Caroline Aaron and Noah Galvin in The Reservoir, at the Linda Gross Theater.
Photo: Ahron R. Foster
It’s been a long, cold February in New York City, filled with the premieres of many plays about addiction and alcoholism. Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir stands out as the coziest — not necessarily the vibe one might expect from a story that sets itself against the challenges of relapse and recovery, though it’s in many ways a welcome tone. Noah Galvin, as The Reservoir’s narrator, Josh, welcomes audiences before the play begins while lying on the floor in a bright yellow shirt and bright red pants. (The children’s-museum-esque set is by Takeshi Kata.) Once the action starts, he narrates in the quippy, hyper-intelligent, and occasionally wry manner of what could be a PBS educational show, if it had room to discuss being gay and blacking out drunk in college. Josh’s found himself, he realizes after picking himself off the ground, back home from NYU in Denver after yet another bender, lying on the beach of the titular reservoir. He talks his way out of a bleary run-in with a cop and then turns to the audience as if he’s just explained how a bill becomes a law. “I’ve only been arrested thrice,” Josh says, allowing the overachiever’s satisfaction that he’s experiencing in the moment to smear itself over the obvious pain of that statistic.
The Reservoir, directed by Shelley Butler, continues along with comforting zip as Josh tries to reboot his life. He’s tried to face down his disease before, as we soon learn in a prickly confrontation with his mother (Heidi Armbruster), and this latest relapse has frayed their relationship to nearly its breaking point. So, instead, Josh decides that he’ll find ballast and stability by involving himself in the lives of his grandparents, who all live nearby and are present onstage throughout nearly all the play. They’re played by a welcome and homey set of theater veterans, Mary Beth Peil and Peter Maloney (on his father’s Christian side of the family) and Caroline Aaron and Chip Zien (on his mother’s Jewish side). As Josh enmeshes himself in their lives, going along to exercise classes and coaching his grandfather’s study sessions for a second bar mitzvah (you really can do that at 83), Brasch presents dementia as an experience that, if not exactly parallel to addiction, does rhyme with it. As Josh is trying to recover his sense of self, his grandparents — notably Peil’s Irene, whose Alzheimer’s is quite advanced when we first meet her — are losing theirs.
In less deft hands, a play like The Reservoir could devolve into a breakfast buffet of intergenerational life lessons, a Tuesdays With Morrie sequel. But even as Brasch indulges in a few treacly moments, he knows that none of the problems they have are straightforwardly overcome — partially from his own experience. He’s described the drama as “emotionally autobiographical” and that it “borrows from the darkest time of my life, in which I had to move home and get sober.” Working a survival gig at a local bookstore, Josh decides to do research on neuroscience, becoming obsessed with the concept of “cognitive reserve” and all the ways in which he could fix both his and his grandparents’ mental capacities with more aerobics, more stimulating trips to local museums, and a lot more spinach. As soon as Josh starts having manic conversations with the handsome doctor he imagines is giving him all this advice (a stoic and reliable Matthew Saldívar, who also appears as Josh’s boss at the bookstore), we know this isn’t going to be so simple, for him or for them. Could we get there without the recurring pop-scientific metaphor about how neurons flow like bodies of water? Probably, but then we might miss out on the cast’s elders doing light interpretive dance as Galvin compares the flow of thoughts to the brain to a river system. And Mary Beth Peil makes for such a lovely droplet.
The heart of the play lies in gently unpicking and expanding its own optimism, because Brasch, while avoiding soupy affirmation, also doesn’t want things to get too grim. “Keep ’er moving at all costs,” he writes in a note in the script. He appends, also, an encouragement for actors to “play against the pain. In spite of everything, let this be a celebration of life.” That’s a trickier line to walk than it sounds, but Brasch and Butler have an all-pro cast, especially with that quartet of grandparents. Peil’s as fragile as lace as the declining Irene, while Maloney allows us to peek at the battle-hardened interiority of her husband, a stern man who may share Josh’s demons but prefers not to think about them. And how could you not enjoy watching Zien, a one-man band of stage comedy, play a womanizing octogenarian nicknamed Shrimpy? Yet it’s Aaron, as Shrimpy’s ex-wife, Beverly, who moves to the play’s center: The wisecracking tough Jewish grandmother is a familiar type, but as Beverly’s role and Aaron’s performance expand in the second act, we get a clearer sense of her struggles. It’s a dynamic that plays well across from Galvin’s cherubic mien, which conveys sweetness so well, and his devious delivery (and, occasionally, public persona), which spikes it. You’re never quite sure if he’ll hand you the glass of orange juice you asked for or, instead, give you a hand grenade.
