Craig Lucas established himself as a smart and able playwright during the 1980s with darkish, imaginative comedies such as Reckless, Blue Window, and Prelude to a Kiss.
As the years have rolled along, Lucas has remained a proficient writer, even as his vision of the world and its people seemingly grows darker with every new play. Excepting for The Lying Game, a seriocomic thriller in 2013, and his supple texts for musicals such as The Light in the Piazza and An American in Paris, the plays that Lucas has composed over the last 20-plus years deal out awfully bleak stories.
His most recent drama, Ode to Joy, staged at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2014, was the woeful tale of a destructive, addicted painter and the unlucky man and woman who loved her.
Lucas’ latest play, I Was Most Alive with You, which opened on Monday at Playwrights Horizons, may well be his grimmest story yet. It partly attempts to be a modern-day variation on the biblical Book of Job. You’ve heard of Job, right? God heaps tragedies upon blameless, upright Job in order to test his faith.
Before relating some particulars of I Was Most Alive with You, let’s point to its most notable feature: The play is performed simultaneously in two languages—English and American Sign Language. Two characters are more or less deaf; they and their loved ones intermittently use sign language as they speak the dialogue aloud. Projected titles materialize at times.
Most prominently, the seven-actor cast is augmented by seven others who silently function as the “shadow” versions of the characters. Dressed by David C. Woolard in clothes similar to those worn by the individuals they shadow, these performers are situated in a gallery above the action. As the play proceeds, they render the spoken dialogue through sign language.
This two-act drama unfolds in flashbacks, interspersed by exchanges between Ash (Michael Gaston) and Astrid (Marianna Bassham), writing partners for a long-running TV series. Deriving material from their lives, the writers recall events from several months earlier, starting with an unhappy Thanksgiving dinner they shared with Pleasant (Lisa Emery), Ash’s alienated wife; and Knox (Russell Harvard), Ash’s 30-ish son, who is spiritual, deaf, gay, and, just like his father, a recovering substance abuser. Their hostess is Carla (Lois Smith), Ash’s kindly, venerable mother, assisted by Mariama (Gameela Wright), her middle-aged aide, whose unseen son happens to be on Death Row.
New to this group is Farhad (Tad Cooley), Knox’s considerably younger lover, a victim of abuse and a former rent-boy who assuages his pain in sex, drugs, and video games. Farhad also happens to be partly deaf. The couple’s relationship is strained, to say the least.
Once Lucas introduces the Job theme and sets up his dramatis personae, various catastrophes swamp Ash and the others, including (but not limited to) dismemberment, bankruptcy, estrangement, capital punishment, attempted suicide, abandonment, and fatal illness. Such woes are accompanied by debates over spiritual higher powers among these characters who identify as Jews, a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, an atheist, and a Jehovah’s Witness. Another thread addresses a conflict among deaf people who use sign language and those who don’t.
The playwright’s point for unleashing such a tsunami of misery upon the characters—as well as over the audience—is not tangible. Self-absorbed Ash is scarcely an upright soul like Job, nor does the conclusion see him altered by his troubles. The play’s title suggests that the story might concern the intense relationship that rages between Knox and Farhad, whose harmful addictions include each other, but their dynamics are not studied in satisfying depth.
The play/production’s experiment with the shadow performers (Sabrina Dennison is credited as Director of Artistic Sign Language) lends gravity to this event. Director Tyne Rafaeli’s actors help to moor the drifting themes with generally solid performances. These positive components at least manage to rescue this unfocused and terribly lugubrious drama from turning laughable.
I Was Most Alive with You opened September 24, 2018, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through October 14. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
