway and film versions of Passing Strange.

The Franziska Racker Centers is partnering with the Kitchen Theatre Company to help broaden the audience for this production. The Racker Centers encourage all to gain a deeper understanding of disabilities, celebrating diversity and interdependence in our community.

Ed Intemann is the Lighting Designer for Neat and Sarah Bertolozzi is the Costume Designer. The Production Stage Manager is LaShawn Keyser. Performances will be at the Kitchen Theatre, located at 417 W. State / Martin Luther King, Jr. Street in downtown Ithaca, NY.  Tickets are available at the Ticket Center (visit 171 The Commons, or call 607-273-4497) and online at www.kitchentheatre.org.

In the Company of Dancers
Kitchen Theatre Company
through October 9 (273-4497 / kitchentheatre.org)

with Timothy Connell, Norma Fire, Lindsay Gilmour, Erin Hilgartner, Karen Koyanagi, Ryan MacConnell, Stephen Nunley, Audrey Pincus, Yvette Rubio, Lillian Stamey, and Shaina Ung

There is surefootedness, grace, indeed élan in the performances now taking place at the Kitchen Theatre.

A dance and music collage titled In The Company of Dancers, Rachel Lampert’s new piece is framed as the reminisces of an older dancer, presumably retired, played with zest and customary wryness by the wonderful Norma Fire. A dozen dancers spanning generations traverse the stage to accompaniment by a live piano trio, members of the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra (Linda Case on violin, Rosie Elliot on cello and Andrea Merrill on piano.)

The sheer kinesthetic experience is immensely pleasurable: there is a rhythmic and tonal subtlety to the evening that is much harder to capture in a typical text-driven play. And the utter confidence with which Lampert fills her stage (with the help of co-choreographer Lindsay Gilmour) announces a master at work. Nothing is tentative, nothing is forced within the movement itself. It is easy to simply sit back and enjoy the wash of sensuality, with phrases from Brahms, Bach, Glière, Mendelssohn, Dvorak and many more to buoy you forward. The range of age in the dancers gives the piece texture as well, with the flash of the youngsters set against the economy of phrasing of some of the older dancers.

Yet the evening is not without its limitations: two to be precise. The lesser of these is the choice of a classical piano trio for accompaniment. Most of the music is of the later Romantic period, and especially when played as excerpts from longer works, tends a little towards homogeneity.

That is minor. The trickier issue is the use of a narrative to stitch together what is essentially an evening of musical morceaux. Fire keeps speaking of the pleasant young man who is about to arrive (he never does) to take possession of her box of memorabilia. She flashes back to years of classes, first in a delightful little bit of Isadora Duncan inspired posing and prancing, then under the more rigorous direction of a Russian émigré, finally to years of being a dancer with a touring group led by a choreographer named Stephanie, and early NYC days sharing an apartment with fellow dancer Toby (Timothy Connell).

Regular Kitchen audiences will recognize these as stand-ins from Lampert’s ongoing autobiographical forays, including her own touring dance company (Rachel Lampert and Dancers.)

In this iteration, the narrative remains the merest of sketches, all edges smoothed away. While presented as memories, memory itself—elusive, self-contradicting, subject to elisions and re-structuring—is not a subject. The evening is no more than what it presents itself: a scrapbook. The other elements that telling a story on a stage seem to promise us—surprise, struggle, reversals—rarely enter in. Nostalgia and sentiment take over.

Throughout, however, the performers are scintillating. Standout moments include a quirky piece to Shostakovich by Gilmour, where isolated moments with quivering feet keep recurring, mixed with strong postures and propulsive moments. Gilmour favors a look of strength and purpose in her women dancers that is refreshing.

Lampert shares with Gilmour an easy use of technique and a good dollop of whimsical humor. Her choreography tends to feature a lot of quick partnerings (Stephen Nunley, a veteran of her company particularly shines in this respect), sharings of weight and balance, and an easy melodic line. Her most extended piece is the winner of the evening, a dance in four movements for a quartet of dancers in pajamas with a giant ribbon of a quilt.

Without the narrative, however, we would be bereft of one truly magical moment: a half-remembered impromptu tap dance (in bare feet) between Norma Fire and Connell that straddles the distance of now and then with both effervescence and a whiff of sadness.

Tyler Perry provides pellucid lighting.

"Ever So Humble," a new play by Tim Pinkney, debuts at the Hangar Theatre and runs through July 23. Image Provided

“EVER SO HUMBLE,” which runs Thursday through June 23, was workshopped at the Hangar, and it is the product of a happy collaboration between long time friends playwright Tim Pinckney and Peter Flynn.

