Body language

Staging flesh and blood at NewGate

by Claire Chafee

Why We Have a Body, directed by Brien Lang.
At NewGate Theatre through May 17.

What a pity. Although even the title of Why We Have a Body appears to celebrate seeing things as they are, it ultimately flinches and looks away. That's all the sadder because this play by Claire Chafee has a terrifically appealing surface, with tantalizingly colorful characters and enough ideas to chew on for a semester of faculty cocktail parties.

And the NewGate Theatre staging is quite charming. We get four skillful performances and snappy direction by Brien Lang, although he can't manage to finesse the dishonest heart of the play.

Why We Have a Body wants to talk about everything, so it ends up saying nothing in much depth, at least in this staging. We're warned right off, by the identities of the characters themselves. Things revolve around Lili (Kristen Gunning), a private investigator with a sister, Mary (Clare Blackmer), who has an unsettling compulsion to knock off 7-Eleven convenience stores. Their mother, Eleanor (Vera Wayne), is an explorer wending her way around the world. She never was much of a maternal, or even physical, presence in their lives but managed to overwhelm them nevertheless. Lastly is Renee (Patricia Hawkridge), Lili's married paleontologist lover.

We are at Metaphor Central here, with the playwright quite unabashed about that. Three of the characters have job descriptions obliging them to delve into hidden matters, and the other one is a mentally disturbed -- amusingly so -- criminal-in-training with a morbid Joan of Arc obsession. The suspense is excruciating. Will we get nothing but people spouting mini-essays about self-discovery? Egad!

Don't worry. We get that, but also more. A third of the way through Act I playwright Chafee shifts from monologues to exchanges, mainly. The language is lush, the ideas are shrewd and the banter is usually very funny. The mother shows us a diagram of the three parts of the lesbian brain: memory, lust and hammering doubt. When after an affectionate phone conversation Lili tells her sister to send her a letter, Mary replies, "I don't know you well enough." Wonderful stuff.

But this is the kind of play where the intermission wait has us entertained but fidgeting. Will there be a payoff now that we've cheered the play on toward the stretch? Will the chapters unfold now that all the picaresque chapter titles have been spelled out? Somewhat.

Lili, since all revolves around her, gets filled out best; Mary remarks that her sis always loved metaphors more than actualities, such as when a summer camp closing candlelight ceremony made her forget the miserable time she'd had. Anything more we learn about Renee is incidental, since the world on the other side of the closet extends in every direction. But the mother, who plays a more fundamental part in the story, doesn't just fade out of the picture once her role as feminist Cassandra is exhausted, she abruptly drops out. Kind of like a deus ex machina in reverse.

Most troublesome is how this production handles Mary. Since we knew that there'd been mental hospitals in her past, the play has been heading toward facing the real pain behind her glib joking. The playwright even has Mary call Sylvia Plath "one of the great comic writers of the 20th century," setting us up for a put-down reading of a painful poem that could reveal a crack in Mary's tough facade. But Blackmer is allowed to read it as though Mary really is unaffected by it -- instead of with, say, piqued denial. So when we then see her back in a mental ward, only the plot tells us she's been through a life-mending trauma.

Ultimately, ironically, Why We Have a Body is like a spinster -- or Norwegian bachelor farmer -- who is afraid of being composed of flesh and blood. Although it's delighted to explore metaphors and discover ideas, the production -- if not the play itself -- seems squeamish about the painful, bloody mess at the core of us, represented by Mary's mental illness.

I'm not asking for strict psychological realism in an offering that handles non-naturalistic devices so skillfully. But even if an amusingly crazed character is mainly a metaphor, we're not. We need the imaginary phantasms storming and strutting on stage to be recognizably human as well as edifying. That goes for mothers in the heart of darkness, sisters in the throes of terminal sibling rivalry or detectives investigating the private recesses of the human heart.