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Mike Sepesy’s play is the second in a trilogy of plays that involve families in a tangle of tragic events wrapped in mystical and elusive images that allow the present world to blend seamlessly with what is mythic or lying under the pond of our unconscious. The first being The Alice Seed, which I saw as a reading at the Cleveland Play House early last year and which will be fully staged this fall at Cleveland Public Theatre.

The action largely revolves around Douglas “Dougie” (Allen Branstein) a grown man who is stuck like a tree and cannot move forward with his life: whether his stuckness is due to a metaphysical ailment, a bump on the head he received as a teenager or his alcoholism is difficult to answer. Dougie’s stuckness is altered however when his long-ago ex-girlfriend Cass (Molly McGinnis)—from just before he fell from the truck and bumped his head—shows up to tell him that after that long-ago summer she had a daughter, Rose, (Virginia Konchan) and Dougie is a dad. Dougie, who was planning to kill himself, says that meeting a daughter is worth a few days, and decides to stick around and see what’s what—including that his daughter has brittle bones; her boyfriend, Marc, (James Kosmatka) is an appalling ass; and transforming himself and becoming un-stuck—finding the courage to move forward with his life: a courage for which Dougie’s father, Larry (Don Prather), is no doubt grateful.

Sepesy is very adept at controlling the theatrical elements of The Douglas Tree to layer meaning and effect and force the audience to sort things out: one of the more interesting examples being the use of the daughter and her boyfriend as representations of the younger Dougie and Cass. Perhaps the most stunning moment occurs when the older Dougie (Branstein) walks into the wood to show his daughter (Konchan) the heart he long-ago carved into a tree for Cass: at this moment Branstein opens his shirt and becomes the tree (the heart carved presumably in his chest); at that singular moment the young couple comes to life before our eyes: the young lovers Konchan and Kosmatka—acting out that long ago time. The doubling of the younger actors as both the older Dougie and Cass as well as the current Rose and Marc creates a Bahktinian dialog in terms of the temporal and physical space as well as between the actors and the audience adding the “layers” of meaning I mentioned earlier—and with great success. One of the more brutal moments of the play comes when Dougie “cuts” the heart off the tree using an axe and we see the representation of the young Dougie being axed to death—a scene that takes on the dual meaning of Dougie’s no-doubt strong desire to axe his daughter’s boyfriend Marc. The meaning of this moment is confounded for the audience by two points: Marc never returns to the stage and the absurdist technique of having Dougie go about the stage for the rest of the play wearing a blood-drenched shirt—that no one seems to notice or comment on.

I will save a later post to talk about The Alice Seed, but will here just remark on the obvious “nature” theme running through the titles: seed, tree. I will also note that the two plays draw heavily on family tragedy, absence, loss, and memory—and that Sepesy uses very strong stage images and uses them to create an enchanted environment on the stage that has a heart-wrenching pulse.

I sat down next to Barbara Becker when all of us (Raymond, playwrights, actors, and directors) were meeting to discuss how Little Box would work. She was kind enough to move her papers and let me sit. I was struck by her genuine nature, she is a lovely person. She is also an attractive person who is quite fit. I was therefore surprised, after the Little Box meeting, to see her stand up and limp around: well, not just limp, it is a serious impediment. This brings us to her play.

As described by Becker herself in the Little Box description:

Ictus is a journey through a foreign country and through the world of catastrophic illness. An athletic, healthy, thirty-five year old woman experiences a severe stroke or brain attack while traveling through Italy on vacation. In seconds her life is derailed. Unable to speak or swallow and paralyzed she must find a way to put her life back together as she struggles through rehabilitation of her paralyzed body. The brain is the center of the self. How do you put your life back together if everything that makes you you is damaged or out of commission?

Ictus is derived from the Latin, icere “to strike with a weapon” and one can almost hear a warrior boasting, “I brought him down with one fell stroke…” such is what happened to Becker, as she ably demonstrates in her work.

The stroke happened while she was in Italy, far from any hospital. One of the daunting statements, and I hope I’m getting it right, is that a portion of your brain the size of a pea dies every 5 minutes that the brain is denied blood and oxygen. It was 5 hours before she got to a hospital that could treat her. As she notes in her play, “that’s a lot of peas.”

Thematically, the trip to Italy works very much in Becker’s favor, as does her constant use of Italian throughout. The trip to Italy and our trip through her stroke work off each other to show the foreign character of the experience: you are not in world that you know anymore; the things you took for granted are no longer things that you may assume, everything is foreign now.

Ictus stars Laurel Brooke Johnson who’s seen some movie and tv work. She does a fantastic job demonstrating the physical difficulties faced by Becker: walking, speaking, struggling to stand, etc. And does a compelling job demonstrating the anguish and frustration that surely must have dominated, and still must dominate, Becker’s daily life. Johnson also has a blog.

Structurally, the play presents a linear timeline of events that take up at least a year, from the trip’s promising start in Italy to her return home from the Cleveland Clinic. It is framed by a timeless space in which Johnson (Becker) examines five or six pairs of shoes set on chairs about the stage. These shoes are from her own life and represent events and stages of her life: running shoes she wore in marathons, dress shoes for various occasions, etc., all the phases of her past life: her once normal life. The final frame sees her in the same place: shoes all around, but this time a new pair have been added: the right shoe larger than the left (presumably for a brace). One thing I found neat was the physiological, if you will, examination of the shoes—the wear patterns—how these changed. It was done at both the beginning of the play and at the end. What was most striking was the final analysis where the pinky toe area of the right shoe is examined: it shows wear—where dragging it across a floor has caused excessive damage.

I am reminded here of my one time next door neighbor as a boy: Mike Stout. Mike had been impacted by polio as a boy and one of his legs (and subsequently his foot) was smaller than the other. He too had to purchase shoes of the same style but in different sizes for each foot. I always wondered at this. Wondered at how one would go about purchasing shoes in this way: did he have a special shoe store that he went to? Or did he have to explain at every store why he wanted to break apart a perfectly good pair? Or did he have to buy two pairs, knowing he would never use two of the shoes?

I think the framing device works to great effect. I think the linear portion works fine, too, but at times it is a bit of a strain—as the audience member is going through highly narrated events in a point-by-point way. There is great potential for dead time here and, in fact, there are points that the piece drags—either the rhythm/pacing needs to be examined or something needs shortened. However, these faults are ably compensated in theatrical ways: for instance, a projector and screen is used as a visual aid to many segments that have the effect of adding energy to the piece. For instance, right after the stroke Becker is forced to write everything (as she cannot speak) and the projector shows, in tremulous scrawl, the words she puts on the pad of paper. There are other comic points, too: when they are testing her ability to recognize objects and emotions and she is asked “is this man happy or sad” and the projected picture is an absurd fellow with a smile that seems as much gas as genuine emotion. There are other elements of staging that add energy to the presentation as well.

Overall, I like this piece and I think Becker deserves a lot of credit for putting up what is extremely personal and her equally personal ruminations on the event. Her examination is insightful and elements are cautionary: value what you have. This is made more poignant, I think, by the fact that she is so young and this happened; yet the reality is that many of us will face something similar in our own lives—as aging and the decline of the body is a fact each of us faces.