Moviemaker Todd “Happiness” Solondz must have been mightily gripped by the 2012 New York City headlines concerning an Upper West Side couple, their two young children and a wayward nanny. (You don’t know about this? You might want to look it up.)
In the unfortunate event, Solondz appears to have spotted the dangers upper-middle-class liberals can face in their supposedly insulated lives. That certainly seems to be the impetus for Emma and Max, which Solondz has written and directed and which is now getting its world premiere at the Flea.
This is the first time Solondz has wandered away from film to the theater. (Some of Emma and Max is actually projected.) And it certainly is an intriguing leap. Not that by the end of the 90 minutes it takes to unfold, the intrigue is thoroughly worked out.
Brooke (Ilana Becker) and Jay (Matt Servitto) are the self-proclaimed magnanimous liberals. They’re the well-heeled parents of the titular three-year-old Emma (Sawyer Manning) and two-year-old Max (Mason Goldstein). They’re first viewed not getting around to telling nanny Brittany (Zonya Love), a Barbados émigré, that she’s being let go. (N.B.: Manning and Goldstein only show up briefly in the projections.)
Putting off the bad tidings with as many bleeding-heart liberal clichés as Solondz can muster—“you’re part of the family” and giveaway comments along those lines—they feud with each other while Brittany sits in quiet tolerance, ostensibly knowing in which unpleasant direction the Aspartame-like Brooke-Jay rhetoric is flowing.
When Brooke and Jay finally get around to the firing and Brittany has left, the former two have a run of gnawing liberal guilt bouts—Brooke more than Jay but him, too. These take place, for two examples, by a Barbados pool and on the flight home from that unsatisfying vacation. Frequently the couple’s pained conversation pertinently concerns whether Brittany has returned the house keys still in her possession. For her part Brittany takes to her narrow upstage bed. Mostly, but not entirely.
Perhaps because Solondz eventually noticed that as written Brooke and Jay are more suited to comedy sketch than legit drama, he shifts the action to Brittany about three-quarters through. (So long, actors Becker and Servitto, see you at the company bow.)
For this last thick slice of drama, Brittany is discovered reclining on a prison cot while being interviewed by a woman identified in the program as Padma (Rita Wolf). She’s writing a non-fiction book evidently about women in jail. Or maybe, Padma being Indian, she’s writing a volume about non-white women attempting to build a viable life in the United States. Or maybe she’s preparing something else.
During the interview Brittany is not so much tuned in to the Padma give-and-take as she is motivated to give out with a stream-of-consciousness diatribe on her understandably unhappy life as a lower-class immigrant at the mercy of the moneyed white population.
Pertinent to her speech is a concentration on water—water being an Emma and Max theme repeated verbally and visually. Before the play begins, video designer Adam J. Thompson spills flowing water imagery all over the stage. The above-mentioned pool is also projected (with a one-rung metal ladder added). Before the conclusion, water figures in another sinister fashion, though as a bow to spoiler-avoidance it won’t be discussed explicitly here.
That Solondz has it in mind to satirize is plain, but he doesn’t follow through on the particulars. For instance, just as Brooke and Jay complete the initial you’re-fired scene with Brittany, the latter submits to what looks quite convincingly to be an epileptic seizure. From how Brooke and Jay react, this seems to be the first time they’ve witnessed such an event. Surely, had they known about the condition before, they might have decided to let Brittany go then. Brittany wouldn’t have been someone with whom to leave children alone. The fit ends, however, and is never referred to again. It’s simply dropped. Huh?
Also dropped is Brittany’s mode of expression. In the introductory scene, the Barbados nanny has trouble with her English. Brooke gives this as one reason for handing Brittany the three-months severance pay. When, however, Brooke gets around to her monologue, she speaks extremely well. Perhaps the audience is meant to consider this as dramatic license.
The above are just two of Solondz’s puzzling lapses in a beautiful production that Julia Noulin-Merat has designed. She’s put up a three sided-room with the side walls at, say, 35-degree angles. The walls, chiseled into a wave-like relief (the water thing again), are painted powder blue. Within them are several sliding doors behind which various set pieces are placed and then, as the doors are pushed aside, are rolled forward and back.
It’s a Solondz conceit that, when those doors are opened, weary Brittany is the one pushing and pulling the sliding furniture—a metaphor, of course, for the downtrodden having to do the literal and figurative heavy lifting. Only as a prelude to Brittany’s taking over the work are Brooke, Jay and the imminent Padma asked to do the shuffling.
Solondz, better at this point as stage director than playwright (the actors do take healthy bites of their roles), needs a more solid way to make his points in the current political climate of vague liberal inclinations and immigration dilemmas.
During the play, Brittany refers to ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All.” (Sound designer Fabian Obispo plays the Top 40 click). The song mirrors Brittany’s belief of a life where she’s no winner. As of his first theater jaunt, Solondz also doesn’t take it all.
Emma and Max opened October 14, 2018, at the Flea Theater and runs to October 28. Tickets and information: theflea.org
