There are contemporary plays that take provincial New Yorkers to places in this country they likely haven’t thought much about, except perhaps to dismiss their denizens as, well, provincial. Tracy Letts, whose superb Linda Vista opens on Broadway this week, has written a bunch; his fellow fiftysomething Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage provided a prominent example (and earned her second prize) with Sweat, a stinging and deeply humane indictment of the underexplored conditions that played a huge role in Trump’s election.
Among younger playwrights, Idaho native Samuel D. Hunter has emerged as a leading surveyor of this terrain, though by no means a solitary one. Hunter’s Obie Award-winning breakthrough A Brand New Boise was first staged by Partial Comfort Productions, a not-for-profit ensemble currently introducing a work by its co-founder, Chad Beckim. Titled Nothing Gold Can Stay, after the Robert Frost poem, Beckim’s new play follows two young lovers and their families in a working-class community in Maine, his own home state, as their lives are all gradually upended by a prescription opioid that’s been in the news quite a bit lately.
Jess and Clay are high school sweethearts separated when Clay goes off to college and Jess, a bright and motivated young woman apparently stymied by some negligence on the part of her damaged mother and abusive stepfather, must stay behind. She finds refuge in the home of Clay’s mom, Susan, and lands a menial job at an egg farm, but neither can quell the frustration and isolation gnawing at Jess, whose nervous energy and growing despair are made palpable in Talene Monahon’s movingly shaded performance.
Clay, who is played with compatible delicacy by Michéal Richardson (a son of Liam Neeson and the late Natasha Richardson, making his New York stage debut) tries to stand by his girlfriend even as her increasingly self-destructive behavior threatens to hurt others. But his older sister and even Jess’s own big brother—both divorced or separated parents of young children, who have presumably had to set their expectations lower than their siblings—show less patience, establishing one of the play’s central questions: Can circumstance override personal responsibility, and to what extent?
Beckim, who has previously written several plays set in New York City (where he’s now based) and featuring racially diverse characters, applies the same gritty empathy to the men and women in Nothing Gold Can Stay—all of them white, all trying to establish some sense of connection and dignity on their own terms. If Beckim’s writing here lacks the poetry of Hunter’s, his dialogue, under Shelley Butler’s vigorous but sensitive direction, captures these struggles with stirring authenticity, whether his characters are having at each other in heated clashes or engaging in terse, quiet exchanges, as Jess and Clay do in one of the play’s most ominous scenes. (Jess’s brother, in contrast, shows a slow-burning, righteous ferocity in Peter Mark Kendall’s intense, endearing performance.)
There are also glimmers of humor and grace, even in the smallest places, like the card games that Susan plays with her daughter, Tanya (a winningly wry, knowing Adrienne Rose Bengtsson) and others, in a living room that set designer Jason Simms has furnished to reflect Susan’s careful, caring sense of domesticity. Warm and generous by nature despite her years of hard experience, Susan is perhaps the character whose pain, and betrayal, we feel most sharply. Beckim gives her a grueling arc and, in the end, a moment of confrontation—delivered with devastating bluntness by Mary Bacon, who is exquisite throughout—that has us ponder the limits of forgiveness with a candor not always applied to that subject.
That’s not to say Beckim has any less sympathy for those who lack Susan’s survival skills. If anything, Nothing Gold Can Stay reminds us of our shared vulnerability within any community—particularly one whose troubles have been underestimated, leaving men and women of all ages ripe for exploitation.
Nothing Gold Can Say opened October 8, 2019, at the Gural Theatre and runs through October 26. Tickets and information: partialcomfort.org
