Theatre in Review: Tiny Beautiful Things (The Public Theater/Susan Stein Shiva Theater)

	Nia Vardalos, Phillip James Brannon. Photo: Joan Marcus

One attends the Public Theater for many reasons -- for beautifully staged Shakespeare, provocative social commentary, and hard-nosed political ideas, along with the odd formal experiment. It's safe to say that one rarely, if ever, goes there for personal advice. I'm not saying that you'll find the answers to your personal problems if you attend Tiny Beautiful Things but I think I can guarantee that you will have an atypical Public Theater experience. Whether that's good news or not is strictly up to you.

A little bit of background. The director, Thomas Kail, gave the book Tiny Beautiful Things to Oskar Eustis, the Public's artistic director, who fell in love with it. Kail also gave it to the actress and writer Nia Vardalos, best known for My Big Fat Greek Wedding; she saw it as a theatre piece, and, under the circumstances, it wasn't hard to get a slot at the Public -- in a production directed by Kail. It may just be possible, however, that all these fine people have let their warm feelings cloud their judgment a little. Interesting plays have been made from epistolary materials in the past, but an advice column -- even one with rife with exquisite literary flourishes -- doesn't really a play make.

The book Tiny Beautiful Things was compiled by the writer Cheryl Strayed (author of the best-selling memoir Wild) from her stint writing the "Dear Sugar" column in the online magazine The Rumpus. The questions range from the probing and metaphysical ("What is this love thing all about?") to the near-farcical: One correspondent reveals that his girlfriend is aroused at the sight of men dressed as Santa Claus. Since he already dresses up as Santa for his two young nephews, might he possibly use the costume for other, more adult reasons? You can be sure that Sugar enthusiastically signs off on that happy-holidays plan.

Most of the questions are real posers, seemingly to leave the amateur advice-giver in a state of stupefaction. A young woman who miscarried wants to know the secret of caring again. (It doesn't help that her doctor informed her that she probably lost the baby because she was overweight.) Another writes, "The thought of staying in my marriage leaves me panicky and claustrophobic." A transgender man wonders if it is time to reconnect with the parents from whom he has been estranged for seven years. A rape victim asks if, four years after that terrible event, she should disclose it to her new lover. These aren't dilemmas that can be disposed of in a few lines of advice.

And, to her credit, Strayed is no Ann Landers, snappily telling her correspondents to wake up and smell the coffee or throw the bum out. Instead, she digs deeply into her own rather checkered past, providing each of them with a little piece of her soul. To the writer who wonders about love, she replies, "The last word my mother ever said to me was love," she says. "She was 45, and so sick and weak she couldn't muster the 'I' or the 'you,' but it didn't matter. That puny word has the power to stand on its own." Providing reassurance to the woman who was assaulted, she recalls revealing her own sordid past -- including heroin addiction and an abortion that left her angry enough to cut herself -- to the man she would eventually marry. His response: "Don't get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don't need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don't have to be broken for me." She comforts a reader who struggles with a narcissistic father -- he routinely withholds his approval and also cheats on his wife -- with an account of her own father, who abandoned her, only to turn up out of the blue, as if nothing had happened. When she called him on his behavior, he flew into a rage and announced that he would be glad to be rid of her forever.

I have no doubt that Strayed has helped any number of people and if I were a regular reader of The Rumpus I would probably head directly to the Dear Sugar column, but this material doesn't really add up to a satisfying evening in the theatre. It's rather like rifling through back issues of a favorite magazine, looking for odds and ends to pass the time. Strayed can turn an elegant phrase, whether she is meditating on "the ordinary miraculous" or stunning with such revelations as "My father's father made me jack him off when I was three or four or five." And she can turn surprisingly peppery, telling a frivolous reader to "ask better questions." But there's no drama here, no development, no increasing complexity or deepening of feeling. It's just a series of questions and answers, and even the deep empathy of the latter after a while becomes a little bit dull.

Vardalos, who has a natural stage presence and the skill to make a pause in the conversation vibrate with unspoken thoughts, goes a long way toward holding our interest, and the three actors who play the various members of her constituency are all first-rate: Phillip James Brannon, making one mean screwdriver to fortify himself while asking a particularly vexing question; Natalie Woolams-Torres, quietly baring the shame of drug addiction and compulsive theft; and Alfredo Narciso, finding real, gutsy power in "Living Dead Dad," who, having lost his beloved son in a car accident, can't find a way back into life. This sequence provides the evening's climax; instead of writing a proper letter, he can only provide a list of bullet points detailing his agony. Her response in a similar format is a marvel of empathy, a promissory note written against the possibility of future healing.

Kail's production has its eccentric touches. One wonders if this simple play needed an elaborate, highly naturalistic set depicting a living room/dining room/kitchen, but in any case Rachel Hauck has delivered it in marvelously detailed fashion. (Looking at it, my first thought was that the Gabriel family, up in the Anspacher, could move right in and be at home.) Jeff Croiter's varied lighting is marked by a series of subtle shifts. Jennifer Moeller's casual-wear costumes suit each actor perfectly. Jill BC Du Boff's sound is solid.

Still, at even a brief running time of eighty minutes, there's a good chance you'll leave the Susan Stein Shiva feeling weighed down by all that uplift. I'm all for Sugar -- but maybe not on an Off Broadway stage. -- David Barbour