two boys and sparkling neighborhood to a gas station for a ride from a friendly stranger, Lloyd, and to start a new life in Springfield.So begins Reckless, Craig Lucas’ incredible tragicomedy directed by Larry Dennis in the third show of Alley Repertory Theater’s inaugural season. With symphonic language as hot as two champion boxers in a title fight, Lucas crafts an extraordinary story about a woman running from her past who makes a home with two people who have also changed their names and live a lie. It is a happy, delusional fantasy for all three, but fate will haunt them relentlessly. The past is impossible to escape.
Thanks to her countless supply of hopeful enthusiasm and a hard-hitting performance by Buffie Main, little housewife Rachel takes on every obstacle pitched her way head on. Each episodic scene becomes a transformation for her. By facing each new direction and every fork in the road head on, shift after shift Rachel continually makes her life brand new. She embraces each thrilling moment, arguing with a calm and stoic Lloyd (Alex Robertson), “The past is irrelevant. It’s what we wake up from.”
Yet even though Rachel rises to a brand new city, new name and family with Lloyd—and, of course, his angelic-but-shrewd, paraplegic wife Pooty (played by Christen Atwood)—, her past finds her and keeps up steadily. Again and again, it returns with regularity as persistent as Christmas. Fate is patient and, at first, Rachel’s past only visits as reminders. It is coaxed from her by a therapist, her first of a string of outrageous doctors in a marathon counseling performance from Katie Preston. But when Tom finds her, pleading her to come back to him, the lies become a hellish reality. She runs again and again, always to another Springfield where there is yet another doctor and it is always Christmas. As Lloyd knew, “The past is something you wake up to. A nightmare you wake up to everyday.”
The Larry Dennis production is captivating and makes the decentralized theatricality inherent in Reckless a comic kick-in-the-pants and easy to swallow. This play is contemporary Epic-Theatre-plus-heart. It marks Craig Lucas’ disjointed reality, which is often one as perplexing as the social, political and human dilemmas he investigates in his work. At the Visual Arts Collective, the dark comedy plays in a fun and touching way, which works when stressing the Christmas setting in the world of the play. But much of the story is made up of gruesome events: attempted assassination, three murders (at least), a handicapped woman feigning deafness and muteness for her husband’s love, lies, doctors who always look the same and are never any help, embezzlement, a man killing himself on a strict champagne-only diet, homelessness, fear and loneliness. As one of the doctors observes, “Life’s been reckless with these people.”
This is more than a feel-good, holiday story. Investing in naturalism, bright charm and touching, winter cheer blurs the demented conflict that drives the action. The potential for collision in Reckless is something fierce. Its tension could reach more brilliant heights and nasty depths; the world around Rachel could be more harsh and brisk. Until she finally makes herself a legitimate new life, she keeps running, always to a Springfield, each one as foreign as the last. If everything in the production is ruthless and unyielding to her, both in terms of performance and design, then by the time Rachel does reach stability in a relaxed lifestyle, the satisfaction could be undeniable and stay simmering in the audience far beyond the 2008 holiday season. By the time she is herself a doctor with a name for herself and a chance to reconnect with her son, anyone to see that journey would have to thank their lucky stars for all their life and good fortune and right away make phone calls to loved ones. The Alley Repertory production is a certain success, but by pursuing the play’s inherent conflict just a little further, it could be an overwhelming triumph.