Peter Flynn chatted about creative collaboration over email.

Q: This production is the world premiere of Tim Pinkney’s play. How did it wind up here in Ithaca?

Peter Flynn: Tim and I have been working together on “Ever So Humble” for the past seven years so I brought the play with me when I became Artistic Director at the Hangar. We did a workshop of the play in Ithaca my first summer, 2009, with three of the actors in this current production, Greg Bostwick, Jesse Bush and Andréa Burns. Prior to this workshop, Tim and I developed the play in about four other readings and workshops during our time together, each time hearing the play more clearly and with more enjoyment.

Q: My understanding is that you and Tim are longtime friends. Are there advantages and/or challenges to creative collaboration with someone you’ve known for a long time?

Flynn: Truly I’d say there are only advantages for Tim & me. We have such an enthusiastic admiration for what the other does as well as a combined understanding of what the play is and what Tim wants to accomplish. We now have a really powerful shorthand: I offer script suggestions, he clarifies my visual storytelling, we finish each others’ sentences. It’s pretty synchronous at this point, and really, really fun.

Q: You’re also working with your romantic partner on this production. And there are a few cast members who seem like they are part of the Hangar’s family. How does a new play benefit from debuting at a regional theatre like Ithaca’s?

Flynn: I’m a big believer that regional theatre is the birthplace of new plays. Commercial productions in New York have become unreasonably expensive to produce, so to come to a place as interested and savvy as Ithaca to work on a play has the double benefit of reasonable production costs and a truly enthusiastic, encouraging community. That is illuminated even more, as you’ve mentioned, onstage: every single member of the acting company has a great friend among the cast (if not more) which makes everyone more comfortable in the rehearsal process, more confident in their choices, and ultimately the friendships build a more entertaining show. I think an audience can sense when the actors onstage are truly having a good time with one another while performing. That genuine energy is irreplaceable. As for working with my wife, I’ve always been a big fan of Andréa so working with her continues to be a dream come true.

Q: “Ever So Humble” is a retelling of “Howard’s End.” How is New York City like turn of the century England?

Flynn: A great question! There is a subtle class-consciousness that runs through New York City even today: the haves and the have-nots. E.M. Forster told a story of people falling in love across class barriers in a culture predicated on such distinctions. Tim uses the humor and folly of New York City, urban real estate and how we find our family in such a busy town to illuminate how, no matter our social status, love will always prevail.

Q: Anything else you’d like to add about the work and/or production?

Flynn: I hope Ithaca audiences enjoy the story of creating family out of our friends because that’s what I experience the longer I’m in this community. “Ever So Humble” is a celebration of coming together through life’s struggles and celebrations. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the company we’ve assembled which is a beautiful blend of new family from New York and “Ithaca Grown” talent. We’re happy to offer it to our extended family — the Hangar audience.

The Hangar Theatre is located at 801 Taughannock Blvd. Ithaca. Tickets ($18-45) can be purchased at: www.hangartheatre.org or by phone at (607) 273-8588.

The world premiere of "Ever So Humble," a riff on "Howard's End," premieres at the Hangar Theatre Thursday, July 14. Photo provided.

THE WORK OF AUBURN NATIVE playwright Tim Pinckney will come to life in a world debut this Friday when “Ever So Humble” opens as the Hangar Theatre’s next summer production. Just after the opening, Pinckney and Hangar director Peter Flynn will be at Buffalo Street Books Cooperative on Monday evening, July 18, to do a reading of the play and answer questions from the audience. This surprising and hilarious play was inspired by the E.M. Forster’s classic novel “Howard’s End,” so much of the discussion is sure to be about the parallels between the play and the novel.

“Howard’s End” is as much about the chokehold of social class as it is about the family ties that define individual identity and preclude a person’s ability to “choose their own destiny” in the strictest sense of the term. Forster’s characters attempt to make connections across social classes and tragedy is the result; despite Leonard Bast’s sensitivity, charming tastes, poetic dreams, and moral convictions, he was still crushed by the decrepit rage of a greedy member of the ruling class. The circumstances that precipitated the novel’s disastrous interaction began with quandaries of real estate: the dying wishes of a proprietress are ignored, and simultaneously, a middle class family is displaced when their landlord wants to install higher paying tenants in their place.

