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Just One Sale Away From Redemption
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
A bright, encouraging smile almost never leaves the face of Crystal, the embattled heroine of the fine new drama “Bethany,” by Laura Marks, which opened on Sunday night at City Center. Portrayed by America Ferrera (“Ugly Betty”) with a warm poise that smoothly masks profound anxiety, Crystal cannot really afford to let doubt or vulnerability cloud her features. She’s a saleswoman, after all, and the key to selling is keeping up a shiny veneer of confidence, even when there’s a silent screech of desperation threatening to leap into your throat.
Ms. Marks’s trenchant, economical drama is surprisingly (dismayingly) rare among new American plays in the clear, compassionate attention it pays to the corrosive effects of the economic downturn on the battered middle class. In this expertly turned Women’s Project production, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, the focus is on the rough waters being negotiated by a single mother living in an unnamed exurb of a small American city.
As the play opens Crystal arrives with a small carry-on bag and a few essentials in her new home: a rather beaten-up-looking, recently foreclosed house that still at least has water and electricity. Crystal has no legal right to be there, so she turns on that welcoming smile when she discovers she’s not the only squatter. Gary (Tobias Segal), scruffy and possibly emotionally disturbed, has already moved into the bedroom upstairs.
Gary’s tendency to rant about the toxins of the “military-industrial complex” and about how the downfall of capitalism will lead to a new, nomadic culture would normally have a sensible young woman like Crystal sprinting for the nearest Comfort Inn. But Crystal has no money and nowhere to go, and more important a pressing need to establish some sort of convincingly stable domicile. A job loss led to Crystal’s becoming homeless, which in turn led to the placement of her daughter, Bethany, in foster care.
As played with twitchy, molelike menace by Mr. Segal, Gary definitely reeks of potential danger, but he seems friendly enough. He mostly sticks to himself and is perfectly willing to help out by posing as a plumber when Crystal receives a visit from the social worker (the fine Myra Lucretia Taylor) she hopes will help her get Bethany back. Aside from the false nature of her domestic situation, Crystal must also hide the dispiriting news she has just received: that her new job selling Saturns will soon be going away when the dealership closes. (Emily Ackerman brings some welcome, mordant humor to the play as Crystal’s dryly dour boss, Shannon.)
Ms. Marks, a recent graduate from the Juilliard playwriting program, draws a stark, increasingly disturbing picture of the vulnerability of single women (and single mothers) in an economy in which the threads of the safety net have frayed to the point of invisibility. Crystal’s enforced cohabitation with the unbalanced Gary is not the only way she finds herself uncomfortably dependent on, well, the kindness of strangers.
At work she is desperate to make one last sale, and she thinks she has found a solid buyer in Charlie (the excellent Ken Marks, the playwright’s husband), a motivational speaker who’s eyeing one of the higher-end models but can’t quite bring himself to sign on the dotted line. In monologues that make for grimly funny listening, Charlie gives us a taste of two of his spiels about achieving financial prosperity, offering comforting, specious platitudes like “the hardest part of making your dreams come true is simply believing that you deserve it.”
The smarmy pep talk, with its generous doses of magical thinking, isn’t the only dubious line of goods Charlie is peddling. Mr. Marks’s genial every-guy exterior hides something far more sinister. In perhaps the play’s most chilling scene, Charlie drives Crystal home after taking her to dinner ostensibly to discuss buying the car. Without quite making the terms of the transaction explicit, Charlie suggests that one of “the secret laws of prosperity,” as he puts it in his inspirational-speak, is the “law of compensation”: the quid pro quo.
As Crystal finds herself under increasing pressure from all sides, “Bethany” takes a turn toward the gothic in its depiction of the lengths to which this intelligent, well-meaning and morally centered woman will go to secure a chance at getting her daughter back. There’s a sad, dark logic to even the most outlandish turns the story takes.
And Ms. Ferrera’s performance is beautifully modulated. Pushed to the edge but still determined to keep the pilot light of hope flickering in her increasingly darkened life, Crystal knows she must keep a firm grip on her emotional responses at every moment. This means burying her humane impulses when she feels her future is at stake, and even, at one point, keeping her wits about her — where’s that Formula 409? — after a brutal (and literal) fight for her life.
Without stepping over the line into moralizing — or editorializing — Ms. Marks’s disturbing, incisive drama suggests that the bruising exigencies of our depressed economy are scraping away at the surface civilities of American life, making it harder for people to heed their moral compasses. Self-reliance may be a celebrated American virtue, but “Bethany” reminds us that the distance between self-preservation and pure ruthlessness can collapse with alarming ease.
Bethany
By Laura Marks; directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch; sets by Lauren Helpern; costumes by Sarah J. Holden; lighting by Mark Barton; sound by Leon Rothenberg; dramaturgy by Megan E. Carter; fight direction by J. David Brimmer; production manager, Aduro Productions; production stage manager, Jess Johnston; associate producer, Lanie Zipoy; assistant director, Lydia Fort. Presented by Women’s Project Theater, under the direction of Julie Crosby and Lisa Fane. At the New York City Center Stage II, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; (212) 581-1212, nycitycenter.org. Through Feb. 17. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Emily Ackerman (Shannon), America Ferrera (Crystal), Kristin Griffith (Patricia), Ken Marks (Charlie), Tobias Segal (Gary) and Myra Lucretia Taylor (Toni).
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