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| Julia Greer and Bruce McKenzie. Photo credit: Travis Emery Hackett |
Having been displaced by the closing of the Connelly Theater due to censorship by the venue's owner, the Archdiocese of New York, playwright Kallan Dana's
RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR, presented by The Hearth, is making its world premiere at A.R.T./New York, giving audiences the chance to see this adventurous, affecting production as originally planned. The play expertly uses absurdity, including breakdowns in logic and language, as a vehicle for resonant emotional authenticity - much, perhaps, like its protagonists mask their personal turmoil with displays of bonhomie. The resulting experience is, in multiple senses, quite a trip.
The literal trip in question structures the play: an unnamed dad (Bruce McKenzie) and his unnamed daughter (
Julia Greer) are taking a road trip together from New York, where the daughter now lives, to California, where she was raised and where her father has a storage unit that needs attending to. As they prepare to set off, the dad relays that he has been given some minor health recommendations from his doctor, the daughter tells him about how much she loves her job and her current boyfriend, and the heaviest subject matter is whether they should indulge in Cheetos on the way. As they move through the states, dad and daughter play word games, including one centered on palindromes, like the one that serves as the play's title. These games echo a wide-ranging playfulness with language that characterizes and enlivens
RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR as a whole; and the fact that this current road trip repeats one from the daughter's childhood provides one instance among others in the play of forward and backward being the same - a temporal palindrome, as it were. At some point in the duo's cross-country progress, we notice some dark references begin to slide by within the daughter's generally chipper-sounding torrents of language. Over time, we come to find that she is struggling more than is at first apparent, and by the end, we are left to reconsider everything that came before - like why people keep mistaking dad and daughter for a couple, or the ramifications of what at first seems just like a weird, warm relationship between the two, or even why dad, in this word-focused play, begins to have trouble with his own words. At one fairly early point, the daughter wants reassurance that she was born good, a musing that seems innocent enough at the time. At a very late point, the dad expresses a wonderfully judged, memorable image of how parents can become part of us, even the parts we wish wouldn't, taking up a kind of internal residence. With dad and daughter nearing New York again - retracing in reverse a route that was already itself a retracing of a past route - the speed of transitions and a general fragmentation increase as the show approaches its denouement and the climax's vital question: "Is it too late?"
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| Camila Canó-Flaviá, Ryan King, and Julia Greer. Photo credit: Travis Emery Hackett |
Despite much of the action taking place inside a car, the actors stand and move around freely for the overwhelming majority of the show, a smart choice that not only offers more visual interest than people sitting in chairs pretending to hold a steering wheel but also allows for visual and spatial coding of how characters are relating to one another at any given moment. Indeed, the production is replete with inventive staging decisions, including a clever use of space in a scene at a Wendy's drive-through that only adds to its aura of unreality; the way that the characters' locations are projected, moving around, reversing, and so on, as appropriate; and even the way that the set itself, designed by Brittany Vasta as a big, square orange shag pit, can equally evoke a car's footwell or a family living room.
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| Ryan King, Julia Greer, Camila Canó-Flaviá. Photo credit: Travis Emery Hackett |
The play approaches its concerns with familial influence and inheritance, guilt and self-castigation, with a phantasmagorical fluidity that encompasses past and future, imagined and real, and even individual identities, which we again might link to palindromes and their sameness from different angles. From whatever angle, McKenzie delivers an excellent performance that lucidly conveys the dad's flawed humanity, maintaining our sympathy even as we must reimagine the central relationship into which he and Greer so adeptly draw us. Greer is equally magnetic, whether spilling the daughter's dialogue through an omnipresent grin or leaning into her physicality in a sequence of psychosexual human puppeteering involving the Ragged Man, played by Ryan King, who at another point, plays a different father with a different daughter. This other daughter is played with impressive impassivity, bordering on creepiness, by Camila Canó-Flaviá, who, like King, shifts deftly among very different characters, as does Jessica Frey, whose Wendy's employee Wendy is perhaps one of the more Lynchian of her multiple roles. Dad and daughter may end
RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR by returning to where they started, but taking this journey alongside them will surely leave the audience in a different place than they began.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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