FROM THEIR LIPS TO: "God’s Ear" @ Echo Theatre Company
BY: ANDREA BRAUN – THEATRE CORRESPONDENT
What can you say when your heart is shattered? If you’re a member of the family Jenny Schwartz has created in God’s Ear, quite a lot. Some of the statements sound like nonsense but make sense. Some observations are hilarious, but considering the situation, it doesn’t seem quite right to laugh, yet it’s impossible not to. I think you feel God’s Ear as much as hear it, so it is necessary to have all chakras open and maintain an intense focus because on many levels, this is no play for sissies.
The set consists of mounds—literally—of whiteness with places defined by light and the suggestion of furniture and props. Eric Little and Maureen Hanratty have design credits. The daughter of the family, 7-year-old Lainie (Cameron Kopsky), notes that it has been snowing. But the white pervades all aspects of the situation, from hospital to home, to toys abandoned by a 10-year-old boy who died. The first sound heard is a respirator, and Mel (Michelle Hand) is telling her husband, Ted (Martin Fox), their son will likely die from drowning earlier in the day. Her voice is robotic. She tags every sentence with “they said,” as if to distance it—and herself—from truth. There is a tone and rhythm to the speech throughout this unusual play.
The whiteness becomes representative of the landscape of grief, the white noise of the commotion of words and thoughts colliding in the family’s heads which emerge as a logorrhea of clichés, in Mel’s speeches. Ted seems, on the surface, to be functioning better than she, but he’s just burying his sorrow in different ways. He travels for business and has started hanging out in bars with unsavory companions, a “Guy” (Tom Kopp) and a potential hookup, Leonora (Kelly Schnider). As Ted drinks, fights, and flirts in airport bars, Mel’s emotions almost visibly fly around the room of their home. She’s paralyzed! She’s manic! She’s gone off the rails burying G.I. Joes and telling Lainie the story of her birth over and over, which also involves mentioning the deadly lake. The idea of water becomes an overarching metaphor for life and death.
And if all this weren’t sufficiently strange, the Tooth Fairy (Donna Weinsting), a grandmotherly figure in a platinum blonde wig, fairy wings and a tutu (seriously, I am not making this up), Ted (and later Ted and Mel) encounter a transvestite flight attendant (Justin Ivan Brown, who doubles as the incarnation of G.I. Joe). The Tooth Fairy and G.I. Joe become guardians for Lainie, and support for Mel. They bring most of the funny stuff, though Hand, Fox, Schnider and Kopp, also have some comic lines. The humor is often politically incorrect—how many Helen Keller jokes are there, anyway?—but that only adds to the guilty release of laughing in the face of so much that is wrong.
Mel and Ted’s marriage may not survive this loss. Mel notes that for a “moment,” their family was perfect (it was actually several years) but as anyone who has ever suffered a devastating loss knows, time becomes bent out of shape, and it does that here too. As we roam through Mel’s fevered mind, we move back and forth among events now occurring, those that happened in the past, and those that may be yet to come. She seems to be playing a kind of “Where’s Waldo” with Ted, not seeming to know at any given time where he is, even when he is sitting beside her trying to get her to put slippers on her bare feet. There are musical interludes which help define situations and clarify actions. Victoria Meyer does fine work as the composer and sound designer.
Lainie finally joins in the chorus of banality, finding it just as difficult to cope as her parents, but as so often happens, feeling left out. I would find her precocious character more credible if she were at least a couple of years older, which Kopsky does look to be. All three family members also have reasons to feel a measure of guilt about what happened. Ted is full of regrets: He tells a story of a joke, Sam, the boy played shortly before he died for which he yelled at the boy. Suddenly it seems everyone he meets has lost a child. He keeps on moving as if to outrun his anguish, while his wife is bound by inertia except during her bursts of displaced energy. In short, they’re a mess.
A note in the flyer handed out at the play says: “God’s Ear is, above all, about language—how poorly we use it, how often it fails us, how strange and vital it can be in the midst of desperate need.” That just about sums it up, as we traverse the desolate land with this family enduring a loss too deep for tears. You would do well to take the journey with them, if you’re up to a challenging evening of theatre presented by uniformly fine actors and director Eric Little. I’m purposely not singling anyone out for special praise because everyone involved is firing on all cylinders; they create a true ensemble. Just learning the lines had to be an enormous challenge for the cast and is a bit disorienting for the audience at first, but once our ear becomes accustomed to the speeches, they come through clearly, painfully, and at last, cathartically.
God’s Ear runs at Echo Theatre Company in Crestwood Court through Aug. 15. Running time is approx. 90 minutes without intermission. You may call 314-225-429 or visit www.echotheatrecompany.org.
Andrea Braun also reviews for KDHX 88.1.
