Evolution Theatre Company continues their streak of bringing acclaimed Off-Broadway and elsewhere plays no one else is doing to Columbus with their area premiere of a handsome production of Anna Ziegler’s acclaimed 2016 play Boy, directed by Mark Phillips Schwamberger.
We meet Adam Turner (Ollie Worden) in a classic Halloween party meet-cute with Jenny (Valtinen Erik Karille) in 1989 when Adam’s 22. The play runs on parallel tracks, jumping between their childhood/adolescence in the ’70s, pulled between parents, Doug Turner (Scott Douglas Wilson) and Trudy Turner (Britt Kline) and experimental therapist Dr. Wendell Barnes (Ralph Scott) and the timeline in the late ’80s/early ’90s.
One of the pleasures of Boy is its puzzle box quality, watching the picture come into view. It doesn’t contain a single giant twist as much as intriguing details to fill into a larger picture that’s almost immediately apparent. For that reason, I’m going to avoid talking about the plot as much as I possibly can.
I struggled with Boy for reasons of pacing and detail. Some scenes seemed labored over, sharpened to a knife point and honed to draw blood. But the early set-up scenes often slipped into seeming interminably long: a cool and balanced sense of menace around mannered “realistic” dialogue works in a few scenes, but others feel slack.
Others feel hastily sketched in. Big deals are made about a child’s age, and what they’re doing in school doesn’t make any sense. The “action” at the heart of the story is elided – told in retrospect, in a magnetic, heartbreaking soliloquy from Worden – when I would have liked to see some of the aftermath of that moment instead of just jumping ahead seven years. And the ending feels too pat, as though it sells out some of the ambiguity that powered the intensity of its best scenes.
It’s to the credit of this stellar cast – and Schwamberger’s firm hand – those qualms didn’t rise in me until about halfway through the play’s 90-minute running time and didn’t strike me more often than they did. Worden dazzles at every turn. They get the darkness inside of the character and the desperation for joy and normalcy; those moments when Adam comes on too strong to Jenny simultaneously made my heart break for the person while they also elicited as intense a nerve-wracking “Don’t go in there” feeling as watching a horror movie. They move between the childlike version of their character and the adult with a painfully realistic sense of disconnection.
The two relationships Adam navigates need foils strong enough to stand up to that performance, and this production delivers on that promise. Scott’s Dr. Barnes is an exquisite, chilling portrayal of a man whose ego and ironclad certainty of his own rightness drift into dark waters. In wordless sequences, Scott’s facial expressions tell the deep, painful story of the play, all on their own – a sad back and forth with Kline’s Trudy; an ominous chess game; a reunion where he lets the veil slip, and dominoes from earlier in the play all fall on the board. He walks a line between empathy and monstrousness that I’ll be thinking about for a long while.
Karille’s Jenny owns his space and makes an impression from the first scene to the last. A character who could be a working-class, single-mom cliche digs into the fact that his character doesn’t need Adam as much as Adam needs her. His palpable heartbreak and unwillingness to let the nonsense slide makes some of the collateral damage of Adam’s trauma more painful, but also implies a life and a world outside these claustrophobic rooms for her. Wilson and Kline make the most of their handful of scenes, especially a touching heart-to-heart between Wilson and Worden and a powerful confrontation with Scott.
There’s a lot of interesting thematic material in Ziegler’s play – the danger of trying to force someone to be what they’re not; the tragic consequences of even well-intentioned secrets; the corrupting nature of ego – and I feel like Schwamberger’s production brings much of it to life. I just wish the play itself dug a little deeper.
Boy runs through September 24 with performances at 2 p.m. Sunday, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, and 8:00 p.m. Friday and Saturday. For tickets and more information, visit evolutiontheatre.org.