Sovereign Body

Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris

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Don’t let Emilie Beck’s new play fool you. It looks and sounds like it’s about a Pasadena family who happen to be atheists, but its poetical tentacles reach so much further beyond the tropes of the play’s squabbling upper-middle-class tribe. After all, the play isn’t just set in Pasadena, it’s set in Pasadena during “a time of drought.” That’s the first hint that this play has theology in its heart.

At first, the play looks and sounds like it’s firmly lodged within the rites of a Thanksgiving dinner – the setting of the play’s opening scene.  But there’s this fellow named The Man (Jack Millard) hanging around. When he crosses the stage, he’s like a dancer, seen only by the drama’s protagonist, a restaurant owner and chef named Anna (Taylor Gilbert). We learn soon enough that Anna’s ongoing professional distractions (she takes calls from the restaurant even while she’s preparing the family dinner) have been pissing off her 20-year-old daughter, Callie (Dani Stephens), for months. Perhaps Callie would be pissed off even if her mother paid more attention to her. Sometimes 20-year-olds are pissed off because they simply need to be pissed off. Callie will go away to India to “find herself.” The squalor she eventually finds in the streets there will provide her a much deeper reason to be pissed off than her mother’s obsession with her own restaurant.

Anna’s mother (Bryna Weiss) mediates the domestic tensions between her daughter and granddaughter, which leads one to believe that Beck’s play is little more than a soap opera. But it’s much more than a soap opera. It’s a dramatic poem about strife that delicately lays out its case through a blend of realism and surrealism, artfully staged by Scott Alan Smith.

For instance, Callie has a perky younger sister, Evie (Hanna Mae Sturges), who’s studying science, as though science will somehow reverse the causes of human misery. In juxtaposition to Evie’s philosophy, and on a raised platform far removed from the Thanksgiving dinner (set by Stephen Gifford), the children’s father, Tal (Kevin McCorkle), sits sculpting clay objects. He even got an NEA grant to do so – specifically, to use clay from war-torn regions in order to fuse them. One of his slabs of clay comes from his own back garden, he says. How can blood-streaked clay from Afghanistan have anything to do with clay gouged out from a Pasadena garden?

Also in juxtaposition to Evie’s scientific inclinations are her uncle Ben (John Cragen) and his born-again-Christian wife (Anna Carini), whom Ben defends.

Everybody’s theology is put to the test when the diabolical, invisible Man woos Anna, overpowers her, rendering her akin to a stroke victim, or a woman with Parkinson’s Disease.

Abruptly, everything in her body and speech that Anna took for granted is now a labor. She’s rendered almost helpless for a reason as arbitrary and pointless as a car crash or a terrorist’s bomb. Sometimes no matter where or who you are, the sky simply falls. And that is what unites us, across eons and continents: That we all live with this capriciousness of destiny. So that near the play’s end, when Tal blends his clay from war-torn regions with the clay from his Pasadena garden, the object he creates is an homage to all human suffering made equal, and to the way we must all endure it. And that is theological.

None of this would be half as moving, if not for the uniformly beautiful performances.  Carni’s zealous Christian could easily be a parody, but is instead a tender, sensitive and humane portrayal. Naturally, it’s Anna’s play, and Gilbert’s interpretation of a woman angry and bereft is a kind of monument.

Road Theatre Company at the Lankershim Arts Center, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; extended through June 7.  (866) 811-4111, https://roadtheatre.org