NEW YORK — It took me a while to understand that the reaction I was having to “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House,” which opened Tuesday at Greenwich House, wasn’t bewilderment but its shy cousin, pleasure.
Once I did, I couldn’t stop grinning, partly because Liza Birkenmeier’s play is so witty and partly because it’s so weird. Both are welcome these days.
Mind you, wit is not the same as humor, though the play, an Ars Nova production, gets its share of big laughs. Wit comes in the form of ideas so angular, they take several extra beats to land. There’s also the way Birkenmeier and the terrific cast, under Katie Brook’s direction, stay so far ahead of the plot, they seem to be taunting you to keep up.
For the first 15 of the play’s 90 minutes, I worried there might not be enough to keep up with. Bypassing backstory or even a stab at introductions, Birkenmeier drops us onto a St. Louis roof on a hot day in June 1983 when nothing seems to be happening. Almost incidentally, we learn that Harriet (Kristen Sieh) and Matilda (Erin Markey) are there for the weekly meeting of the Two Serious Ladies Book Club, which they apparently named for the Jane Bowles novel and is pretty much defunct.
Mostly they drink beers and carp idly, in the coded manner of lifelong friends now in their 30s. “If one of us is brilliant, maybe it’s not you,” Matilda tells Harriet amiably. Though each has an MFA in poetry, they work as waitresses and no longer do much with words except flick them like flies.
They are not otherwise alike. Harriet is peevish and high-minded; she doesn’t care for the “riverboat aesthetic” of a nearby McDonald’s. Matilda is a sly, deliberate enigma, the one “every single person who walks into the restaurant is fascinated by.”
At least in part, the enigma is sexual. Though she has a husband as well as a child — and Harriet has a boyfriend somewhere — the play soon starts to drop clues that the two women are closer to each other than they are to their men. For one thing, Harriet doesn’t seem to have much use for hers. When she tells a long story about having sex with a bearded motorcycle guy while visiting her mother in a Florida hospice, the question of betrayal never comes up. And Matilda says, “I’m going to fantasize about it for weeks.”
Is that snark or a sideways allusion to the women’s own chemistry? If so, it’s a chemistry that otherwise goes unacknowledged, even as Matilda straddles Harriet on a chair, their faces nearly touching while Harriet spins her story.
Only when a wholeheartedly out lesbian named Meg arrives, for what she thinks is a meeting of the book club, does the subtext fully emerge; her big butch charm so jangles the other women’s suppressed energy that jealousies spark in every direction. (Performance artist Marga Gomez is charming in the role.) And when Meg announces that Sally Ride, the physicist and astronaut, is a lesbian even though she’s married to a man, it’s a revelation that stirs a revolution.
Ride is the organizing principle here. All three women are in awe of her talent: Harriet says she has “every skill,” and Matilda says she has “too many.” Because the play is set on the evening before the June 18 launch of the space shuttle Challenger, they try to imagine what she’s doing at the NASA beach house where astronauts are quarantined in preparation for flight. “I love her because she’s going away,” Harriet says.
If all this sounds a bit twee and blurry, that’s deliberate. “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” is interested in the moment when women who are only vaguely aware of their misfit emotions begin to imagine “going away” from their programmed lives. Meg, with her crew cut and work boots, never had the option of not knowing herself and thus achieved full personality liftoff long before 1983.
But if Meg is airborne, Harriet and Matilda are barely on the launchpad, a difficult state of being to enact onstage. Nevertheless, in contrasting ways, the two leads do it beautifully. Sieh, so fearsomely disappointed as the wife of a feckless schmo in “The Band’s Visit,” all but drops her skin here; you can see her Harriet fitfully trying to create a new identity in real time. As the winningly awful Matilda, Markey, a rising star of the avant-garde, has the tossed-off braininess and comic polish of a Julia Louis-Dreyfus, bending phrases into philosophical riddles and not just for the fun of it.
I admit I was surprised to realize that a play whose story develops in what seem at first like listless whorls is actually tightly plotted; when new ideas are born, sometimes their form, of necessity, looks strange. Here, Birkenmeier is exploring the power women achieve when they make themselves the subject of their stories instead of the object. Not that anything is theoretical: If most plays of liberation involve trite slogans and metaphorical pickets, it’s bracing to see one that’s a drama instead of a diorama.
Great daring is needed to keep that going; Brook’s direction never loses its nerve in a story that dispenses with so much of theater’s traditional wayfinding apparatus. (The lighting design by Oona Curley and sound design by Ben Williams are especially helpful in grounding the action.) Which is not to say that everything about “Dr. Ride’s American Beach House” feels finished: A subplot involving Harriet’s sour landlady treads dangerously close to the whimsy line, though the character is amusingly handled by Susan Blommaert. And I’m not sure the play would holler if some of its loose ends were tied up tighter.
But like many young playwrights, Birkenmeier wants to display all the things she can do. (In a review in The New York Times last year, Elisabeth Vincentelli described Birkenmeier’s off-off-Broadway play “The Hollower” as “aggressively quirky.”) I don’t know whether that means she, like Ride, has “too many skills”; time will tell. But for this, her terrific off-Broadway debut, she has every skill she needs.
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Production Notes:
“Dr. Ride’s American Beach House”
Tickets: Through Nov. 23 at Greenwich House, Manhattan; 212-352-3101, arsnovanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Credits: By Liza Birkenmeier; directed by Katie Brook; sets by Kimie Nishikawa; costumes by Melissa Ng; lighting by Oona Curley; sound by Ben Williams; production stage manager, Alex H. Hajjar. Presented by Ars Nova.
Cast: Susan Blommaert (Norma), Marga Gomez (Meg), Erin Markey (Matilda) and Kristen Sieh (Harriet).
This article originally appeared in
.