Theatre in Review: Where the Mountain Meets the Sea (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)

	Chris Myers, Billy Eugene Jones. Photo: Matt Murphy

Where the Mountain Meets the Sea breaks one's heart coming and coming. Jeff Augustin's brief tale, with music, features two protagonists on separate road trips, the sum of their experiences forming a mutual account of unspoken love, missed connections, and ultimate forgiveness. In its dimensions, it's a very small thing, the theatrical equivalent of a short story, but it lands with surprising emotional impact.

Augustin spins the story through alternating monologues, occasionally interrupted with songs composed and performed by the duo The Bengsons. First up is Jean, a Haitian immigrant who emigrates to Miami in 1978 in search of better opportunities. The former schoolteacher quickly adds, "I was a legal," having obtained a crew worker visa onboard his vessel. "The way these ships worked," he adds, "it was legals on top, two in a cabin. Illegals smuggled down in the bottom," a reminder that US immigration policy was equally dire more than four decades ago.

Despite, or maybe because of, the displacement he feels in his new life, Jean is a canny observer of the world around him. In Miami, he finds work as a baggage handler at the airport. When his lover from home fails to arrive, he cycles through other women in the Haitian community, ultimately falling for Natalie, who shares his love for "moun mon," his name for American folk music. Expecting a child, they explore their new country while driving to the West Coast. Their trip includes stops in Tennessee, where the crowd in a bar is surprisingly welcoming to an unknown Black couple, and South Dakota, where they take in Mount Rushmore in all its artificial glory. It is an exciting, but nervous-making journey. Jean frets, "What if she discovers the parts of myself that I do not desire? And she too finds them repulsive? What if that causes her to leave me? Or worse yet, decide not to keep the baby?" He also prays that their child will be a boy: "I could teach him how to walk in this world and how to avoid the perils of being a strong Black Man."

Next, we meet Jonah, a gay linguistics scholar with a taste in daddy-style lovers and, rather pointedly, a loathing for folk music. Based in California, he must return to Miami to pick up the ashes of his late father. He is, of course, Jean's son. Deciding to recreate his parents' cross-country trip in reverse, he makes several emotional pit stops, dallying in Salt Lake City with an older Baptist man who occupies a trailer with his boyfriend and ex-wife, and, later on, picking up a forensic architect from Nigeria who holds out the possibility of a deeper emotional attachment.

In describing the relationship between Jean and Jonah, Augustin works elliptically, letting us discover for ourselves the painful gulf that separates between them. Jonah grows up as an outlier in the rough-and-tumble Haitian community and is bullied for his difference. Jean regards his son with equal parts love and shame; he understands on some level that Jonah needs special handling, but men will be men and any discussion of feelings is permanently tabled. Then again, Jonah is acutely aware of Jean's sadness. "Every year, on the anniversary of my mom's death," he says, "my father would lock himself in his bedroom after drinking half a bottle of Haitian rum and listen to the same folk song. Over and over. He didn't think I could hear him crying."

Both Jean and Jonah have so much to share, if only they would. Because When the Mount Meets the Sea unfolds at the point when a father-son rapprochement is no longer possible, its power lies in the men's contrasting points of view: Jean's happy/sorrowful memories of marriage and fatherhood versus Jonah's gradual coming to terms with his father's limitations. It's telling that one of the most effective scenes is a trip to the airport when Jonah is leaving for college. Neither man knows what to say, and so they travel in silence. "When he was a teenager, I used to get glimpses of him," Jean says. "But I'd kill it. I didn't tell him it's because the world is cruel. And unsafe for people who are what he is."

Augustin's piece is the most delicate of balancing acts but, thanks to Joshua Kahan Brody's extraordinarily sensitive direction and two fine performances, it retains its equipoise throughout. Billy Eugene Jones, one of the most charismatic leading men to emerge in several seasons, is a melancholy charmer, whether recalling the fierceness of his love for Natalie or detailing his fumbling attempts at getting on social media to keep up with the distant Jonah. Chris Myers, looking very different from his recent appearance in How I Learned to Drive at MTC (a tribute to costume designer Dominique Fawn Hill) shows how Jonah tends his wounds behind a carapace of irony, gradually shedding his defenses on a trip into his family's past. The songs, mostly performed by the Bensons, with occasional contributions from the stars, infuse the proceedings with a plangent note of longing.

Arnulfo Maldonado's set, a circular amphitheatre backed by a mountain range, is an eccentric, yet attractive, conception; think of it as a space made for storytelling. Stacey Derosier's lighting uses side angles for attractive looks, then shifts to an overhead wash, creating a startlingly different atmosphere for a duet featuring Jean and Jonah. Ben Truppin-Brown's sound design provides just the right level of amplification in addition to various effects.

The love between these men is real, the obstacles to it are many, and, sadly, time and tide wait for no man. Jean and Jonah hesitate too long to speak their minds but in remembrance lies a kind of reconciliation, especially as rendered in a final number filled with deep feeling. That Augustin can bring these good, flawed men at last into some kind of harmony is an act of grace, and so is Where the Mountain Meets the Sea. --David Barbour