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Two sisters and the man who affects them both form the core of the apple that is the two-act dramedy "Touch(ed)" now playing on the Nikos Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. In its second major production the play is still growing and still forming. It has not ripened into something delicious as yet. It has all the ingredients necessary for a bright and shiny fruit that could adorn your table. What’s missing is maturity and a room to grow.
It is a tightly wound play about two women whose lives are inextricably intertwined: a younger sister, a caregiver, who loses her self esteem in the dream of having her older sister sane and whole once again; an older sister who lives the dream but cannot sustain it or present it in a way that seems credible. As their very different sensibilities come into direct contact and immediately clash each begins to realize that nothing will ever make them whole again, that their cores are rotten in a way that cannot be perceived from the shiny exteriors they are able to present to strangers, outsiders who come into their lives to provide both professional and amateur insights.
Sadly the first act is dull and boring. Often new plays have "second act trouble" but in this case it is just the reverse. Too much confusion reigns in Act One as Kay and Billy, her boyfriend, try to disaster-proof the kitchen of a rented house where they plan to keep Kay’s sister Emma who has just been released from a mental institution. Abandoned by their parents, Kay is the one who sets up care for her sister. She is the one who gives when there’s little left to share. Emma is presented as strange, odd, queer, peculiar and yet she has a strength that is perceivable right from the onset of the co-habitation. When the first act ends there is little to bring one back into the theater after the intermission. Fortunately we stayed because we had to.
Act Two injects wit and humor and honesty and a sensibility that instilled life into these two women. It is almost as though the second act was written as the play and then some fool said "you need a first act to explain all this" so Bess Wohl wrote her introductory paragraphs as Act One and so demolished much of what is good about the play. The final scene of the play, a third act really, is presented in such a way that it confuses the audience with its obvious continuation of events that precede it, but not really. It is awkward to play with the unities in this way, especially with time. That takes better writing, too.
The actors in this play seem to do what they are asked to do by the playwright and the director, but perhaps some greater dynamic range would have helped the play along. Merritt Wever is Emma and her second act is spectacular acting while her first is mummery at best. In the last two scenes in which she appears she has a glorious voice and personality that shines through the words Wohl gives her to say. She moves with the grace of a gazelle. There is honesty in her portrayal. Would she had even a token of all this in the first half. Instead she is a dead thing, again courtesy of the script. She is obviously better than her material but perhaps not as good as we’d like to think since she does not instill Emma, at first, with any clarity or oomph or anything of interest at all.
Lisa Joyce does better with Act One and, as written, loses my attention in the latter part of the second act. The play is her character’s play; she grows, changes, perhaps even begins to find out who she really is once she’s on her own. Yet as played she becomes little more than a cleaning rag the others use to express their own frustrations. This imbalance is unfortunate for at the end of Act Two, Scene Two we really hope she finds out who she is and fast for there is a lot happening for her then and there.
Michael Chernus is the catalyst in their lives, a man named Billy who writes books when he’s inspired and these two women clearly do not really inspire him all that much. It is his intervention that brings Emma into focus and forces Kay into a mud-thickened mire of personality disorders. Chernus does what he can with his underwritten, if talky, role.
Talky and stagnant is seemingly the overriding vision of director Trip Cullman. Cullman takes the curiously unpolished script and rubs off any sheen that may actually be there when the scene is dramatic. Likewise he heightens the denser, thicker, less-well defined moments by exposing them to light they cannot tolerate. Clearly much of the imbalance here is Cullman’s doing. There is no excuse for a director to deliver a dull fifty-five minute first act. That needs to be cleaned up somehow for the play to succeed.
The set designed by Andromache Chalfant is perfect for the play and the lighting designed by David Weiner delivers handsomely. Emily Rebholz’s costumes are good for the characters but, like the script, are in-line pedantic. It would have helped us to understand Emma if there had been a costume for her that was truly not what we expect. Sometimes defining a character means hair, makeup and costume. This play could have used it.
History has shown us that a long out of town tryout can be the making of a show. This one needs a few more consecutive stands to iron out the many kinks and errors, many of them all too visible. Clever lines do not make up for the curious lack of well defined characters: "Miraculously he starts to become human" and "It was a bit of a cumin situation," are not the bon mots of a George Bernard Shaw but they did get a laugh and now and then a chuckle. This isn’t a play you rush to see, but it is one you might enjoy if its creators would give it the attention it desperately deserves.
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