Kirsten Hansen (Photo by Rodrigo Altamirano)
Reviewed by Socks Whitmore
Bonny Blue Productions @ Zephyr Theatre
Through Aug 24
RECOMMENDED
While the August heat continues to rage in sunny Los Angeles, inside the Zephyr Theatre the scene is set for a winter whiteout. Bonny Blue Productions presents Cindy Lou Johnson’s 1989 play Brilliant Traces, a slow burning two-hander about a runaway bride holed up with a taciturn recluse in his mountain cabin during a snowstorm. Over the course of 80 minutes, these two strangers repel and attract one another in a mesmerizing psychological dance, keeping audiences on the edge of their seat as the pair unravels. The unassuming premise soon gives way to heavy conversations around nervous breakdowns, suicidality, dementia, the death of one’s child, and other complex traumas.
The play begins with Rosannah DeLuce (Kirsten Hansen) stumbling into the cabin with nothing but her frayed wedding gown and disintegrating heels, rambling an impressively long neurotic monologue to seemingly thin air before promptly passing out onto the floor. The energy shifts dramatically to a captivating silence as the cabin’s inhabitant, Henry Harry (Weston Barnwell), stirs from a previously inanimate pile of blankets and begrudgingly nurses Rosannah back to health. The contrast between a gruff man of few words and an emotionally unstable yet sincere woman creates a powerful tension, delicately strung across long emotional beats without words. The use of humor and subtext in the silence is masterful, elicited by Jenna Rossman’s thoughtful direction through slight gestures and facial expressions.
When Rosannah wakes, the oscillation between awkward conversation and intense verbal sparring that follows is unpredictable and thrilling. Henry’s unrelenting attempts to understand Rosannah’s mysterious arrival provide an anchor in reality to her phantasmic descriptions of her journey, resulting in a complicated mutual attraction partially built on the open wounds of Henry’s past. Both characters self-describe as “not very socialized,” sharing a tendency for impulse and defensiveness that is somehow endearing — watching Henry soften from nearly nonverbal to laughing and gentle embraces makes for truly riveting theater.
The simple furnishings and skeleton wood rafters are a solid basis for the stage’s transformation into a rural Alaskan abode, but the lack of creative lighting design, projections, or prominent sound design does leave something to be desired in communicating the sense of freezing weather and remote isolation; the temperatures are primarily embodied by the actors through Rossman’s attention to detail in the staging. The play shows its age a bit with a passing quip about whether Rosannah’s fiancé “used to be a woman,” which may raise eyebrows from contemporary audiences familiar with the necessary nuance of today’s gender politics, but the writing is otherwise timeless. The central themes of losing loved ones and the fear of being forgotten are uniquely executed and make for an unpredictable, compelling presentation of the messier side of humanity.
As actor Weston Barnwell describe the show in his program bio: “A play about loneliness and isolation in rural Alaska put on in a metropolis full of loneliness and isolation seems about as fitting as can be.”
Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., W. Hollywood. Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; thru Aug 24. https://brillianttraces.ludus.com. Runtime: 80 minutes with no intermission.
