When, if ever, is it appropriate for a therapist to lie to a patient? The standard answer: Never. But what if nurturing a falsehood is the only way to accommodate a patient’s life-sustaining delusions?
A highly irregular partnership unfolds in a bleak hospital room at the Walt Whitman Hospital on Long Island in 1945. Dr. Philip Cotton (Reed Birney) – urbane, a bit condescending – has been charged with helping a young man, Chester Bailey (Ephraim Birney, Reed’s son), deal with devastating injuries he incurred while working as a riveter at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Dr. Cotton is an accomplished professional clad in a brown tweed three-piece suit, Chester an awkward, frozen-in-time youth huddled in a ratty hospital-issue bathrobe (apt costuming by Toni-Leslie James). One is a bit world-weary; the other has been denied the opportunity ever to become so.
The set, masterfully engineered by John Lee Beatty, is a plain, prison-like room bare but for a bed and a desk. Look again and you’ll spot the wheelchair lurking stage left. The flyspace is transected by iron girders, which will serve triple duty as the hull of a warship, the lofty rafters of the old Penn Station, and the ceiling of a Luna Park dancehall, lavender-lit to evade the notice of potential warships lurking in the dark offshore.
Twenty-three-year-old Chester is a rarity among his demographic: a civilian, much to his chagrin. His over-protective mother, perhaps still in mourning for a daughter who died as an infant, was not about to let her remaining child court danger overseas, so she persuaded her husband to find Chester a safe, if not cushy, “reserved occupation” job. Think “Appointment in Samarra”: What befalls Chester in the hold of the ship is easily the equal of any catastrophe he might have encountered overseas.
This revelation arrives fairly early, about 10 minutes into a volley of monologues which gradually entwine Dr. Cotton’s relatively manageable recent trauma (divorce and ensuing separation from his young daughter) and Chester’s pre-traumatic reminiscences, conveyed with the gee-whiz affect of a kid permanently poised on the brink of adulthood. Chester’s can-do attitude will serve him well once their stories conjoin. Where others might experience the expected phantom pain of a missing appendage, Chester somehow continues to summon untrammeled hope and joy.
The backstory: During an otherwise disappointing night on the town (Chester was uncomfortable checking out Roseland in mufti: “I felt like garbage”), he gravitated to the grand railroad station and found himself transfixed by a young lady manning a newsstand. The sound of her voice (faintly Southern) and the sight of her red hair – “Dark like mahogany. Like rust.” – thrust him into an immediate crush, one that may have to last him a lifetime.
As Chester tries to piece together a persona after key parts of his body have ceased to function, this one fragmentary glimpse of a potential dream girl may be all he has to go on. Ultimately Dr. Cotton, who has relationship issues of his own, gives up insisting on regular reality checks. He even manages to transmute a further injury that Chester undergoes while hospitalized (the description is non-PC but period-appropriate) into something of a fairy tale, the kind that allows for a circumscribed happily ever after.
Some audiences may balk at this roseate denouement – that and the writerly flourishes that author Joseph Dougherty occasionally allows himself in order to lend a scene a poignant twist. Other viewers – I’m in this camp – will thrill to the eloquent volte-faces and surprise cross-references.
Tackling an extremely challenging role, the young Birney shows himself to be easily as talented as his elder. He starts the play by connecting to the audience viscerally: his blue eyes, bright as lasers, engage ours as he shares anodyne reminiscences in a convincing mid-century Brooklyn accent. When the truth of Chester’s condition breaks through, it’s wrenching to observe. This grievously injured young man is no longer among us; he’s in a world we can’t even imagine. But imagine it young Birney does, getting to the heart of the kind of inconceivable pain that life can inflict at random.
Dougherty’s play, under Ron Lagomarsino’s deft direction, speaks to the unease that suffuses our post-pandemic attempts to resume a “normal” life. Random acts of violence have us all on edge, and no one, whatever the supposed protections of wealth and class, can claim safe harbor. Any one of us, at any given time, might benefit from the essential kindness of a flawed hero like Dr. Cotton.
Chester Bailey opened October 19, 2022, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through November 20. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
