NEW YORK — Playwright Bess Wohl likes to make things difficult for herself. In “Small Mouth Sounds,” her breakthrough hit, she confined her characters to a silent retreat, depriving them of dialogue and thus eliminating one of the tentpoles of drama. (The story, quite magically, stayed aloft.)
More recently, with “Continuity,” she set out to layer incompatible genres — a Hollywood backstager and an eco-sermon — on the back of the title pun. (It collapsed.)
So naturally she’s now written a play that flies in the face of a theatrical prohibition so basic it’s all but engraved in the classic W.C. Fields one-liner: “Never work with animals or children.” For the first 40 of its 80 minutes, “Make Believe” is nothing but children. Four of them.
And one thinks he’s a dog.
Happily, the toughest constraints often elicit the strongest workarounds, and that’s the case here. But “Make Believe,” which opened Thursday at Second Stage Theater, is no stunt, even if the production, directed by Michael Greif at the top of his form, is a slick machine, honing and angling every casual moment to support the concept.
No, “Make Believe” is a rich and moving contemporary drama — the kind that builds itself from fragments that could just as easily fail to bind. With the help of a toy chest of tricks Wohl has in store, they do bind here; her formal daring, her precise calibration of humor and despair, her confidence and anger and empathy, all mingled, lift “Make Believe” into the realm where even naturalism becomes a great mystery.
Fittingly it achieves that entirely within a set (by David Zinn) depicting an attic playroom, complete with art supplies, a clubhouse fort, a hideous Cabbage Patch doll and a toy kitchen. There in the mid-1980s, the four Conlee siblings, ages 5 through 12, take hilarious refuge from the real world below by compulsively re-creating it in their games. Over “dinners” of plastic food, and in arguments that blur the line between childish bullying and adult fury, they borrow and repurpose their elders’ clichés.
“What in the hell’s name is this?” roars Chris, the oldest, and thus playing father, as he stares at the “meat loaf.”
“How am I supposed to do my homework with this infernal ruckus?” shouts 10-year-old Kate, playing mother. “Cease and desist!”
Why they and Addie (who is assigned the role of Little Miss) and Carl (the dog) spend so much time in the attic over the course of several days is at first hard to discern. Wohl structures the first half of “Make Believe” as a series of 13 brief scenes that dissolve time and genre and keep you guessing. The only real-world information provided comes in code: When the phone rings downstairs, the children lie with their ears pressed to the floor to make out the messages on the answering machine.
The story they (and we) begin to put together from these messages isn’t pretty. I won’t spoil it except to say that what at first seems to be a nostalgic comedy of underparenting isn’t. The children’s play isn’t idle or fantastical; in fact, we gradually realize, at some point it stopped being play. When Chris shows up with a bag of groceries — ketchup, bacon, Twizzlers — they aren’t plastic. How did he get them?
Despite always being several steps behind the plot — a wonderful and rare feeling — we get to know the Conlees very well. Defying Fields, Wohl has chosen not only to work with children but also to depend on them as expressive actors. She has come close to the heart of a truth about childhood: They know how to “play” others even if they can’t play themselves. Somehow Ryan Foust (Chris), Maren Heary (Kate), Casey Hilton (Addie) and Harrison Fox (Carl) are both adorable and terrifying.
And then, in a beautifully managed effect, they disappear; 32 years elapse, and Wohl moves into dramatic overdrive without stripping gears. We are now firmly rooted in a specific moment — a memorial service, though it’s not clear whose — and in a new genre. The second half of the play is one long, continuous scene, booby-trapped with surprises.
In it we meet four adults with the same names as the vanished children: Kate (Samantha Mathis), Addie (Susannah Flood), Chris (Kim Fischer) and Carl (Brad Heberlee). It doesn’t take long to see how they do — and in one crucial case don’t — align, perfectly but unpredictably, with the earlier cast. Anxious Kate is now a bossy gastroenterologist; Addie has made a career of fantasy play as a television actress. What Carl the dog became I leave for you to discover.
But those are merely the incidental pleasures of a play that wears its comedy like spandex, revealing more than it hides. As we take in what has happened to the Conlees, we sense the scope expanding from a miniature portrait of children coping with the adult world to a much larger canvas on which adults forever remain the children they once were.
For Addie, who told her doll not to mind grown-ups because they “aren’t real anyway,” this determinism is devastating. “It’s impossible to do something you never had modeled for you,” she says.
Wohl offers counter-evidence: As an adult, Carl does talk — in a way. But the overall pattern of the play tips toward despair, seeing families as Rube Goldberg contraptions for the transfer of neurosis. Society too: turning always from one extreme to another. (If the Conlees were severely underparented, today’s children “can’t bring a nut anywhere near a school anymore because somebody might die.”) In searching for the self, everyone is hurtfully selfish.
If that sounds dark — and it is — the play remains gorgeously light at the same time. The acting is part of that, especially from the adults; all four are expert, and Flood quite brilliant, at navigating the space where comedy and tragedy muddle.
Likewise, Greif’s direction exploits every opportunity to amp up the theatricality of what could be, in less confident hands, a heavier slog. Neither he nor his team — especially Zinn and the lighting designer, Ben Stanton — forget the value of pleasing the audience with surprise.
But what finally makes “Make Believe” a profound delight is that it knows what it is and refuses to tell you. What at first seemed random proves not to be; it’s a very tight package, and part of the intensity of the experience is trying to peel the wrappings.
Ultimately, you can’t. All you can do is laugh and cry and accept the mystery. Plays, like people, “Make Believe” seems to say, are made up of things it’s sometimes better not to know.
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Production Notes:
‘Make Believe’
Tickets: Through Sept. 15 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; 212-246-4422, 2st.com.
Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
Credits: By Bess Wohl; directed by Michael Greif; sets by David Zinn; costumes by Emilio Sosa; lighting by Ben Stanton; music and sound by Bray Poor; production stage manager, Justin Scribner; associate artistic director, Bennett Leak; general manager, Sarah Danielsen; production manager, Juniper Street Production Inc. Presented by Second Stage Theater, Carole Rothman, president and artistic director, Casey Reitz, executive director.
Cast: Kim Fischer, Susannah Flood, Ryan Foust, Harrison Fox, Maren Heary, Brad Heberlee, Casey Hilton and Samantha Mathis.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.