In contemporary Brooklyn, class tensions continue to ripple between property owners and hamstrung renters hard-pressed to push enough dimes together to pay the outrageous rents and sublet costs in a city inhabited by some of the richest people in the world. This is the setting for Pinckney’s re-imagining of the “Howard’s End” dilemma: how, and where, will the middle class live? In an era of housing busts, deflating property values, and foreclosed mortgages, this question burns with just as much intensity and urgency now as it ever has. As Nick and his two friends Bobby and Dana find themselves having trouble finding an apartment, they befriend Howard, a property owner with responsibilities that include a beautiful home, a partner of 30 years, and a child. The younger characters are presumably meant to mirror Forster’s Schlegels, who themselves reflected the open-minded intellectual values of the Bloomsbury Group, and their interactions with Howard play out from there.

“Ever So Humble” was workshopped at the Hangar as well as Rattlestick Playwrights theatre and further developed in the Ensemble Studio Theatre’s playwright’s unit.  The play is the product of a happy collaboration between long time friends Pinckney and Flynn. The cast of seven features Andréa Burns (In the Heights), Philip Hoffman (Falsettos, Into the Woods) and Eric T. Miller (LAByrinth Theatre’s Sweet Storm). Poignant and smart, Ever So Humble will attempt to remind the audience that in the 21st century, our home and our family are what we make them.

Tickets for Ever So Humble range from $18 to $45.  Tickets can be purchased at www.hangartheatre.org or by phone at (607) 273-4497.  The recently renovated theatre is located at 801 Taughannock Blvd. The Hangar business office is 171 East State Street, Suite 230 in Center Ithaca.

The Buffalo Street Books reading and Q&A will be Monday, July 18 at 6:30 p.m. at the Buffalo Street Books Cooperative.

“It's like walking into the chambers of your own heart and then finding someone else standing inside there too.” Photo provided

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY performance group of actors, writers, musicians and artists funded by Cornell University, will immerse an individual New Yorker in a 24-hour production in which they are the scriptless main character, with no idea of what the performance will be. The Odyssey Works: New York piece, developed over several months of intensive research into all aspects of the main character’s life, will lead the protagonist all over New York, to public and private sites, and eventually out of the city and deep into upstate New York.

Odyssey Works: New York pushes ideas of interactivity and site-specificity to their extreme in order to make the work have the deepest possible impact. “Long ago, theater’s fourth wall was broken,” says Odyssey Works Director Abraham Burickson, “this work breaks the fifth wall–that between performance and reality. Because we know so much about the protagonist we can pull symbols and narrative themes out of real life and develop them in the performance. If we need someone to play a mother, for instance, we call the main character’s mother. If we need to create a nostalgic scene, we perform it in a nostalgic place, such as the character’s childhood home or place of employment.”

Odyssey Works’ actors go through intensive training to move away from performing and toward behaving, so that their roles are believable not only for the protagonist but for themselves. They take the performance out of the prepared zone of the stage and into the uncertain space of dynamic relationship with the audience. Long before the performance, the actors work with the protagonist’s friends and family to be inserted into her life, develop real relationships with her, and to plant the seeds of a narrative, which on April 16^th, will grow into a story that draws from every aspect of her life.

The Odyssey Works cast of artists, coming from around the US and Canada, count among them a New York Times Notable Book Author and National Book Critic’s Circle Finalist, a Cornell University Artist-in-Residence, a Concert Cellist, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow, a winner of the Celeste International Contemporary Art Prize, the founder of the Austin New Music Coop, an architect, a graphic designer, even a dream expert. Their training is intense and experimental. The artists work with one another to expand their understanding of traditional disciplines in order to be more flexible, audience-focused, and ultimately more open to the unknown. Notes playwright Michael Agresta, “It’s a whole different way of making art for me. It’s different than anything I’ve ever tried to do.”

“In a way it is like writing a love poem,” adds Burickson, “You know your audience, you have an intended effect, you are there to deliver it and it is continuous with life, rather than extracted from it like a poem in a book. We take that process and apply it to beautiful things as well as dark things, music as well as theater, the deeply personal and the almost impersonal. All art-making is a communication, and can be thought of this way.”

Monica Aiken, who experienced Locating the Borderlands, Odyssey Works’ 2003 production in San Francisco, says “[It's] like walking into the chambers of your own heart and then finding someone else standing inside there too.”

Odyssey Works: New York is sponsored by The Cornell Council on the Arts and the Risley College for the Creative and Performing Arts.

"The Tricky Part" at the Kitchen Theatre continues through April 10, 2011. Photo provided

AT FIRST GLANCE it would seem as though the subject matter of The Tricky Part renders the play unfit for the faint of heart, but the Kitchen Theater’s thoughtful treatment of this one-person monologue evokes more contemplation than squeamishness. Actor Carl Danielson delivers Marty Moran’s coming-of-age narration with skill and a certain careful lightness, allowing audience members to ponder the nuance of the story rather than demanding pity or affronting them with the wailing melodrama that often accompanies victims’ stories of too-soon sexual initiation rites.

