Review: The Pain and the Itch by Capital T Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Mark Pickell has an eye for mordant black humor, so Capital T's productions fit perfectly into Ken Webster's Hyde Park Theatre -- both into that odd and intimate space and into the ironic, brash, better-than-hip ethos of the place. If you like Ken's stuff, you'll love Mark's. And a further lure: the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago has premiered the last seven works of this playwright.
Bruce Norris' savage deadpan flaying of the earnest American upper middle class in The Pain and the Itch is more than mere satire, though. It's a paradox wrapped in an enigma presented in Pickell's exquisitely imagined box set. In the guise of a family visit to attorney Kelly and her house-husband Clay at Thanksgiving time, Norris serves up at least two mysteries: What is that reserved Middle Eastern taxi-driver doing in this American home? And what is the malady of adorable five-year-old daughter Kayla that Cash the plastic surgeon brother-in-law is called to investigate and at the same time to conceal?
I missed the staging of this 2005 play when the University of Texas MFA program did it in a April, 2011, followed immediately by Norris's Clybourne Park (which was later awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the 2012 Tony for best play).
The arc is from the squabbling of grown siblings to the disconnects of incomprehension, television, clashes of culture, accidents, victims and deceit. Norris writes with a scalpel whetted to such a fine edge that at first one doesn't realize the depth and damage of his adroit strokes as he dissects the bland, blind conceits of this all-American family.
Anyone who knows Austin theatre will see in an instant that this cast includes some of the very best and most vivid actors in this town. It's an ensemble that lifts the audience in that close-up space out of mere make-believe into authenticity, unpredictability and suspense that are fine-tuned and deeply memorable.
Ben Wolfe as the patient, awkward and painfully polite taxi driver Mr. Hadid is like Banquo's ghost at this feast. Indigo Rael as Kalina the brother-in-law's much younger refugee girlfriend is a brashly exuberant survivor, delighted to play with tiny Kayla but ready to flare up in an instant. We learn that these two, foreigners and opposites, have both experienced loss beyond bourgeois comprehension. Other intruders are gnawing in the house and in the attic, leaving toothmarks -- presences both symbolic and ultimately fundamental to the dénouement.
Benjamin Summers as Clay is the putative protagonist here, but he's about as far from Father Knows Best as you can get. His earnest sincerity is almost painful to watch, and you just know that he's going to get it in the end (and he does, as he recently did in Hyde Park's Middletown by Will Eno -- and though in this play he doesn't die, he's so thoroughly humiliated that death might have been kinder to him).
Kenneth Wayne Bradley as his assertive brother Cash (how's that for sardonic naming?) provides his familiar edgy vigor, and Lana Dieterich does a fine turn as mom Carol, peppy, deceptively rambling and slightly delusional (very like her role as Violet in the Zach production of August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, for which she was nominated for a B. Iden Payne as leading actress in a comedy but inched out by Lauren Lane in the same production). Liz Fisher delivers, as always, a performance of smooth elegance, even as a distracted and uneasy working mother of two (or perhaps of three, if you count her needy husband).
A special round of applause goes to tiny Sadie Dragoo as daughter Kayla, quietly hitting her marks amidst all this grown-up wrangling and hysteria. She's the focus of one extremely comic moment when she panics the whole lot of them.
Capital T's tag line for the show is "Worst. Thanksgiving. Ever." The Zach called August: Osage County "one bitch of a family reunion." Norris and Letts share an attitude and portray a conventional American family that's seriously stressed, self-absorbed and threatened.
I find Norris' work the smarter of the two, particularly in his mining of cross-cultural incomprehension. He does resort to an Agatha-Christie-type resolution in the second act, clicking all the pieces suddenly into place with rapid-fire revelations across the stage, followed by a moment of horrible uproarious laughter (watch for Lana Dieterich's sublime double-take on her own dialogue in that scene). At first it seems like a cheap trick, but Norris is better than that, for then he reveals the reason that the inhibited Mr. Hadid is there to witness all of this mutual recrimination and self-degradation
Hadid's reaction is whole-hearted and sincere. It goes so far as to restore some of our hope for the future generations that will eventually modify and replace the comic but despicable and self-deluded American upper middle class presented by Norris.
Review by Jeff Davis for www.austin.broadwayworld.com, November 4
Comments by Claire Christine Spera in the Stateman's Austin360 Seeing Things blog, November 5
Review by Adam Roberts for the Austin Chronicle, November 15
Two-minute 'Arts Eclectic' spot with Mike Lee on KUT-FM, November 15
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, November 24
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The Pain and the Itch
by Bruce Norris
Capital T Theatre
