Review: Adult Film's "Where We're Born" Is a Fantastic Rebirth for a Timely Play

Where We're Born

Written by Lucy Thurber

Directed by David Garelik

Presented by Jamie Coffey and Adult Film at a private studio in the Ridgewood area

January 16-February 2, 2025

L to R: Trevor Clarkson, Michael Darby, Jamie Coffey, Taylor Petracek, & Michelle Moriarty
Lucy Thurber's play Where We're Born was published in 2008, the period of financialized capitalism's most recent national and global meltdown, but the resentments expressed by some of its white working-class characters about being looked down upon by people who think they're better and about racialized Others having it easier than "real Americans" have if anything intensified–or at least been amplified–in the intervening years. Adult Film's fabulous new production of Where We're Born, one of five works that make up Thurber's award-winning cycle The Hill Town Plays, fittingly comes at a historical juncture in which such grievances have helped to usher in what promises to be a period of further intensified income inequality, deregulation, and rule by a billionaire oligarchy. But while socioeconomic status is the unavoidable matrix in which the play's characters live out their struggles, these struggles–with family, with sexuality, with identity, with belonging–are multiple and interrelated.

Where We're Born takes place in a small town in Western Massachusetts, more specifically at the home that Tony (Taylor Petracek), a possessive cheater type, shares with his girlfriend, Franky (Jamie Coffey), who works as a waitress. Tony's 19-year-old cousin Lily (Michelle Moriarty) has come home from attending Amherst College to visit and is staying with Tony, who has been like a mentor and a best friend to Lily, whose home life is suggested to be less than ideal, throughout her life. Often to be found at Tony's as well are his friends Drew (Trevor Clarkson), possessed of a thoughtful, sensitive side, very religious parents, and a crush on Franky; and Vin (Michael Darby), a self-identified real American, something of a player, and arguably the most comfortable with their routine, an endless cycle of work (except for the unemployed Drew), cigarettes, weed, and alcohol. Lily is seen as the one who will make it out of this town and this cycle, but, interwoven with her class-based reservations about belonging at Amherst, she questions at one point whether she is merely playing out how others imagine her to be rather than what she actually wants. Lily may be the one most overtly wrestling with self-definition, but all of the characters here are looking for love, validation, and/or a sense of being wanted, as well as (and not mutually exclusively) ways to stave off boredom, all of which is complicated by the tangled vectors of desire that emerge over the course of the play.

Where We're Born opens with Drew and Vin gossiping about someone in town being caught in the literal act of committing adultery, foreshadowing the structural and thematic return of infidelity later in the play. Sex takes on for these characters, among other functions, an aspect of self-commodification as seemingly one of the only things that they have to trade with one another. The intimate, non-traditional space occupied by Adult Film is a perfect fit for this play, feeling almost immersive at times. A lawn chair delineates the outside of Tony's home, a bed and dresser the bedroom, a battered couch the den or living room, while the space's actual restroom stands in for Tony's bathroom and the lighting guides us from one location to another. Evidence of the group's penchant for smoking and drinking shares space with Red Sox and Patriots décor and a slightly chipped decorative owl, and the overall naturalism of the staging is broken only by an angry suffusion of red light during a few important moments later in the performance. The production creates an appreciable sense of contained pressure–the second half is quieter overall but in a modulation rather than loss of the tension(s) of the first–and the pressurized environment of Tony's home represents a microcosm of the town itself.

Lily, at least in some ways, may be too immature for what she starts to get herself into, but her attempts to figure out and to get what she wants also perhaps present a needed, even admirable, if doomed, counterbalance to a fatalistic acceptance of one's place: an idealism that contrasts Franky's resigned (yet still painful) realism. These are compellingly complex characters–even Tony, who does love Franky and Lily and demonstrates some self-awareness about his behaviors even as he is not above a little physical assault to enforce his point of view–and the cast rivetingly embodies them in all of their depth and nuance. Clarkson and Darby bring absorbing, sometimes unexpected touches of subtlety to Tony's hard-partying friends. Coffey is phenomenal as a woman trying to keep things together while keeping a sense of self-worth; Moriarty delivers a superb turn as Lily, alternately assured and impulsive, naive and perceptive; and an outstanding Petracek makes it clear how those around Tony can both fear and love him. The authenticity of these performances is enhanced by their physicality, with touch expressing violence and control (there is some impressive fight choreography) as much as tenderness and sensuality. As long as we get theatre as good as this, 2025 won't be all bad.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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