If two shows can constitute a trend, then the latter half of 2014 is turning into the Year of the Desperate Woman Waiting for a Bus. In Martyna Majok’s “Ironbound,” produced in August with Steppenwolf’s First Look Repertory, we saw the same woman over 20 years at a bus stop in a desolate stretch of Elizabeth, N.J. In Hamish Linklater’s “The Vandal,” now in its local premiere with Steep Theatre Company, it all happens in one night. But what a night!
Linklater, whose acting resume includes a stint in last season’s CBS sitcom “The Crazy Ones,” made his playwriting debut with “The Vandal” in 2013. It’s a compact work that, particularly in director Shade Murray’s pinpoint-precise staging, offers a piquant and poignant portrait of life on the downslope, after the universal accountant has toted up far more emotional losses than gains for us and we begin to wonder if it might not be better to settle for pennies on the dollar. And though a late-in-the-play twist strains a little too hard for profundity, the three actors find the bruised hearts at the center of Linklater’s Beckett-lite meditation.
Kendra Thulin is the Woman, shivering on a bench in Kingston, N.Y. She’s soon joined by a loquacious Boy (an endearing Jack Miggins), who ruminates on their existential coordinates — the bus stop is in a triangle between a hospital, a graveyard and a liquor store — so you’ve got “the dying, the dead, the drunk.”
The Woman breaks through her suspicious reserve enough to tell him that she’s just come from visiting a friend in the hospital. He then tells her he’s just come from visiting a friend’s grave and delivers a tragicomic (at least as Miggins tells it) roll call of the deaths that have decimated his classmates — from heroin overdoses to suicide to car crashes. Also, he’d love some beer, if the Woman wouldn’t mind buying it for him.
The Man (Alex Gillmor) who runs the shop throws a monkey wrench in the plans. He tells her that the Boy is his son, Robert. And that he has a habit of coaxing strangers to buy him beer. He gets the Woman to open up even more about just what was going on at that hospital, especially when her ID and her credit card don’t match up.
The big personal revelations in Linklater’s script really aren’t the main attraction here. It’s the small observations about grief that stab home with great effect. In a scene in the cemetery, where the Man and the Woman end up, finishing off the last of the six-pack, Gillmor’s Man wonders why anger must always be part of a “process” of acceptance. “Anger is a stand-alone for me,” he declares.
Thulin’s Woman doesn’t so much veer between cynicism and anguish as weave them together into one seamless garment that offers precious little comfort from the emotional elements. When the Man tells her, “You’re young for a widow,” she deadpans, “That has got to be the worst compliment.” Her description of the drawn-out death — the long goodbye — of her late husband is heart-wrenching in its naked honesty.
Though it’s short, Linklater’s play does feel a little whimsically indulgent at points, as when the Boy goes into a metaphysical analysis of Doritos dust. But Murray knows how to keep it on track without clubbing us over the head when the big reveals arrive. (Dan Stratton’s set, which uses a series of receding frames and simple cream-colored boxes, along with Heather Gilbert’s lighting, which runs the gamut from bruise-blue to autumnal orange, helps create a minimalist yet foreboding environment.)
What Linklater knows — and what this carefully crafted production conveys — is the knowledge that when our darkest truths come out, they usually do so in ways that we cannot anticipate and to people whom we might not even know that well. We’re all stuck waiting for the same bus in the end.
When: Through Nov. 8
Where: Steep Theatre Company, 1115 W. Berwyn Ave.
Running time: 80 minutes
Tickets: $25-$35 at 866-811-4111 or steeptheatre.com