For much of its first act, Fern Hill, the new play by actor and writer Michael Tucker, suggests an episode of a quaint, overeager sitcom. Imagine Friends, to use a timely example, were the six characters, the same number featured here, a trio of long-married couples approaching their golden years.
It’s not a premise that would likely have network or Netflix executives leaping with excitement, and initially, Tucker burdens the excellent actors cast in Hill—among them his wife and former L.A. Law co-star, Jill Eikenberry—with dialogue that could sink the sturdiest comedic talent. Set in the titular farmhouse that Eikenberry’s character, Sunny, shares with her husband, Jer—get it?—the play opens as they have gathered with friends to celebrate Jer’s 70th birthday. Conveniently, this milestone arrives just days before Billy’s 60th and months before Vincent’s 80th, so that the three men present, and their wives, are ripe for discussions about mortality—and, as it happens, carnality.
In an early scene, Jer, a professor and author, toasts Sunny, “who nightly warms the cockles of my heart,” and one friend quips, “And the heartles (sic) of your cock.” Lest any audience members not be cringing yet, Jer responds, “No small thing,” setting up the inevitable comeback, from another pal: “So we’ve heard.” Later, the women gather to talk girl stuff, contemplating where they could pick up younger men. “Home Depot,” suggests Darla, Vincent’s wife. “They have everything.” After a short beat, Michiko, Billy’s wife, asks, ““Do you guys ever watch porn?”
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★ review here.]
But Hill‘s focus is not so much sex as intimacy, and it’s in pondering the distinction and tension between the two that Tucker begins to find his groove. It turns out that the friends are hatching a plan to live together, commune-like, on the farmhouse—a rather trite nod to the ’60s counter-culture roots that bind them, age differences notwithstanding, but also a strategy to provide mutual support as the indignities of age encroach. The only holdout is Jer, who we glean has trouble sharing, and not just where square feet are concerned. As played by Mark Blum, he emits a subtle arrogance (and less subtle irritability) that grows more pronounced as details pertinent to his relationship with Sunny are revealed.
Eikenberry, still lovely and sharp, is ideally cast as Sunny, who represents the incomplete social and sexual progress made by her generation. Hailed as their “queen” by the group, she has nonetheless been overshadowed by and in at least some respects subservient to her husband, processes in which she has been complicit, and Eikenberry makes her realization of this accessible and poignant.
Though Vincent and Billy are also alpha figures outside the home—the former as an accomplished painter, the latter as bassist in a band of some renown—their marriages emerge as more evolved. There’s a genuine, affecting chemistry between Billy, played by an impish Mark Linn-Baker (bearing some resemblance to baby-boomer rock icon David Crosby, with a perceptible paunch and graying hair that’s too long in some places and absent in others) and the deceptively flighty Michiko (a lissome, goofy Jodi Long), and between Vincent and Darla, who are imbued with great warmth and wit by the marvelous John Glover and Ellen Parker.
But Tucker’s most moving, least predictable touch may be his refusal to give up easily on Sunny and Jer, the latter in particular. Anyone who’s been in a relationship for a certain length of time, and it needn’t be multiple decades, knows that candid communication with the person you love most can be more difficult than it is with a perfect stranger. When Sunny laments that she and Jer are “wrapped up head to toe in all the things we never said to each other,” she is accepting some responsibility for her plight, rather than choosing the simpler and trendier path of dismissing her admittedly obnoxious, flawed partner as a sexist oppressor.
“Love is a dangerous business,” as Billy observes. “‘Cause you’re always flirting with losing yourself.” It’s in acknowledging both the beauty of this and the importance of hanging on that Fern Hill finally rises above the banality that threatens to topple it.
Fern Hill opened September 19, 2019, at 59E59 and runs through October 20. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
