Audio By Carbonatix
Reckless, now running in Boulder in a biting, smart production by the Actors Ensemble, might have been called Relentless Christmas–so much of the action takes place on consecutive Christmases and so many of the events are cataclysmic. But although Craig Lucas’s hilarious play skewers the season’s sentimentality, it isn’t about Christmas. Instead, Lucas proposes a world of coincidence based on the premise that bad stuff happens to good people who least expect it. It’s a bleak, absurdist universe. Yet Lucas doesn’t take the easy way out, and the piece takes a mildly surprising turn toward optimism.
The best thing about Reckless–and what lifts it above dour fatalism–is the way Lucas builds the protagonist’s character. Rachel is an Everywoman, an ordinary sort of adult American female who loves her family and gets glassy-eyed with euphoria on Christmas Eve. As the play opens, Rachel is waxing eloquent about how, as a child, she wanted to live in Alaska, where it is always snowing and always Christmas because Santa lives there. Babbling on happily to her husband, who looks bored, then ticked off, then troubled, she eventually presses to know what’s bothering him. We expect him to rant at her about how he hates Christmas or that he is having an affair; instead, he blurts out that he has taken out a contract on her life.
Rachel doesn’t believe him until she hears the window smashed downstairs. Her husband, having second thoughts about the hit, hustles her out the upstairs window. Wearing her coat but still in her slippers, she accepts a ride with a nice, innocuous man who takes her home to spend Christmas with him and his wife, Pooty. Pooty is paraplegic, deaf and dumb–apparently. But no one is really all they seem to be in this play; everybody has a deep, dark secret. Still, Rachel finds a happy home with her new friends, a decent job and a new beginning–until the following Christmas, when another attempt on her life is made from an unexpected quarter.
As Rachel is buffeted about by the winds of chance and human frailty, she tries valiantly to find herself via six different types of therapy. But she just can’t work up a primal scream, and while one therapist believes Rachel’s horror stories are all dreams, another turns out to be the bus driver who accidentally ran over her mother when Rachel was six. Talk about coincidence.
Lucas refrains from explaining too much about what happens to Rachel. We never learn why her husband wanted her dead, for example. But that’s the point. It isn’t Rachel’s fault. The rain falls on the just and on the unjust. “Things happen,” she says, and there’s nothing she can do about it.
Well, maybe a little something. Lucas does offer poor Rachel a little solace: She never gives up on Christmas. In fact, though her Christmases seem peculiarly cursed, she embraces the season with all the more fervor, and Christmas eventually comes through for her. Maybe she has more control over shaping her life than she thought. Every act has consequences and everyone is connected to everyone else in Lucas’s mad world.
Director Chip Walton’s dynamic production is crisp and clean. He has a gift for nailing the right expression, the perfect turn of the head with an instant blackout. In fact, the way the action moves about the stage and the immaculate, snappy endings of scenes give the impression of movie editing.
Ethelyn Friend brings Rachel to life with quirky, subtle nuances of feeling, blinking baffled into the glare of fate. She makes Rachel ordinary on the surface–sentimental and foolish–but little by little, she allows her Everywoman to reveal universal truths. A fine comic actor, Friend capably involves us in tragedy as well.
Emily Newman Walton plays each of the six therapists with great finesse and unerring comic timing, creating exuberant individual personas that ring true and insane at the same time. Melinda J. Scott, double-cast as Pooty and a crackpot doctor, embodies first innocent affection and then cold-blooded commercial hackery.
All the sliding paradoxes, all the absurd twists of destiny, all the coincidences here are darkly funny. But when the tone of the play turns doleful and the laughs give way to pathos, Lucas demonstrates that what we don’t know can hurt us, that a nice-guy facade can hide a despicable history and that most therapists haven’t a clue. He has taken the trouble to think through the implications of his pessimistic worldview, creating a stage environment that we may not accept but that nevertheless underscores experiences we’ve all lived through. And in the end, he acknowledges that some of the rain that falls may refresh a withering life rather than just wash it away.