Theatre in Review: The Hill Town Plays (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre)The new season kicks off with an extraordinarily ambitious project that is both an enormous gift to a playwright and a major gamble -- for her and the producing organization: Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre has chosen to simultaneously present five plays by Lucy Thurber in five separate Greenwich Village theatres. (Aside from Rattlestick, the others are Axis Theatre, Cherry Lane's main stage and studio space, and the New Ohio Theatre.) A legion of canny directors, fine designers, and gifted actors has been marshaled for the effort. It's a playwright's dream, but be careful what you wish for; having seen all five works, it remains an open question if Rattlestick has done Thurber any favors. The title of The Hill Town Plays refers to a collection of small towns in Western Massachusetts, where poverty, ignorance, and addiction form a seemingly unbreakable cycle. (This is not the New England vacation land of Tanglewood, Williamstown, and cute country inns; one of Thurber's characters refers to it as "Massatucky.") In their most trenchant passages, of which there are many, the plays focus on characters torn between clawing their way out or sinking into the familiar morass of hopelessness. It's powerful stuff, but the plays are of unequal value, to say the least, and their group presentation raises many unfortunate questions. The press release states, "Each of The Hill Town Plays examines a pivotal stage in a woman's life -- from a childhood of poverty, alcoholism, and abuse in a western Massachusetts mill town, through college and coming to terms with one's sexual identity, and on to adulthood and a successful writing career." Fair enough -- but, because each play was apparently written as a stand-alone work, there is a glaring lack of continuity that proves confusing and is sometimes actively irritating. To see all five, which cover more than two decades of its shapeshifting heroine's life, is to wander through a wilderness in which people come and go without explanation and characters regularly change their names and intentions without explanation. The action commences with Scarcity; set in 1992, it introduces many of the principal players, including the young woman we will refer to as The Central Character, or TCC. Here, she is 11-year-old Rachel, who lives with her hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-loving parents, Martha and Herb, and her brother, Billy. It's a fraught, frantic existence, fueled by liquor and cigarettes, and lacking anyone to take responsibility. Boundaries don't exist between parents and children; a kiss and a punch send more or less the same message. The action focuses on the efforts of Ellen, a young teacher, to salvage the intellectually gifted Billy, pointing him toward college. Thurber is hardly interested in uplift à la The Corn is Green, however; Billy is sitting on a powder keg of rage, Ellen is needy and a bit of a sexual predator, and Martha and Herb exert a negative power that is hard to escape. Thurber is especially good at establishing Ellen's cluelessness, how every time she describes a new opportunity for Billy she unconsciously strips Martha and Herb of their last shred of dignity. Meanwhile, Rachel, who is unnaturally mature and well-spoken for her age, watches in horror at the prospect of being left alone with her parents. Scarcity had a high-profile production at Atlantic Theatre in 2007 but Daniel Talbott's taut staging, with its ever-present threat of violence, has a better cast, especially Deirdre O'Connell's furious, smothering Martha and Will Pullen's sullen, angry Billy. There's a slightly forced climax, when an artificial deadline is imposed to decide Billy's fate, but the outcome is as wrenching as anyone could wish. It's typical of the cycle's unevenness that this powerful work is followed by one of the weakest entries. Ashville takes place in 1997, when TCC, now a 16-year-old named Celia, lives with her mother, Shelly. (The seemingly unbreakable marriage of Martha and Herb, as seen in Scarcity, is a thing of the past. There is no mention of a brother.) With her raucous laugh, taste for scotch, and inability to act like an adult, Shelly is another Martha. However, Celia is Rachel's direct opposite, a shy, pathetically unsure creature who relies on her good looks and people-pleasing nature to get along. She has nabbed an older boyfriend, Jake, who works in construction and wants to marry her. (In this family's version of togetherness, Celia sleeps on the couch with Jake, and Shelly sleeps in the bedroom with whomever; her current beau is Harry, a creep who tries to molest Celia.) Nothing much happens; everybody gets drunk or high, Jake and Celia and get engaged, and she promptly throws herself at Joe, the drug dealer next door, and Amanda, a female