Theatre in Review: Maybe Tomorrow (Abingdon Theatre Company at ART/New York Theatres)

	Elizabeth A. Davis. Dan Amboyer. Photo: Grace Copeland

Maybe Tomorrow is the first play I've seen set entirely in a bathroom; this is not likely the birth of a genre. It's a rather luxurious bathroom, surprisingly so, since it is attached to a mobile home. (A "deluxe" one, we are repeatedly told, but still.) Gail, its primary occupant, refers to it as the "pause room" where she can hide from the world, especially her too-enthusiastic boyfriend (and, later, husband) Ben. Her pauses start extending, however, until Gail can no longer step out into the real world, a prisoner of...what?

The play begins on an amusing note with Ben and Gail spicing things up in the bedroom department with a cop-and-prisoner scenario. In retrospect, the scene is a red flag, signaling Gail's perilous dependence on fantasy. In any case, reality bites back when she becomes pregnant. Ben is ecstatic; she is less than thrilled, not least because they are just getting by, economically, living in Vermont. Rising to the occasion, he proposes marriage, gets a job selling used luxury cars, and off they go to a new life in New Jersey. Gail gives in to this plan but -- believe me -- that bathroom will soon become a semi-permanent residence.

Ben's new career takes off, but Gail becomes increasingly withdrawn, planting herself on the john for increasingly long stretches. At his suggestion, she starts making jewelry to sell on Etsy, building such a profitable business that Ben must quit his job to raise their young son. (What initially looks like postpartum depression becomes something else; her maternal instincts are nil, to the point of criminal neglect.) This setup works for a while, then takes a sinister turn transforming what begins as a romantic comedy into an exercise in psychological horror.

Or what might be one, if Maybe Tomorrow weren't so fundamentally divided against itself. Max Mondi reportedly based his play on a real-life incident but has difficulty imagining it as a coherent drama. Ben, a cheery, jump-first-and-ask-questions-later type, and the preternaturally cautious, pessimistic Gail make an odd couple, leaving open the question of what they see in each other. Indeed, her rampant agoraphobia seems rooted in feeling railroaded into marriage and motherhood and her suppressed anger is spiked with a touch of self-hatred: When Ben offers to arrange a meeting with a friend of a friend who runs a New York art gallery, she snaps, "So she can laugh at our trailer too?!"

Gail's obsessions overtake her life so completely, she concludes that her son, whom she hasn't seen in months, doesn't exist. (Not for nothing does Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with its mysteriously absent offspring, get introduced into the conversation.) Also, by now, Gail is chatting openly with the audience, explicating the feelings she can't share with her husband. In the middle of a marital argument, she shouts, "Ben, it's OK to admit we're in a play. It took me a while to get it, too, but, once I did, I was so much happier."

Maybe Tomorrow is dotted with inconsistencies, leaving one with little to hold onto. The play hints that Ben drinks too much, then drops the idea. Gail's art is supposed to be avant-garde and hard to grasp, but we never learn anything about it once her crafting business takes off. (Does she have real talent? Does it matter?) Mondi wants to keep the audience in a state of tingling uncertainty -- either Gail is a mad housewife or plugged into a higher reality; either Ben is a loving, supportive spouse or utterly blind to his wife's needs; either they have a child, or they don't. But in each case, it's too easy to guess the answer.

It's also difficult to care about the passive, querulous Gail. She's the sort of woman who screams into a pillow and then insists everything is fine, and her dishonesty -- with Ben and herself -- becomes irritating. That we don't give up on her altogether is a testament to the extraordinary skill of Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays her. Her flirtation with the audience is genuinely eerie and in those rare moments when her rage breaks through, you can feel the entire room snap to attention. Ben is an extremely tricky character -- one can't stop wondering why he puts up with Gail's increasing reclusiveness and paranoia -- but Dan Amboyer finds a way to keep him sympathetic. (It's not his fault that Ben's eleventh-hour speech, explaining why he has stuck around for so long, doesn't really convince; Gail obviously needs a wheelchair and a therapist, not necessarily in that order.) Chad Austin, the director, clearly has an eye for casting; he also handles each scene with commendable skill.

Josafath Reynoso's set design has its oddities -- this may be the first bathroom ever to have a toilet freestanding in the center -- but at least it is pleasant to look at, glimpsed, interestingly, through unfinished walls. Dawn Chiang's lighting becomes increasingly subtle and complex as the evening progresses, making use of units under the deck and LED tape lining the top of the structure; she also mixes things up with some surprising color washes. Siena Zoe Allen's costumes fit the characters to a T. Evdoxia Ragkou's sound design includes some well-chosen music between scenes and the all-important sound of a crying baby.

A lot of skill has been applied to Maybe Tomorrow, but Mondi hasn't managed to translate his fascination with this bizarre situation into a portrait that gets under Gail's prickly skin. Her strange case remains hard to understand, and sometimes difficult to care about. --David Barbour