As those of us who have recently reached the midcentury point know all too well, when those older folks from your childhood told you “it all goes so fast,” they weren’t kidding. Sometimes it can feel like you’ve disappeared into a land behind a mirror — the person you see staring out still seems like your kid self, but the growing weight of personal history and loss clouds your perspective.
Playwright Jordan Harrison tackles that paradox in “The Grown-Up,” now in a local premiere with Shattered Globe Theatre under Krissy Vanderwarker’s crisp direction. It’s generally well-acted and Grant Sabin’s spare but imaginative setting provides a nice playground for this 75-minute show. But even at that brief length, Harrison’s self-conscious whimsy starts feeling belabored well before the end. Labeling the characters as “Actor A” etc., all the way to “Actor F” exhibits the rather exhausting look-at-how-meta-I’m-being nature of the script.
Kevin Viol is Kai (or “Actor A”), the protagonist named after the boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” He “disappears” as a 10-year-old while playing hide-and-seek with his sister Annabelle (Christina Gorman) at their grandparents’ house. A magic crystal doorknob opens portals to various scenes in the aspiring writer’s life — from a meeting with a capricious television executive (Joseph Wiens, or “Actor E”) to his late-in-life marriage to another man (Ben Werling, who also plays the warmhearted grandfather). Interspersed are scenes from a “pirate ship” which allegedly provide the genesis for the doorknob and a confounding subplot involving the executive’s Adderall-addled assistant (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel). Through it all, Gorman’s forthright Annabelle searches for her lost sibling.
In a tribute-dinner scene honoring 88-year-old Kai’s screenwriting triumphs, a speaker mentions the “righteous fabulism” of his work. One senses that Harrison is, in essence, clearing his throat and pointing to himself here.
But I couldn’t help comparing this relatively thin tale with his fellow dramatic fabulist Noah Haidle’s “Smokefall,” which has had two runs in recent years at the Goodman Theatre. That play too involved disappearance, lifelong searches for lost family members, regret and meditations on the fleeting nature of our mortality. But where Haidle hit home runs with sorrowful insights, Harrison (himself a writer for “Orange is the New Black”) is hitting at easy-target whiffle balls. (Did you know that Hollywood is filled with shallow-yet-desperate people?) Despite the stylistic flourishes, the grown-up stakes aren’t there.
REVIEW: The Grown-Up by Shattered Globe Theatre
2 STARS
Through May 23, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.; $33 at 773-975-8150 or theaterwit.org.
Reid is a freelance writer.