“This is just our childhood. We are not even going to remember most of this stuff when we grow up.”
That’s 12-year-old Chris (Ryan Foust), the oldest and presumably wisest of four siblings anchoring Bess Wohl’s delicate and daring Make Believe, now off-Broadway at Second Stage. Of course, he’s right. Thirty or so years later, how much do we actually recall from those hours we spent playing dress-up and diapering our dolls? Not a heck of a lot—but those seemingly mundane activities must be lingering somewhere deep in our subconscious minds.
Wohl’s play is a bittersweet reminder of what it was like to be a kid in the days of Atari and answering machines. You could spend hours digging through the overstuffed attic-slash-playroom set, masterminded by Tony winner David Zinn (SpongeBob SquarePants). Note the Lite-Brite, the squishy green GloWorm, the chubby-cheeked Cabbage Patch Kid, and the big blue plastic easel. If your parents worked, you definitely had a room like this; filled with mismatched, scratchy ’70s plaid furniture, it’s where you did your homework and entertained yourselves until mom or dad got home at 6 p.m. Mine was our half-finished basement.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
On the floor, Addie (Casey Hilton), age 7, plays with her Cabbage Patch doll, which she’s named Babs Kimbra: sniffing her bottom and wiping her clean; spoon-feeding her invisible baby food and shoving a tiny bottle into her mouth; brushing her hair and rocking her to sleep…until Chris bursts in and starts pounding Babs’ head in. “You’re so dramatic,” he says to the hysterical Addie. “I didn’t even do anything.” Precocious 10-year-old Kate (Maren Heary) just wants the “infernal ruckus” to stop so she can do her homework. And the littlest, Carl (Harrison Fox), just 5 years old, is hiding in the makeshift fort.
To pass the time while they’re waiting for their mom—where the heck is she, anyway?—they play house: Kate, donning sunglasses and brandishing a wineglass, takes on the role of mom; Chris, as the father, barks orders and insults Kate, clueing us in to their dad’s behavior; Addie grudgingly agrees to be the baby but please call her “Tiara Sparkle Flower Rainbow Mermaid Sparkle.… Sparkle for Short”; and Carl barks and eats from a dog dish. Later, Chris mocks Kate by repeating everything she says: “Stop that I mean it!” “Stop that I mean it!” In an especially aspirational moment, Kate writes a letter to Princess Grace, whom she believes is her real mom: “I can do a French braid, not on myself but on others. I have two rings and three bracelets. I am a Virgo—that’s Zodiac stuff.”
All this would grow extremely tiresome were it not for one extremely risky—and genius—casting move: The kids are played by actual kids. (And not hammy, affected, acting-schmacting kids.) When the first thing you see is a cute little girl planted downstage center cradling her doll, there’s no way not to be invested. Well played, Michael Greif.
Mom’s sudden disappearance is explained in the second half, when the siblings reconvene in the attic for a family funeral 32 years later. Kate (Samantha Mathis) is now a gastroenterologist whose husband takes frequent business trips. Like mother like daughter! The imaginative Addie (Susannah Flood) is an actress. Carl (Brad Heberlee), says Addie, “helped start something called Google.”
Just as Chris predicted decades earlier, they’ve forgotten many childhood events. “I loved this doll so much,” says Addie, picking up the floppy-limbed, duct-taped Babs Kimbra. “What happened to her?” No one reminds Addie that she herself methodically tore out Babs’ stuffing after a particularly vicious dinner scene between pretend-mom Kate and pretend-dad Chris.
Is it that they (and we) can’t remember traumatic experiences, or that they (and we) don’t want to? That’s a question for the therapists, and probably not one a playwright—even one as sharp as Wohl, who also wrote the sensational mediation on silence, Small Mouth Sounds (2016)—can answer in just 80 minutes. But Carl, the family’s former pretend pup, has a theory. Dogs, he explains, “forget events and remember only what they need to remember in order to survive.” And really: Does anyone need to remember disemboweling a poor defenseless doll?
Make Believe opened Aug. 15, 2019, at Second Stage Theater and runs through Sept. 15. Tickets and information: 2st.com