Don’t worry: The Reservoir itself would never explode like that. Brasch and Butler keep it firmly predictable. The production’s gentle tone has its advantages, notably in not alienating an audience — on the night I was there, the crowd was closer in age to Josh’s grandparents, and happily chuckled along — though by the play’s end, I felt a missed opportunity to sit longer with its big questions. Plays about addiction and plays about aging tend to race, in their themes, toward the existential. How do you make room in your life for an impulse that will never go away? How do you make peace with the sense that your person, inevitably, will cease to exist? It’s, as we’ve seen in the last month, really hard to answer those questions, and also, to ask them in a way that feels new and present. The Reservoir, later on, sends Josh and Beverly off to a mountain valley to shout about their smallness in the universe. In the scene, Brasch raises a discussion of higher power — though Beverly insists her divinity lies in afternoon naps and pumpernickel bagels — and approaches what feels like a deeper, scarier reckoning with faith and fragility. But Brasch keeps us at a safe distance from those mountains. Inevitably, by way of a punchline. “All right, I’m over it,” Beverly announces. “Let’s go get a milkshake.”
_
For a meditation on human frailty, look no further than Clare Barron, a playwright deeply fond of bruises and bleeding, scabs and gunk. The A24-revitalized Cherry Lane Theatre is now running a cushy revival of Barron’s You’ve Got Older, first staged in New York in 2014 and offering its own companion take on caring for elders, itself inspired by a crisis period in the playwright’s life. Just after a bad breakup, Mae (Alia Shawkat) has moved back home to tend her father (Succession’s Peter Friedman) during his treatment for a “weird, mysterious cancer” that has struck out of the blue. In her lonely nights in eastern Washington, she fantasizes about visits from a strapping cowboy (Paul Cooper) who’ll tie her up and have his way with her. Also, she’s developed a nasty rash, which she shows to a man she meets at a bar (Caleb Joshua Eberhardt, who excels at being at once ordinary-guy familiar and totally mysterious). In one of You Got Older’s many tender scenes, he gently presses his fingertips on her rash, something she agrees to only after asking if she can gnaw on one of his beard hairs.
Barron’s characters in You Got Older tend to be as richly intimate in the realm of pus and fluid as they are totally at sea in expressing themselves with actual language. Mae and her dad, referred to only as “Dad,” can barely discuss his gardening, much less have a serious conversation about her career. When her siblings — played by the trio of Nadine Malouf, Nina White, and Misha Brooks — enter the picture, as You Got Older molts from rural isolation into a hospital-set family drama, their communication problems multiply. One scene seems to consist only of people interrupting one other’s thoughts, skipping from talking about their family’s inherent body odor to White’s sister’s desire to get a group photo with their dad banging a gong to signify his recovery. It’s a remarkable bit of scene construction. Without anyone saying it, Barron’s dialogue pulses with dread. What if he gets worse.
Alia Shawkat and Peter Friedman in You Got Older, at the Cherry Lane Theatre.
Photo: Marc J. Franklin
That’s a rhythm of Barron’s that many a playwright has imitated. I thought, often, watching You Got Older, of plays I’d seen produced by Page 73 or Clubbed Thumb that could have been children of this one — like Grief Hotel, which featured Malouf — or have at least inherited Barron’s interest in dramatizing, simultaneously, the rangy weirdness of life and people’s infinite ability to ignore it. Though it was also hard to shake the sense that this production, directed like the 2014 staging by Anne Kauffman, lay in its own shadow. Friedman, as that ailing father, gives a performance as steady as weathered rock, but Shawkat is tentative, working her way toward an understanding of Mae without really living in her impulses and dimensions. The production’s tempo, in a handsome wood-paneled set by Arnulfo Maldonado, matches Shawkat’s. It’s stately, and often reverential, when there’s room in the script to zag toward the grimey. That keeps You Got Older on the shelf, and draws your eye to the ways the play has become an inadvertent period piece. I kept noticing the ways this all felt so early 2010s, not just because of the characters’ old cell phones, but also from the discourse they swim in. A daughter chides her dad for bringing up the fact a man he saw was Black, a colorblindness of the Obama era, and there’s little anxiety about the politics of Mae’s former rural classmates in the way you might expect. (You could push that cowboy fantasy to richer and darker dimensions now, though Kauffman does not.) But it’s most notable in Barron’s hand-picked choices of songs, frozen in time because they’re written into her script. What could be more 2014 than ending your play with your characters dancing at a wedding to “Timber”’ by Pitbull, featuring Ke$ha?
The Reservoir is at the Linda Gross Theater through March 15.
You Got Older is at the Cherry Lane Theatre.
→ Continue reading at Vulture
