The journey of Sister Sorry, from the magazine page to the Barrington Stage, is a curious one, though not entirely in the way novice playwright Alec Wilkinson must have banked on.
In the October 4, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, staff writer Wilkinson unveiled “The Confession.” It’s a longish piece, about an answering machine set up in Manhattan by a middle-aged conceptual artist dubbed “Mr. Apology”—shades of Nathanael West’s male advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist Miss Lonelyhearts—who invited all and sundry to dial in and get off their chest any misdeeds for which they wished to atone. (After a while, the line was upgraded so that one could choose either to record mea culpas, or listen to those of others.) The story’s centerpiece is the announcement, from a 28-year-old Queens lad self-identified as “Jumpin’ Jim,” that he’d killed his mother by suffocating her with a pillow, when locking her in the closet overnight didn’t do the trick. The rest of it consists of multiple repeat calls from Queens, responses from the general public, and finally cat-and-mouse conversations between the artist and Jim as to just how much of the latter’s yarn—if any—can be verified.
With so much choice verbiage in the transcript, one can see why the idea of a dramatization might be tempting; much of the ranting of the alleged killer is delivered verbatim from the original piece. (For some reason, Jumpin’ Jim is now called “Jack Flash,” though any intended connection to the Rolling Stones song is obscure.)
More importantly, the telephone project has been turned into the brainchild of a woman who calls herself “Sister Sorry,” and that’s the first in a series of decisions that send Wilkinson, and the play, down a rabbit hole of implausibility and pretentiousness.
The original Mr. Apology was just a guy who had an idea for creating fodder for gallery installations (which he received, around town). We’re let in on no motivation, nor indeed any character texture, beyond artistic ambition; on the page he’s even less dimensional than the random callers whose comments are heard in snippets. But because a play has to have a central character, Sister Sorry is presented as this raving egotist who claims a dark past, including a spate of shoplifting adventures and urban vandalism. She brags she almost finished a Ph.D. in math without explaining why she gave it up or why it’s relevant to this tale, and defiantly informs us that “I don’t want to intervene, just observe. I’m cold that way. If people really knew how little I care whether they live or die, well….”
This amalgam of unlikely background and random traits is never convincing. And when a thoroughly unbelievable character is woven into a framework of (at least purportedly) real-life testimony, can it be any surprise that all the seams are showing? Sister Sorry dutifully mouths the words originally spoken by Mr. Apology, but there’s no coherent need or subtext behind them, nothing driving her to do the things that, according to The New Yorker, Mr. Apology actually did. Meanwhile Jack Flash’s screeds, which become progressively more disjointed and then psychotic over time, don’t intersect with her words or actions, either. So we have two characters operating in different layers of reality, acting as if they were interrelating when everything is telling us that they are not. Director Joe Calarco employs a lot of running around the stage under David Lander’s expressionistic lighting to foster the illusion of two desperate souls rattling each other’s cages, but there’s no there there and the center doesn’t hold.
Christopher Sears is spiky and dangerous as Jack, though in that strained, anguished Actors Studio manner patented by James Dean and Sal Mineo in 1955. And though Jennifer Van Dyck takes Sister Sorry from fidgety to still in the course of an intermissionless 75 minutes, that hardly qualifies as a character arc, as evidenced by her overexplicit closing monologue: “Clearly I went too far. I put another human being in danger…. There was a part of me living in the shadows, a lurker, maybe even a voyeur…. A connoisseur of human misery, strangeness, and moral degradation.” Sorry, Sister Sorry, but that kind of insight, coming at the end of a dramatic event, is what we as audience members are supposed to infer for ourselves. When the truth has to be wrapped up so neatly and patly (as in “I’m cold that way”), it’s a clear sign that the play’s mechanisms have let us down.
Sister Sorry opened August 18, 2021, at the Boyd-Quinson Mainstage (Pittsfield, MA) and runs through August 29. Tickets and information: barringtonstageco.org
