Feb. 24--The setting is a cozy middle-class living room, like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog, if somewhat messier. Along the back wall are built-ins filled with books and attractive knickknacks. And at the center sits an overstuffed beige couch. About a third of the way through the play, the entire middle section of the couch is pushed out of the way as if someone took a chain saw to it, so that only the two ends remain with a gaping hole in the center.
That's an overt but effective visual metaphor in director Jess McLeod's production for Strawdog Theatre Company, symbolizing the emotional state of a married couple whose 7-year-old son has been missing (and presumed dead) for two years.
Fiona (Mary Winn Heider, who is aptly vulnerable but also wound tight from the get-go, leaving herself little room to shift gears) is paralyzed by her son's absence and unknown fate. Her husband Guy (John Ferrick, in a cipher of a role) seems less overtly affected by their loss than he is with Fiona's inability to become unstuck after some time has passed.
Complicating matters is Fiona's idealization of their child, who we see in flashbacks courtesy of a terrific Gabriel Franken, who also plays a number of extraneous roles in the play. Franken is tall and lanky and yet he becomes believably childlike in these scenes as a kid who perhaps lands somewhere on the autism spectrum.
The nature of his condition never specified ("Kids are meant to be a handful, he's fine," Fiona insists, teeth gritted), but parenting him was clearly an enormous challenge. Fiona was pushed to a breaking point one afternoon, when she stopped the car on the way home from school and got out and walked, just to get away from the kid for a few minutes, only to return and find him gone forever.
Playwright Lauren Yee is getting at something interesting here: parental guilt, particularly as experienced by those who have children with special needs, as well as the exhaustion and mistakes and self-recrimination that tend to follow. The occasional wish, never dared spoken aloud, that life would be so much easier unburdened of this child and his behavioral problems. And then to have that awful wish come true. This is a complicated premise and the stuff of good theater. Fiona's scenes as a parent have a strong energy to them (the struggle is real) and they are the best portions of the play, even if it is unclear how or why she is able to finally emerge from her funk by the end.
The bigger issue with "In a Word" is that it is full of wordplay that gums up the works. (The young boy mishears the phrase "a leave of absence" as a "leaf of absence" and so on.) It's self-consciously poetic and overwritten to the point of distracting from the play's core emotions. Trimming all of that out and shoring up the narrative a bit, unadorned of so many writerly curlicues, would provide more room for this compelling story of three people -- mother, father, child -- trapped in a loving if frequently unhappy alliance.
REVIEW: 'In a Word'
2 STARS
Through March 19 at Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway; tickets are $28 at 866-811-4111 or strawdog.org