In a one-person show with a spare set (just a rug, a stool, and a piece of furniture that has a photo of the character as a young boy), all the attention is focused on two formal elements: the proficient acting and the streamlined story, which flashes back and forth from the character’s childhood in Catholic school, leading up to his sensual encounter with an older man, and his visit as an adult to that same man in a VA hospital years later.

The show opens with some base Catholic jokes which might be amusing to those completely unfamiliar with Catholic culture, but simply listing the names of Catholic schools and churches and tee-heeing at the references to blood and conception seemed to me a little flat, a bit literal for a mature, thinking crowd. I assume the intent is to set a humorous tone, and maybe tie into the kind of humor a 12-year-old boy might find comical, and if so, these quips are indeed successful at loosening up the audience and drawing them into the entry point of the story.

Marty’s childhood stories are familiar; he is baffled by the obscure teachings of the Church and eager to gain experience in the adult world. This experience is finally offered to him by Bob, an adult counselor he meets at a Catholic camp who helps him learn more about his changing body. As Marty moves toward the literal and figurative climax of the story, the audience grapples with the young, strong Bob of yesterday and the frail, feeble Bob of the present day. This space between the past and the present creates tension that adds momentum and reminds us that all of today’s abusers are tomorrow’s elderly and infirmed.

Where the plot veers into unfamiliar territory is with the pleasure and longing involved in the depiction of Marty’s deflowering and in his subsequent relationship with Bob. At this point, the lights go down and Danielson sits on a stool illuminated by a very bright light that imitates moonlight. He reads the scene out of a journal, invoking a very intimate feel, like stories told around a campfire. Bob’s erection makes him feel special: “him rising out of his cotton briefs, pulsing,” Marty says, “is for me.” And then: “Better than a gold star or a straight A.” When Bob engages the boy in oral sex, Marty says, “I pushed into the dark, pushed thinking that this is what I prayed for all day long. Relief. And thanks be to God, if he was anywhere anymore to be thanked.”

Far from being terrified by the encounter, Marty is energized by it, and is only filled with hate when Bob says what they shared was love, and Marty suddenly gets the sense that he is only one in a long string of boys that Bob has been with. Marty is repeatedly, even as an adult facing the elder Bob, rankled by the idea that he is “not the only one.” That Bob mourned Marty’s absence when Marty finally left him at the age of 15 provides the adult Marty with some comfort, hinting at a deeper bond, but this relational ambiguity is shattered when it is revealed that Bob went to jail for one of his other dalliances. Then it is clearer that we are witnessing the tale of a crime rather than a confusing spring/autumn romance.

“I was too young to be lit up with desire like that,” Marty later muses, too young to know such feelings of passion and guilt, which he speculates later led him to engage in compulsive sexual behaviors like unprotected cruising. Other, more shocking and complicated details are released and glossed over along the way, such as the fact that Bob had a wife and Marty sometimes had sex with both of them because Bob was worried that Marty might be gay. I found myself wishing the story would have veered off its neat, tight course and into that messy, fertile, and potentially rich area of subject matter, but it was not to be; The Tricky Part stays faithful to the story of Bob and Marty, more faithful than Bob himself was to Marty, as Marty repeatedly bemoans.

For all its references to Catholicism, the story doesn’t penetrate or explore its mysteries in any substantial or compelling way. Marty’s references to God seem just as compulsive as his sexuality, and in fact, sometimes they are indistinguishable (as in: “my God, my God,” etc.). Themes that are introduced are never pursued; for example, one nun clucks that discipline leads to transcendence, but we see neither in The Tricky Part – it remains solidly rational, descriptive, highly intelligent in its depiction of the dynamics of sex between adults and minors, and ultimately quite earthy.

One could argue that Marty himself must have exercised discipline to have a successful acting and writing career and that in itself is a kind of transcendence, and I concur, but we don’t see this explored in the writing of play itself: we don’t see Marty sweating it out day after day, year after year, fighting destructive urges in favor of creative ones. The one Christian concept that Marty does truly seem to have absorbed and processed is that of grace, which he mentions near the end, describing as “the gift from beyond that moves us to salvation.” (If salvation is a loaded word, imagine “healing” instead, perhaps, or transformation.) Marty prayed for grace to let go of Bob, but ultimately realizes that what he needs is to let go of his inner 12-year-old. That, he concludes at the play’s end, he does not yet know how to do.

Danielle Winterton is a fiction writer, an Editor at Large for The Ithaca Post, and a co-founding editor of Essays & Fictions.