Photo Source: Carol Rosegg
Susan Pierce, single, five months pregnant, and looking to reinvent her life, has come to Plainview from Manhattan to teach in the wake of television reports showing the devastation wrought on the town by a tornado. In the course of a class on abiogenesis, which Susan explains is "the process of how life on Earth could have risen from inanimate matter," she makes the following comment: "The leap from nonlife to life is the greatest gap in scientific theories of the Earth's early history, unless, of course, you believe in all that other gobbledy gook." This upsets her born-again evangelical students, particularly the truculent Micah Staab, who was orphaned by the cyclone and is now living in the home of family friend Gene Dinkel, whose parenting attempts he despises. With the folksy Gene running a controlling interference, Micah pushes Susan to articulate exactly what she meant, after which he demands a public apology for disrespecting her students' religious beliefs. The situation escalates when a scarecrow in a gorilla suit is burned on a cross on Susan's front lawn and Micah is implicated.
Trieschmann's characters are far too blankly written and reliant upon stereotype. Predictably, Susan is the prickly, condescending, citified intellectual; Gene is the genial good ol' boy whose affable manner masks a darker intractability; and Micah is the pure-in-heart, obsessive teenager who sees the world in black and white. Lacking sufficient backstory and largely devoid of compelling specifics, the characters resolutely refuse to coalesce, not helped by the playwright's determination to keep motivations murky until a final—and very forced—reveal of information that should have been a turning point instead of a finish.
Director Daniella Topol seems to have encouraged Heidi Schreck to highlight the annoyingly self-involved Susan's faults, in a busy and shrill performance full of surface ticks. Adam LeFevre's darting eyes keep trying to suggest interesting depths for Gene, but to little avail. Justin Kruger, in his New York stage debut, is more successful, particularly when inhabiting the intensity and operatic self-righteousness of teenage convictions, but he can't make Micah's final behavior feel organic or believable.
Set designer Clint Ramos has puzzlingly placed his spot-on prefab-trailer classroom inside a cement-block shell of a building that exposes the theatrical artifice of lighting instruments and such. But Topol doesn't use the "outside" space in any interesting way, while the playing area is unnecessarily constricted. Lighting designer Brian H. Scott's color-coded scene transitions are awfully obvious.
The arguments about evolution and religion are hardly new, and though the play makes a welcome feint in the direction of considering whether or not religious faith can sometimes be destructive, it doesn't follow through. Nor do we learn much from the spectacle of two adults making bad choices and further screwing up a damaged boy. Ultimately, "How the World Began" feels like an episode of "The Andy Griffith Show" gone terribly wrong.
Presented by Women's Project Theater at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 W. 42nd St., NYC. Jan. 5–29. Tue.–Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 3 and 7:30 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com. Casting by Alaine Alldaffer and Lisa Donadio.
