[ssba]
A Small Fire
Reviewed by Jenny Lower
Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre
Through May 31
RECOMMENDED:
“This is a horror story,” murmurs a voice from the darkness in A Small Fire, directed by Alana Dietze — the latest outing from the Echo Theater Company. The voice belongs to Emily (Lily Knight), a middle-aged woman who succumbs to an undefined medical condition that gradually chips away at her senses, upending her construction business, marriage, and personal agency.
The production bears more than a passing resemblance to The Other Place, a Road Theatre production across town which also features an older woman’s declining faculties and its effect on her family. But where Juliana’s strategy, portrayed by Taylor Gilbert, is to rage against the dying of the light, A Small Fire is quieter, and for me, may be the more enduring play. Its medical underpinnings may seem more surreal and baroque, but its depiction of the power dynamics in marriage cuts to the bone.
Amanda Knehans’s scenic design doesn’t try to fill the space, letting the bedroom and living room exist as islands on a stage that feels ever more cavernous and desolate as the play progresses. The rugs are set at odd angles to the furniture, a harbinger of the disorder to come. It starts small: Erin, a brusque go-getter who runs her own construction company in the New York area, loses her sense of smell in the days leading up to her daughter Jenny’s (Mackenzie Kyle) wedding. Her husband John (Michael Mantell), a low-key, human-resources type who (according to his wife) lacks any imagination, doesn’t panic. But as Emily’s condition worsens, her world contracts, with John eventually remaining her last tether to the outside world.
Writer Adam Bock has said in interviews that he wanted to explore how illness can tilt the balance of a marriage, how one partner can get weaker while the other draws strength. In different hands, this play could be about the human capacity to hate feebleness and how we sometimes domineer or subjugate even those we think we love. In this story, it’s the long-suffering John, who easily concedes his backseat role in securing the family’s finances, who suddenly takes center stage. Instead of horror, we get profound gentleness mediated through Mantell’s constant, calm onstage presence. “It can be a disaster, or an opportunity,” another character councils John. “It’s a chance to change stuff—stuff you may not have been able to change before.”
Knight brings tremendous empathy and warmth to her portrayal of Emily, her vitality quieted but undimmed by her incapacitation. As she degenerates, we catch brief windows of insight into her interiority, like the haunted monologue above. Knight is a master at toggling between Emily’s helpless anger and her childlike, timid gratitude for her husband’s assistance. At the same time, we see the roots of the conflicts that make it difficult for Jenny to accept her mother’s sudden fragility.
Darrett Sanders, sharing his role with Stephen O’Mahoney, steals his scenes as the big-voiced, big-hearted Billy, Emily’s construction foreman who raises pigeons. And since Bock seems to enjoy subverting gender stereotypes, he gives us an unexpected backstory that complicates and complements our perception of Billy’s place in the story.
A final scene, beautifully lit by Matt Richter, answers a question that throughout the play has only lurked in the background: Is a wreck of a life still worth living?
In the end, Bock overplays his hand: instead of a horror tale, he’s given us the most exquisite of love stories.
Echo Theater Company at the Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave., Atwater Village; through May 31. (310) 307-3753, www.echotheatercompany.com
