While the Berkshire Theatre Festival is producing The Miracle Worker in their mainstage space, the Unicorn Theatre is the venue for the premiere production of Eugene's Home, by Kathy Levin Shapiro.
Eugene is an adult with cerebral palsy. And an IQ of 135. Told in a series of flashbacks, the story chronicles the relationship between the young man and Talie, a young woman who tries to separate herself from a privileged background by dedicating herself to the lives of people like Eugene: the overlooked and the undervalued. Well-intentioned though it is, Eugene's Home nonetheless falls short of a satisfying evening in the theatre. The characters' lives are merely hinted at and offstage events, such as Talie's conflicts with her parents and her fiancé, and Eugene's complicated relationship with his mother, overwhelm much of the less compelling onstage action.
Shapiro does manage to dispel many myths surrounding the life of people disabled as Eugene is, but her primary focus is never clear enough for us to understand the play's overall purpose. And while the title implies that Eugene is the focal point, the truth is that Talie is far more intriguing though far less developed. Two further issues work to the play's disadvantage: the first is in the writing and the second is in the production itself.
The play evokes, and borrows from, a number of other stories that include disabled and disfigured characters -- Whose Life Is It, Anyway?, My Left Foot, The Elephant Man and Equus, among them. Perhaps we are too unfamiliar with such characters to avoid comparisons. The fact is that a young man determined to decide his own fate regardless of the consequences, a therapist who falls in love with the man beneath the frightening exterior thereby awakening her own passions, and a reversal of images -- the deformed man sees the truth that the beautiful woman is too emotionally paralyzed to confront -- are echoes of other stories that we know too well to overlook.
Secondly, the staging of the play is cumbersome without ever being illuminating. The flashbacks are presented as monologues by the woman, who speaks to several unseen characters. And the monologues are delivered in front of a white drape behind which set pieces are arranged for dialogue scenes that follow. The repetitious use of this staging convention serves only to separate us from the characters' increasingly complex interactions. Indeed, the stop-start rhythm provided by director Scott Schwartz undermines the energy established in one scene by the isolated monologue in the next.
Shapiro further gets in her own way by imposing a couple of episodes between Talie and an unseen female character who asks pointed questions in a sonorous voice. Talie's repeated, "Who are you?" is one of the rare moments when actor and audience share the same thought.
Arnie Burton plays the title role with absolute credibility and without any affectation. His approach is utterly unsentimental and, best of all, he never tries to solicit audience approval for his enormously strenuous work. Kelly McAndrew is less settled as Talie, but as I have noted earlier, the role is less well written. Perhaps more attention to why she has moved away from so easy a life and why she is so contemptuous of her mother's efforts at fundraising for worthy causes would give the actress something to work with. As it is, the script and the actor give us little more than a spoiled rich kid who uses the less fortunate to soothe her own guilt. That is a worthwhile theme to investigate, but the playwright has yet to determine if that is a theme she wishes to expand.
The Berkshire Theatre Festival continues to provide audiences with a mix of the familiar and the unknown. A play such as Eugene's Home is not a safe choice, after all, but the full house I experienced was absolutely prepared to listen to what they could not have known in advance. For that alone the management of the BTF is to be congratulated and encouraged.