If you really think about it, a
preponderance of comedy is built around suffering in one form or another—but
in Sons of the Prophet, playwright
Stephen Karem has decided to examine
suffering specifically, by piling it on
his hero, a young, gay Lebanese-American man, Joseph (Santiano
Fontana).
Formerly
a runner, Joseph is now enduring a shortage of cartilage in his knees and
several other thus-far undiagnosable symptoms. His father has recently died of
a heart attack following a car accident that was the result of a college
students’ prank, leaving Joseph to be the guardian of his likewise gay teenage
brother Charles (Chris Perfetti) who is
deaf in one ear; and the guardian of his ailing septuagenarian Uncle Bill (Joseph
Bulos), though without being too obvious
about it, because Bill needs to maintain the illusion of his independence.
Joseph works for a small publishing company, a part-time job he took on solely
because of the health-insurance benefits, where his boss, Gloria (Joanna
Gleason) is pressuring him to allow her to
develop a book about his family and its lineage (they are distantly related to
the prophet Kahlil Gibran), so that she can get back into the mainstream
publishing game. And she herself is not a little unstable, having endured a
breakdown following the suicide of her husband.
Then
there’s dealing with Vin (Jonathan Louis Dent) the basically good kid who, on a dare, put the fake deer in the road
that caused the car crash in the first place—and deciding whether or not
to ruin the poor African-American kid’s life by urging the high school board to
deny him the sports participation that would earn his college scholarship. Add
a mercenary young gay reporter to the mix (Charles Socarides), who is looking to make his bones on a story about
the turmoil surrounding Joseph’s family and not averse to making Joseph’s bones in the process.
Sons
of the Prophet has garnered enormous
enthusiasm in the critical press, by and large. I’m not quite as enthusiastic in the sense that I don’t think it’s
a great play (at least for me, it hasn’t the poetic or thematic reach, or that
indefinable you-know-it-when-you’re-witness-to-it resonance of greatness)…it's ”just”
a very good one. Very good in that playwright Karem has indeed found a
knife-edge balance between real pain and the real comedy that can be embedded
in it, and demonstrates so by dramatizing the ways in which people, through
anger, forbearance, compromise, impulse and desperation, can somehow still
reach toward the light and endure. And the very-goodness is supported by a
production in which, under Peter DuBois’ nuanced and low-key
direction, the pile-up of misfortune doesn’t seem like a dramatic contrivance,
just the consequence of living through one of those periods of
adjustment—we all go through them—in which, for whatever reason or
no reason, stuff happens. And it’s greatly to the production’s advantage in
turn that the ensemble contains actors who understand that the key to
finely-tuned comedy is playing the truth rather than the joke…Mr. Fontana and
Ms. Gleason in particular are masters of the game.
And
whatever else one can say about suffering, this much is certain: “Great” is a
boon, when it shows up. But “very good” never hurts either…
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