“I guess we’re not winning any parent of the year awards, are we?” Fiona (Samantha Mathis) says to James (Andrew Pang) towards the end of Carla Ching’s Nomad Motel—to which James replies, “There are no awards that come with parenting. Only suffering.”
The exchange gets to the heart and guts of a play largely about the relationships between parents and children, where the parenting has been, putting the best face on it, deficient. It’s one of those works that comes along every once in a while in which the playwright’s intentions are admirable but where realization hasn’t been entirely sufficient. Close but no cigar, as the pungent old saw goes.
The children pretty much left to their own devices are Fiona’s daughter Alix (Molly Griggs), who longs to become an architect and probably has the talent for it, and James’ son Mason (Christopher Larkin), who wants to be a musician (he plays the guitar) and definitely does not want to be the economist his Hong Kong-based dad insists he must become.
As Ching shapes her work, Alix and Mason are the prominent characters. Alix is left with the family car at her disposal when Fiona, a California actress relying on income from commercials, is down at heel and unable to support her daughter and two (unseen) younger sons. She’s facing the loss of the family home. Mason is cast adrift and nearly destitute in his dad’s empty house near Anaheim while James remains in Hong Kong caught up in shady loan-shark activities.
Brought together for a school project for which they barely have time, Alix and Mason eventually share his Tustin, CA home. That’s after Alix has drifted through a couple of shabby motels and a convenience store where she’s parked her car and belongings with importuning ex-boyfriend Oscar (the clever Ian Duff). Set designer Yu-Hsuan Chen meets the changing-locales challenge fairly well. She and lighting designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew see to it that quite often an upstage neon motel sign flashes behind a curtain of vertical metal strips.
By the way, Alix has been by New York City’s Pratt Institute and otherwise strapped for tuition wherewithal. Mason is hard up due to the withholding James. They’re examples of talented youngsters potentially unlikely to achieve their goals because of undue financial college burdens. The situation lends Nomad Motel a potent relevance to today’s headlines.
Watching Alix and James struggle to maintain their footing in a world where often the best the down-trodden can hope is not to finding themselves trodden even farther down. Their predicaments tug at the heart, especially with Griggs and Larkin playing the sometime chums, eventual lovers with such sincerity.
Griggs’ Alix is strong at the core but lets the 17-year-old’s uncertainty show when so incessantly disappointed. Larkin’s Mason comes across as obviously talented (not only on the guitar) but slowly cracking under his father’s failure to understand how supportive (rather than dictatorial) fathers behave. (Sound designers Emily Gardner Xu Hall and Enrico de Trizio wrote the original music heard when Mason is tinkering as well as at other times.)
The problem weighing on Nomad Hotel has to do with the depiction of the trouble-inducing Fiona and James. Ching seems to think she only needs to sketch them in to indicate the onus they place on their unfortunate, striving off-spring.
All that’s revealed of Fiona before she makes the above-quoted comment about winning no parenting award is that she’s doing her best, which isn’t nearly good enough. She’s prepared to fob her children off on others while she lands the occasional job—one as a lady pirate in what is either a commercial or a movie. All that’s known about James, who disappears for longer stretches than Fiona does, is that he’s a martinet of a father and is in some kind of trouble he’s keeping from his son—as well as from the audience.
In other words, Fiona, once seen making a desperate phone call to Alix for solace, and James, who turns up in California for some reason or another (is he fleeing vengeful associates?), are underwritten. This despite Mathis and Pang doing their utmost to enliven the roles.
Compounding the Mason-James confrontation is a late-in-play swordfight that breaks out between them and, as they clash weapons (a broom is also wielded), verges on the laughable. (Ryan-James Hatanaka is the fight director and has his hands full making the encounter register as anywhere near believable.) Clearly, Ching needed to find something over which Mason and James could face off. She chose the wrong thing.
As this is the Nomad Motel world premiere, perhaps it’s fair to regard it as a work in progress. Should Ching decide to build up Fiona and James—since the play is so much invested in parental failures—she might have a truly substantial drama instead of something that now is only part of its nomadic way there.
Nomad Motel opened June 3, 2019, at Atlantic Theater Company II and runs through June 23. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
