A parent's experience of the death of a child can only be imagined as something unbearably painful; words, for the grieving and for those comforting them, simply fail. In God's Ear, playwright Jenny Schwartz captures the emotional and verbal breakdown of a couple whose son has drowned.
Hurtling from the hospital where Mel (played with intensity by Christina Kirk) tells her husband, Ted (a gloriously understated Gibson Frazier), about the doctors' prognosis for their son, God's Ear unfolds in a series of fractured vignettes in which dialogue occurs in short, repetitive bursts, exchanges that bring to mind the work of Beckett, particularly if he were to use clichés and stock phrases from greeting cards. As Ted spends increasing amounts of time traveling on business, Mel is left to comfort not only herself but also their daughter, Lanie (played with poignant simplicity by Monique Vukovic). Schwartz integrates a disheveled tooth fairy (Judith Greentree) and a life-size G.I. Joe doll (Matthew Montelongo) into Mel's world, and these fantasy characters offer comfort even as they disorient her and the audience. While away, Ted encounters a transvestite stewardess (also played by Montelongo), who acts as his guide to the underworld; he also has an affair with the sexually voracious Lenora (Annie McNamara) and hopes that some man-to-man bonding with Raymond McAnally's Guy will ease his pain.
It's a strange, often uncomfortably hilarious kaleidoscope that's enhanced by plaintively whimsical songs from Michael Friedman. Director Anne Kauffman's gracefully modulated production allows the extreme emotions of the grieving parents and sister to pierce the audience. Thanks to designer Kris Stone's set, a raised blue platform that allows characters to pop up into the action like jack-in-the-boxes, Schwartz's depiction of grief as a hallucinatory whirlwind comes to life with equal power.
Presented by New Georges
at the East 13th Street Theatre, 146 E. 13th St., NYC.
May 7-June 2. Mon., Wed.-Sun., 8 p.m.
(212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.
Casting by Paul Davis/Calleri Casting.
