With his 2014 play Marjorie Prime, one of the most imaginative and moving new works of the past decade, Jordan Harrison envisioned a future in which the bereaved had access to computerized simulations of their lost loved ones. Thus it seemed as if the dead had never left—except, of course, they had, and their high-tech replicas only reflected the curated details and perceptions they’d been fed by the living, much like social media profiles do today. Harrison’s next effort, The Amateurs, then took us back in time, following a medieval theater troupe trying to outrun the Black Death.
The playwright’s latest, Log Cabin, is set more or less in the present, spanning 2012 through 2017—though anyone who follows politics and media might argue those years represent at least two eras, the first bringing both progress and signs of a gathering backlash that smacked us in the collective face some time in the wee hours of Nov. 9. 2016. Though the election of Donald J. Trump is only alluded to towards the end of the play, without citing his name, it looms like a dark cloud over the upwardly mobile gay and lesbian couples in focus, even if they fail to see it.
The action unfolds in the well-appointed Brooklyn home of married women Jules and Pam, who will be visited regularly over the years by male friends Ezra and Chris, also married. In the first scene, over drinks and conversation, Jules reveals that she and Pam are “shopping for sperm,” and all have a rueful laugh at the backwards thinking of Ezra’s doctor father, who still equates homosexuality with AIDS. “The world is changing too fast for some people to understand,” Chris notes, to which his more voluble and acidic spouse responds, “The world isn’t changing fast enough. Who cares if they understand?”
As it turns out, Ezra—whose wry, smug behavior and lingering insecurity are perfectly parlayed by Jesse Tyler Ferguson—and his pals, so confident of their progressive views, may be having trouble keeping up themselves. This emerges when another old friend shows up, a transgender man named Henry, who years ago, when he was Helen, accompanied Ezra to their high school prom. No one wants to judge Henry, mind you, but Ezra feels weird and a bit wistful about having his old gal pal disappear, and the others don’t hide their own skepticism, or its patina of resentment. “We’re all fully interested in navigating this brave new world with them,” Jules insists of her trans brothers and sisters, “but it sometimes seems as if they want us to get it wrong.”
What Harrison is getting at here, and it couldn’t be a more timely consideration, is the challenge of sustaining empathy in a culture increasingly defined (and polarized) by identity and perceived privilege. Chris, who is black, can’t see how Henry feels entitled to label him a “cis” male, this lumping him in with the white jocks who threw racist and homophobic slurs at him. “This country has gotten too liberal,” Ezra declares at one point, as if inviting audience members to advise him to be careful what he wishes for.
Harrison doesn’t judge his characters; he draws them with the same open-minded curiosity and compassion, the lyricism and lack of pedantry with which he approaches the daunting subjects of his plays. As in his other work, overwhelming dilemmas are made to feel intimate, injected with a graceful oddball wit, and thus emerge a little less terrifying, even as they haunt us. The men and women in Log Cabin fumble with their feelings and goals; when Ezra decides to honor Chris’s wish to have a child, his relationships with both Chris and Henry take unexpected turns. Pam and Jules’ growing son, whose supposed inability to talk is a source of barely suppressed grief, is comically presented as a hyper-articulate man-baby in his PJs—played with deadpan wit and wisdom by Ian Harvie, who doubles as a poignant Henry—serving up insights that often elude the grownups.
Director Pam MacKinnon, an expert miner of the pain and humor that define friendships and family dynamics, also culls sharp, touching performances from Phillip James Brannon—whose relatively laid-back Chris is a foil to the “annotated bitchiness,” as the character puts it at one point, of Ferguson’s Ezra—and Cindy Cheung and Dolly Wells, who respectively play the cool, composed Pam and the similarly elegant but more patently conflicted Jules.
Talene Monahan is tartly winning as the play’s token millennial, Myna, a young woman Henry is dating, who ends up disgusted with all of them. “What are you contributing?” she asks the others, who are mostly pushing 40. “Maybe you cared about something at some point, but as soon as you got a foothold, as soon as your own rights were taken care of, you just”—Myna gestures dismissively—“out the window.” If Harrison acknowledges this is in some respect true, Log Cabin offers a more complex and generous perspective, one that acknowledges our capacity for moving forward even as it warns against complacency.
