Everything is broken.
When we first meet Maggie, the smalltown matriarch played to perfection by Judith Ivey, she has just knocked over the display case containing her long-dead father’s pocketwatch, shattering the vitrine and cracking the watch’s crystal. The cordless phone she’s talking on needs a good thwack to make it work, and the mining museum she runs is packed up, its contents being thrown out. Her son, Joe (Edmund Donovan, in a remarkable performance), who used to lead tours of the disused mine, is mentally disabled; her estranged husband left her for a man; and Billy (Ken Narasaki), the long-ago boyfriend who will soon turn up, is widowed after a loveless marriage, father to an alcoholic, and suffering a relapse of the cancer that’s already left him impotent.
Oh yeah: And the town of Clements, Idaho, where Maggie’s family has lived for generations, where the defunct mine is about the only attraction left, has voted to dissolve itself rather than let second-home gentrifiers from California take control of local government and enforce a new ordinance requiring the locals to clean up their yards. No more streetlights, no more traffic light, no more upkeep for the mine and so no more tours. “It’s like—they’re just burning it all to the ground,” says Joe. “It’s so stupid.”
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
It’s tempting to call Greater Clements, the quietly devastating new play by Samuel D. Hunter that opened tonight in a Lincoln Center Theater production at the Mitzi Newhouse, an extended metaphor for Trump-era America. We’re in a time, after all, when it seems like everything’s broken and that the people in charge want to burn everything to the ground, stupidly. But that would be a disservice to both Hunter’s play, which is even bleaker than that, and to its characters and the excellent actors playing them, who poignantly render a human tragedy that’s much more specific than mere allegory.
The most salient fact is that things in Clements aren’t newly terrible. They’ve been that way forever, and Hunter regularly reminds us of that. In Maggie’s childhood, her father left the mine and moved his family a few hours away to Carmike Falls, where he got a job teaching. That’s where Maggie and Billy met and dated, and from which Maggie’s dad took the family back to Clements when he thought she might marry the Japanese Billy. So sainted dad was a racist. Billy — like so many Japanese — lived in Carmike Falls because he’d been brought to an internment camp nearby. So governmental racism is nothing new, either. And when Maggie’s dad returned to Clements, the mine hired him back as an entry-level worker, working the night shift at $2.26 per hour. He worked there until the day he died — burned in an infamous mining disaster a mile under the surface. So the indignities of corporate capitalism are nothing new, either.
Over the course of a quick-moving three acts and almost three hours, Hunter introduces us to Maggie and Joe, to Maggie’s nattering bore of a best friend, Olivia (Nina Hellman), and then Maggie’s old beau, Billy, who stops by on his way to take his granddaughter, Kel (Haley Sakamoto), to mock legislature — and to see if he and Maggie might finally, late in the life, find happiness together. He unpacks the crap in everyone’s life: Joe’s troubles and the problems they’ve caused; Maggie’s disappointment and exhaustion; even Kel’s fatalistic sadness, which first seems like teenage ennui but eventually begins to seem a reasonably reaction to knowing her dad’s alcoholism will get worse and so will her grandfather’s cancer.
There’s a slow build, as Hunter reveals the history of the town, the history of the mine and the fire, the history of all these sad people. It pays off with an extraordinary third act, with powerful scenes for Ivey, Donovan, and Sakamoto (and played by those three with devastating emotion). Director Davis McCallum, Hunter’s frequent collaborator, gives the action a restraint that lets those revelatory moments land explosively. And, finally, two lovely codas drive home the play’s underlying point: One reminds us that, shitty as things might be, we have no choice but to keep going, and keep trying. The other drives home the truth that, even so, there’s no guarantee things will get better.
One directorial choice, however, is this production’s biggest flaw. McCallum, working with set designer Dane Laffrey, has given in to that LCT temptation to build a giant, moving set piece when a static one would do just fine. (Recall when the Beaumont stage slid back during the overture of South Pacific, to reveal the orchestra underneath, or when nearly the entire set was elevated into the flies at Slowgirl, LCT3’s inaugural production, for a scene in the open jungle.) Here, there is a chunk of playing space that sometimes sits at stage level and sometimes rises overhead, to create a mine-like feeling underneath. It’s a nice effect, but it requires vertical rails at its perimeter, on which the deck rides up and down. The prominent rail at downstage center nicely blocks the view of, depending on the moment, actor’s faces, that watch displayed on a shelf, and other goings on. Maybe it’s intentional: Here, even the sightlines are broken.
Greater Clements opened December 9, 2019, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and runs through January 19, 2020. Tickets and information: lct.org
