By Michele Markarian
Ripe Frenzy – Written by Jennifer Barclay. Directed by Bridget Kathleen O’Leary. Co-Produced by Boston Center for American Performance and New Repertory Theatre, Boston University College of Fine Arts, Studio ONE, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA through March 11.
The arrival of Jennifer Barclay’s exceptional play Ripe Frenzy in Boston could not be timelier. For anyone affected by America’s spate of school shootings, particularly in the wake of the recent one in Florida, Barclay intelligently and thoughtfully puzzles her way through some of our deepest thoughts and fears without being didactic. It’s a heartbreaking piece, alternately tense and tender, that offers no answers, which is oddly and honestly comforting.
As the play opens on the stage of the auditorium of Tavistown High School, chairs are splayed across the stage. A bulb on the end of a long pole bisects them. We know something bad has happened here, as the town historian, Zoe (Veronica Duerr) hints at. Tavistock is a small town in the woods of upstate New York, with just under three thousand residents. The high school was performing Thornton Wilder’s Our Town for the 40th year in a row, a feat which earned them a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. Zoe tells us, with pride, that she was cast as the Stage Manager in the 1992 production, despite the role being typically played by a man. She periodically interrupts her conversation with the audience to speak with her son, who has designed the lights for the show and is in the lighting booth, projecting photographs that he took himself as part of the set. Her son is the light of her life.
Zoe’s best friends from town, Miriam (Stacy Fischer) and Felicia (Samantha Richert), as well as their respective kids, Matt (Henry B. Gardner) and Hadley (Reilly Anspaugh) are also working on Our Town. Rehearsals are punctuated by the occasional notifications on iPhones, with updates from a massive school shooting in Michigan. Miriam, Felicia and their kids are following the tragedy with horror, but Zoe, who sees herself as a positive person, wants no part of it. What you resist persists, and Zoe is forced to confront reality when something goes very, very wrong in Act Three of Tavistown High School’s 40th production of Our Town.
The play works on so many levels, starting with Our Town as an allegory for what we witness (if you’ve never read or seen Our Town, not to worry – you’ll get it as the play goes along). Barclay layers the piece with topics such as the Internet, YouTube, and Nature vs. Nurture as her characters discuss why events like the Michigan school shooting happen. The shooter, Bryan James McNamara, has uploaded footage from his GoPro onto YouTube, which, like a car crash, the cast and crew of Our Town can’t seem to stop watching. They repeat his name, Bryan James McNamara, as if he were a celebrity, albeit a sick one. Zoe observes that web-surfing produces something she calls “the loop of dissatisfaction”, where one gets answers so quickly that one doesn’t quite believe it, and starts a new search. The scariest scene takes place in Zoe’s mind, a confrontation with Bryan James McNamara (Henry B. Gardner) where he gives her a litany of conflicting reasons why he committed the killings – his parents loved him too much. His parents loved him too little. He was picked on. He was a bully. He wanted to be famous. And on and on and on and on, none of it adding up to anything Zoe or the audience can even remotely understand. “Do you find patterns to be calming?” Zoe asks us, and yeah, I can say that I do. Which is why tragedies pull us off balance – sometimes we can’t see them coming. And sometimes we just don’t want to.
Bridget Kathleen O’Leary strikes a fine balance between moments of lightness and fear, well-played by an excellent cast. Veronica Duerr gives an amazing performance as Zoe – there’s not an inauthentic moment over the course of her ninety-minutes onstage. Stacy Fischer and Samantha Richert are effective and moving as her best friends. Reilly Anspaugh Hadley/Bethany) and Henry B. Gardner (Matt/Bryan) are so different and credible in their dual roles that I didn’t even realize they were played by the same actors until the curtain call, when only five people came out. Seriously!
In the end, what Ripe Frenzy’s victims and shooter have in common are mothers who loved them. And as for the mother who loved the son she can’t mourn in public, the tragedy is just beginning. For more information, go to: http://www.newrep.org/
