Entertainment :: Theatre
Where Moments Hung Beforeby Kilian MelloyMonday Aug 10, 2009 The Boston Actors Theater presents Joey C. Pelletier’s meditation on grief, Where Moments Hung Before, at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through Aug. 16.
Jasper (David Lucas) is a gay man who has just died of AIDS-related pneumonia. His extended family--including his sisters, his niece, his best friend, and these people’s various lovers and ex-lovers--gather to celebrate his life and to reminisce.
The sticking point to this celebration (at least from the point of view of 11-year-old Lucy [Barbara Woodall, a natural who holds her own among a strong cast despite her young years]) is that the wake has been scheduled for the same day as her 12th birthday party.
The play’s author, Joey Pelletier, explores the effects that grief has on people, using loss, anger, and sadness to open up his cast of characters. Jasper’s lover, Timothy (Mikey Diloreto), is bewildered and somewhat pathetic; lost, he wanders around the party wondering aloud what he’s supposed to do now--now that Jasper has died suddenly, now that he no longer has to share the bathroom, now that he’s single again and yet still attached to someone he spent four years with, sticking by him even after learning in the first year of their relationship of Jasper’s HIV-positive status.
Timothy is clearly in shock, and he’s not alone. Jasper’s older sister Morgan (Jenny Reagan) and her husband Daniel (Paul Ezzy) are organized, efficient, almost too practical in their response to the tragedy. They’re identifying Jasper’s body for hospital staff one moment and, in the next moment, juggling schedules to get the funeral and the wake taken care of while not disrupting their existing plans for Lucy’s birthday celebration.
Morgan, in particular, is calm and gracious, even in the face of platitudes offered by relatives and acquaintances at the funeral; it’s only later, much later that night, after a few drinks and a spat with younger sister Fiona (Julia Specht) that Morgan’s fury, resentment, and raw hurt erupt, not with screaming accusations but with a tipsily frank, yet level-headed, outpouring that electrifies the stage and leaves the house all but breathless.
Fiona, who has arrived from out of town with her current lover, Yael (Evelyn Howe), in tow, is bloody furious at everyone, especially the deceased. She’s only learned of Jasper’s HIV status recently; she’s not even had time to digest the news (which everyone else, even Lucy, has known for some time) before Jasper’s death, and the fact that she wasn’t speaking to him when he died only compounds her anguish. As a result, she’s impatient and quick to anger--a state of mind that perhaps is not so far off her usual metric, especially lately, with Yael giving the reluctant Fiona hints that while she understands Fiona’s dislike of labels, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if Fiona would regard her as, and introduce her as, her girlfriend.
Indeed, Yael, who might have been an awkward tagalong, makes herself right at home with the family, despite the stress of the moment. (Her magic pipe might be partly to explain for this.) A Jewish rapper, Yael is unafraid but not thick-skinned: she’s a genuine and kind presence, and she stands in contrast to the career-minded and overly deliberate Jordan (Elise Wulff), who isn’t just a tagalong... she’s a tagalong of a tagalong, the fiancee of Quinn (James Aitchison), the former longtime partner of Jasper’s best friend, Patrick (Pelletier).
There’s some dramatically rich, and fun, material to be mined from the difficult and complex relationship shared by Jasper, Patrick, and Quinn, and Pelletier avails himself of it with gusto. For one thing, when Quinn left, he took all of Patrick’s rent money with him, leading to Patrick’s eviction (and his subsequent tenancy on Morgan and Daniel’s sofa).
Quinn has had drug problems in the past; but since leaving, Quinn has cleaned himself up and started dressing better, not to mention that he’s started sleeping with women and, indeed, gotten engaged to one. (It can’t hurt that Jordan is a successful shoe designer and presumably in a position to help Quinn retire his mountain of debt.)
This gesture at the "ex-gay" lifestyle is not belabored: it’s simply part of Quinn’s character, along with his South African accent, and the less it’s explained to us, the better it works. Equally effective is Jordan’s revelation that she knows Quinn has not really switched his sexuality: he’s still gay, and she’s okay with it. She doesn’t love him, after all--she’s just relieved that this time, she’s going into a marriage with her eyes wide open. (Jordan’s three ex-husbands were gay, too.)
Another thing: Quinn was Jasper’s other best friend, and by leaving Patrick (and leaving him in the lurch), he’s broken Jasper’s heart, as well. Now, at Jasper’s wake and with his tail practically tucked between his legs, Quinn has to own up to his shabby behavior--and to the fact that he still loves Patrick, who can hardly stand to look at him.
If it sounds like Pelletier has a lot of material to work with here, that’s because he does: and while the play is quite well written overall, with solid characters and authentic-sounding dialogue, it’s talk-driven and suffers from a few slow spots and few scenes that don’t feel strictly necessary, including one long scene set in an art museum that could have served as a one-act short play all by itself.
It’s a funny scene, and it’s well written, and it clues us in on a few things... but there is such a thing as too much, and the scene adds to the play’s two-and-a-half hour running time, with the information we get about the characters valuable, but something that could have been communicated just as effectively elsewhere--perhaps as part of (or in place of) another funny but extraneous scene in which the characters recount a drunken party at the home of a religious homophobe.
The pacing only feels a little off in the second act, however. The first act, while talky, is buoyed by a sense of discovery: who these people are, and how they’ve each been affected by Jasper’s death, keeps the play in motion, together with the skill, and the charm, of its uniformly strong cast under Danielle Leeber’s direction.
Jasper himself appears in two modes: as a ghost (which is thematically relevant, since this is a study of loss and absence: his ghost can hardly keep from informing the material) and in flashback.
In both cases, the theme of memory also plays a powerful role. Jasper the ghost is as watchful in death as Jasper was in life: still looking after Timothy in his exhausted slumber, Jasper recalls how, during their time together, he would watch Timothy sleep, and still be watching when Timothy got up to perform his morning ablutions. The implication is that Jasper was, during his life, alive and engaged at every moment; in death, however, Jasper finds that names are beginning to elude him. How long will it be until other memories fade, too?
In flashback, Jasper is the calm center of a large and sometimes contentious group of people. Even as he wrestles with fear upon learning that he’s HIV positive, Jasper remains upbeat for those he loves: it’s only in one scene, as he relates an episode of unsafe sex in which he participated right after learning the news, that we see how grief derails Jasper, too, much as it quietly (or not so quietly) shatters those who survive him, years later.
Pelletier has written a tender, affecting play that offers plenty of laughs along with its many striking dramatic moments. The material could stand some sharpening and trimming, perhaps, but this is Pelletier’s first full-length play, and this production is the play’s inaugural run. A first play this fully realized and well-written can only hold out a promise of greater things to come.
"Where Moments Hung Before" plays August 13, 14, and 15 at 8:00 p.m. and August 16 at 2:00 p.m. at The Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, located at 949 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.
Tickets cost $15 ($10 for students with valid ID) and can be obtained online at the Boston Actors Theater Web site (www.bostonactorstheater.com) or by calling 866-811-4111.
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
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