Theatre in Review: Long Story Short (Prospect Theater Company)

	Pearl Sun, Bryce Ryness. Photo: Matthew Murphy

A short piece about a long marriage, Long Story Short offers one set, two people, and 50 years of events. As Charles, the hero, sings, "Don't you wish we could skip the in-between stuff/All the boring everyday routine stuff/Oh, if I could fast-forward through it/I say, why not get right to it." And that is pretty much the modus operandi of Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda's new show. The story is structured as a series of jump cuts. A lighting cue in the middle of a scene -- in the middle of a conversation -- will indicate that the action has suddenly flashed ahead weeks, months, or years. The show leapfrogs from dating to marriage to parenthood to senior citizenship; their lives seem to pass in the blink of an eye.

Long Story Short is founded on one of those pairings of opposites that the writers of musicals seem to love so much. Charles is Jewish, neurotic, craving love, yet terrified of commitment. He dreams of writing historical novels, but he pays his bills by pouring coffee. Hope is Asian, and seemingly much more together; she is also a little bit of a nudge and not really looking for a relationship. Their first encounter is a sort of date -- he's romantically inclined, while she is merely doing a favor for a friend -- but soon they are dating, then fighting about marriage, then he is carrying her over the threshold. We see Charles go from barista to bank teller to executive. Hope begins as a stay-at-home wife and mother, but returns to school to become a high-priced therapist. The songs depicting their getting to know each other are highly variable, especially the one in which Charles has his hands on Hope's breasts while she cups his groin. Otherwise, the action couldn't be more predictable, punctuated by perfectly ordinary songs about perfectly ordinary things; after a while, you might find yourself thinking that you'd really rather be at a revival of I Do! I Do!

However, the authors throw a curveball into the story with a plot development, about the unexpected death of a child, that is seemingly destined to kick the proceedings up to a new level of emotional complexity. (Long Story Short is based on the play An Infinite Ache, by David Schulner, which features a similar turn of events.) Hope is plunged into depression; this event is the first wedge driven between her and Charles, and it will soon come to seem like a chasm. But even as their marriage starts to collapse, Long Story Short finds itself, like Hope, unable to face and resolve the pain caused by this tragedy, and so, except for a few scattered references, it remains buried. It is around this point that the true weakness of the libretto becomes manifest: For far too much of the running time, Charles and Hope so obviously exist in different worlds that it is difficult to understand what they see in each other. We watch them grow apart when we've never really seen them together. By the two-thirds point of the show's 90-minute running time, I was more than ready to grant them a divorce.

However, as it heads into the home stretch, and as Charles and Hope warily reunite, first as friends, then for a standing weekly date, and finally living together again, Long Story Short starts to become the moving portrait of a marriage the authors intended all along. The last couple of numbers, "Still Love" and "Letting Go," benefit from pensive, melancholy melodies, although the lyrics throughout remain ponderous. ("It happened in a moment/Just as if I'd always known it/When you fell asleep that first night/I felt my heart would burst out of my body...") But the pain of a broken relationship is powerfully conveyed, as is the way they cling to each other even as one of them is dying.

That Long Story Short works at all is heavily due to the performances. Bryce Ryness' Charles is the kind of super-intense guy who can exhaust others with his feelings; he invests the character with a powerful sense of yearning that proves engaging; you really just want him to be happy. Pearl Sun is equally fine as Hope, who keeps both her happiness and heartbreak carefully shrouded from public view. Her transformation from a deeply unhappy housewife to a crisp professional is neatly done. Both of them age plausibly without makeup or wigs -- Ryness is especially good at capturing the glassy-eyed, slack-jawed stare that you see in some of the elderly -- and they play their later scenes with a tenderness that feels real and unforced. There's also a clever touch at the end, when the action rewinds to their first meeting, and we see a little bit of staging business that goes a long way toward explaining why these perfect strangers got together.

Under Kent Nicholson's relatively light-fingered direction, everything else about Long Story Short is efficient, including David L. Arsenault's set, which depicts an anonymous studio apartment in Los Angeles; Grant W. S. Yeager's lighting; and Kevin Heard's sound. Even though the action covers half a century, Charles and Hope exist outside of history; there isn't a single reference to a president, a war, or a TV show of any period. Given this strange limitation, Kirche Leigh Zeile dresses both characters attractively, using clothing that points to no special period.

And in the end, despite the hard work of two fine performers, the words that define Long Story Short are "nothing special." The characters aren't distinctive enough, the songs aren't sufficiently lively or well-observed, and the principal novelty -- those jump-cuts in time -- keeps us from experiencing the little details that would make the show come alive. For a show like this to work, it's not enough for the characters to fall in love; we have to fall in love with them. Charles and Hope are perfectly nice young people but you probably wouldn't ask them out for a second date. -- David Barbour