Theatre in Review: When It's You (Keen Company/Theatre Row)

	Ana Reeder. Photo: Carol Rosegg

Each theatre season has its own identity, its own concerns and questions; as When It's You began, I wondered, could it really be that, in the same month, I was seeing the second solo play about a woman who is connected to a massacre along the lines of Newtown, Charleston, or Aurora. Well, yes and no. On the Exhale, now at Roundabout Underground, focuses on an academic whose little boy is murdered at school, along with many others. Ginnifer, the heroine of When It's You, isn't directly connected to a parking lot shooting that kills a handful of male workers, wounding many more. Then again, maybe she is. Or maybe she isn't. The constant tug of war inside her head is what drives Courtney Baron's play.

As conscientiously embodied by Ana Reeder, Ginnifer is an affable Dallas gal in her late thirties -- who, somehow, when she wasn't looking, ended up utterly alone in the world. Her parents divorced when she was little and her father quickly disappeared from her life; her brother got out of town at the first opportunity -- for college at Dartmouth -- and remade himself as a New Englander. Ginnifer moved to St. Louis, where she pursued a career as an accountant, but eventually she returned and she now lives in the house that belonged to her late mother. She even sleeps in her mother's bed -- although she is quick to add, "But it has new sheets, a new mattress pad" -- as if these details were enough to dispel the impression that we're getting.

Ginnifer adds that her mother provided her with "the most love I've known. Those of you married and coupled, there is love that you have, that y'all'd be left with. But I am struck by the fact that the love I have is going to die. Did die. Did. Disappeared. Don't give me the crap about how she'll always be with me, because spirit love is not satisfying. I can attest to that." She freely admits that her dating experiences have been sparse and not really satisfactory; there was one long-term relationship that, she thought, might get her on the marriage track, but it went awry when, one day, her boyfriend informed her that she needed to "up her game;" you can imagine how that played out.

After the funeral of her mother, one of the mourners who showed up at Ginnifer's house, bearing food, was Jason, her high-school boyfriend. Long out of touch, she learned that he worked as a mechanic and still lived at home; the meeting was awkward, as such things are, but it more or less slipped her mind -- until the day that Jason drove into a parking lot, rifle in hand, and took out a bunch of strangers.

The rest of When It's You follows Ginnifer's obsession with the case. She dwells on bizarre details, insisting that the lights in her house started to flicker at the same moment that Jason departed on his homicidal mission. A group of old high school girlfriends look her up and take her out, trying to pry out of her any details of Jason's troubled psyche. ("I become the expert they want me to be.") She even seeks out Jason's grief-hollowed mother, an encounter that begins skirting disaster the second she tells her first lie, pretending to have a child of her own. The strange paradox of When It's You is that Ginnifer has only the slightest connection to the murders -- a fact that serves to open a window into her largely solitary existence.

Baron's script is full of striking observations. Discussing her feelings about tornadoes, Ginnifer says, "The world is filled with natural disasters, but when the first ten minutes of The Wizard of Oz feels like a documentary, you gain a healthy fear of the weather." Going out with her eerily preserved friends from long ago, Ginnifer, who is perfectly capable of devouring an entire box of Girl Scout Thin Mints in one sitting, purposely orders a salad for lunch. "Don't let them see you have no self-control," she says, by way of explanation. Odd little details -- a postcard sent by Jason just as he is leaving for a summer's backpacking in Europe -- suddenly seem filled with mystery. What happened to the adventurous young man who could never get away from home and ended up doing something unspeakable? No answers are forthcoming, but Reeder -- whether saying, as if testing the proposition, "I think I have been loved," or producing, with a mixture of humor and embarrassment, the Cabbage Patch Doll that she can't manage to throw out after all these years -- gives us a thoroughly unsentimental guided tour of her character's strangely unfurnished life.

The weakness of When It's You -- and it's a pretty big one -- is that the pleasures it offers are largely those of fine prose. Because Reeder is so skilled and also because she never once asks for our sympathy, we follow Ginnifer's progress toward a bleak sort-of realization with avid interest, but the climax that Baron supplies simply isn't as dramatic as it should be. What the script lacks is the moment of recognition that would anchor the action, making Ginnifer's journey seem fully worthwhile. I was never bored watching When It's You, but I also kept thinking it would make an even more powerful novella.

Jonathan Silverstein surely had a hand in shaping Reeder's fluent and understated performance; he has also elicited a production design of spartan simplicity. Steven Kemp's set is a bare space, painted gray, that serves as a surface for Justin West's projections of high school yearbook photos and big Texas skies. Jennifer Paar dresses Reeder appropriately, and Bart Fasbender provides a handful of sound effects.

While it's a relief that Baron hasn't sensationalized her material, her approach is so understated that one begins to wonder if she has found the right format for the tale she has chosen to tell. In any case, she's a writer to watch. -- David Barbour