It’s difficult to know quite what
to make of Harper Regan by Simon Stephens, the British import at the Atlantic being given a new American production directed by Gaye
Taylor Upchurch. And that’s because the
stakes for the title character, played with an understated, existential
bewilderment by Mary McCann are
mostly internal and unarticulated.
The
play starts with a long scene in which she endures a slow torment by her boss (Jordan
Lage) in the wake of her having requested time
off to visit her dying father in hospital. A request he refuses with sadistic
pretense of possible reconsideration.
She
next makes a random friendship (of a sort) with a 17-year old black boy on the
bridge overlooking her Uxbridge neighborhood; we’re not sure what she intends
by it; neither is the boy and, so it seems, neither does she.
We
next meet her unemployed husband Seth (Gareth Saxe) and college-student daughter Sarah (Madeline
Martin) both of whom depend on Harper’s
paycheck; but far from being depicted as leeches or a burden, they are
introduced as loving, normal father and daughter, with Regan’s relationship to
them seeming likewise nothing much out of the ordinary. There is, to be sure,
an out-of-the-ordinary context to Seth’s financial dependence on
Regan, but that’s not so much as hinted at in these early sequences, nor is it
revealed for quite some time.
I
could continue listing the vignettes—which include a guy in a bar (Peter
Scanavino), a guy in a hotel (Christopher Innvar) and her Mom (Mary Beth Piel), among others, but it’s not mine to spoil the
lowkey-picaresque narrative line; the point is Harper is just a middle-aged
working wife and mother going through a general-purpose midlife crisis. I
suppose if anything makes the play remarkable, it’s that she crams a few weeks’
worth of renegade behavior into two days. But that doesn’t make her special;
merely industrious.
Everything
about the production is perfectly respectable, and in terms of character
delineation and holding your attention, so is the play…but nothing about it
feels necessary, revealing, urgent or resonant, because in making Harper a
wandering cipher, Mr. Stephens hasn’t properly staked out or defined the
thematic territory we’re meant to respond to.
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