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Luna Gale
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
Goodman Theatre (Chicago) at the Kirk Douglas Theatre
Through Dec. 21
RECOMMENDED:
While institutions and their procedural processes may be the backbone of our social organization, they can also tend to compound the dysfunctions they confront with systemic failings of their own, whether they be the police, schools, courts, or in the case of Rebecca Gilman’s engrossing drama Luna Gale, child protective services. This transplant by the Center Theatre Group of its premiere production by Chicago’s Goodman Theatre from earlier this year bears acute relevance to Los Angeles audiences, beset as we have been by years of abject inadequacy in our County’s foster care supervision.
In a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that could plausibly be anywhere, veteran social worker Caroline (a commanding Mary Beth Fisher) reports to an emergency room where the dangerously dehydrated eponymous infant girl has been belatedly taken by her meth-addled 19-ish parents, Karlie (Reyna de Courcy) and Peter (Colin Sphar).
An expert hand at playing the bad cards she’s dealt, Caroline keeps Luna out of foster case by placing her with Karlie’s mother Cindy (Jordan Baker), an end-of-days evangelical, but for all her efforts to provide the services Karlie and Peter need to rehabilitate themselves to resume custody, she cannot manage to get them into an essential rehab program, shunting them off instead into inconsequential “support” groups which lack lengthy waitlists caused by inadequate funding.
When, under the guidance of her charismatic and clever pastor Jay (Richard Thierot), Cindy seeks an expedited procedure to secure custody for herself (and for her granddaughter’s immortal soul), Karlie’s freaked-out panic threatens to derail their prospects for recovery, and a sympathetic Caroline seeks to stage-manage their defense, crossing the professional line from assistance to adversarial advocacy.
This makes for naturalistic social-issue drama of a highly accomplished order, with densely woven plot turns, fascinatingly flawed characters, a nuanced awareness of hard realities, and some genuine moral complexity. Gilman (2001 Pulitzer finalist The Glory of Living, Spinning Into Butter) has had six plays commissioned originally produced by the Goodman, and their collaboration bespeaks a thoroughgoing mutual understanding between company and playwright.
Director Robert Falls, its artistic head since 1986 (whose last work here was a well-judged premiere of Beth Henley’s The Jacksonian), brings unstinting clarity to the messy relationships and mixed motivations, assisted by a cast of uncommon cohesion that has had ample opportunity to settle deeply into their roles.
Gilman vividly conveys the slippery slope of good intentions, and how easily they become the pretext for scurrilous behavior. Everyone in Luna Gale means well and intends to do good, yet everyone also shows themselves capable of situational ethics and morally queasy actions. Particularly fascinating is the testy conflict between Cindy and her younger male supervisor, Cliff (Erik Hellman), in which personal biases are gradually unmasked and then exploited for defensive advantage and assertive reversal. At times, Gilman evokes some distorted, bureaucratic mirror-world to David Mamet’s, ostensibly decorous rather than scabrous, yet essentially just as baldly competitive and treacherously self-defeating.
Through it all, Gilman’s point seems to be that the crush of the system itself, with its guidelines and jargon and checklists, relentlessly grinds down everyone in its maw. In reaction, all are compelled to match wits at gaming that system, ultimately availing no one, not even the system itself, which prevails without making any consequential difference beyond protecting itself under a cloak of established procedures and prescriptions — ostensibly for the purpose of regularizing outcomes but without accounting for human prejudice or error.
Luna Gale exists comfortably within the realm of intelligent entertainment for a target audience of thoughtful theatergoers. Its ambitions are real, but notably circumscribed by the requisites of its conscientious carpentry. It’s really gratifying to have the Chicago production share the CTG stages with all creative hands intact. It would also be redeeming to the organization’s purpose to export our own local talent in equal measure.
Goodman Theatre at Center Theatre Group/Kirk Douglas Theatre,
8920 Washington Blvd., Culver City, Tues.-sat., 8 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 p.m.; Sun., 1 & 6:30 p.m.; through Dec. 21. (213) 628-2772, www.centertheatregroup.org