friend. (This is the first of several drawn-out lesbian seductions that frequently slow the pace of the plays.) Instead of an ending, Thurber relies on an out-of-left moment of direct address that resolves nothing. On the plus side, this production, directed by Karen Allen, features an assured set design by John McDermott, which solves the spatial problem of representing two adjoining apartments on stage, and lovely, delicate lighting by Matt Richards. Mia Vallet makes a strong impression as the inarticulate Celia, and Aubrey Dollar is equally appealing as Amanda, possibly the only character in all five plays who is capable of making an adult decision. In Where We're Born, it is now 2003 and TCC, now named Lilly, is a student at Smith College. Unable to tolerate her needy, demanding mother, here reduced to an offstage character, Lilly is spending her vacation with her cousin Tony. (This is Tony's first and only appearance; again, the father and brother are nowhere to be found.) In a cycle of plays in which smoking, drinking, and shooting the breeze constitutes virtually the only nonviolent activity, Where We're Born may contain the longest, most-drawn-out passages of idleness. The atmosphere of torpor brings out the devil in Lilly, who seduces Tony's girlfriend, Franky. (The long, teasing run-up to their first encounter is a virtual replay of the Lilly-Amanda scene in Ashville.) No good can come of this secret relationship, and its exposure leads to more emotional fireworks. There are some nice things in Where We're Born, which was directed by Jackson Gay, but almost all of them can be found in the other plays. The one exception is Betty Gilpin, who best captures the warring forces inside TCC's head. Seen by itself in 2009, in a production that was a virtual clone of the current one, Killers and Other Family came across as a nerve-shredding thriller about a family reunion gone horribly wrong. Caitriona McLaughlin's production still impresses, but seen in the context of the other Hill Town Plays, it becomes strangely perplexing. TCC has matured into Elizabeth (Samantha Soule, in a remarkably committed performance), a graduate student living in New York with her female lover, Claire. Trouble arrives in the form of Jeff, Elizabeth's brother, and Danny, her old boyfriend, both of whom are fleeing a clear case of manslaughter and want money to get to Mexico. Is Jeff, a drunken redneck, an older version of Billy from Scarcity? Is the near-psychotic Danny another version of Jake from Where We're Born? There's no way of knowing, but the increasingly nagging question of how to consider these plays is temporarily tabled by a suspenseful scenario spiked with horrifyingly credible scenes of violence staged by UnkleDaves' Fight House. Shane McRae and Chris Stack are equally effective as Danny and Jeff. Thurber saves the worst for last with Stay, which is set in 2013. We're back to Rachel again, who is now a grown woman, a published author, and a professor of writing at an eastern college. She's single again and is still the same ticking bomb she ever was. She is also accompanied by Floating Girl, a simulacrum of her younger self, whom she alone can see. Rachel gets a surprise visit from Billy, her brother, a graduate of Harvard Law, who has just lost his position in a high-profile firm for sleeping with his secretary, who happens to be the boss' daughter. (To underline the point that these are the characters from Scarcity, we hear Dierdre O'Connell's voice on the answering machine as Martha.) Rachel has no right to judge her brother, because before you can say "poor impulse control," she' shaving a fling with Julia, a clearly disturbed (and occasionally suicidal) student who is also gifted with second sight. (This cues the third lengthy we-really-shouldn't-be-doing-this seduction, the highlight of which has Julia slipping into a trance.) As in the other plays, Rachel is always being distracted from her work by her bad companions. (It's telling that in none of the plays does TCC ever express the slightest joy in reading, writing, or teaching literature; work is a way out of poverty but not a form of spiritual sustenance.) Stay is even more listless and poorly plotted than Ashville; the Rachel-Julia alliance leads to various shouting matches -- Tommy, Julia's hapless boyfriend, gets in the mix as well -- leading to a truly baffling ending in which all the characters discover the presence of Floating Girl and serenade the audience with a lullaby. Gaye Taylor Upchurch's direction never finds a convincing approach for a play that is little more than a gaggle of theatrical devices. Cheers, however, to Rachel Hauck's set, which takes us from Rachel's office to her apartment with the flip of a single wall. It's dispiriting to arrive at the end of this five-play journey feeling much the same as one did at the outset. If The Hill Town Plays don't really work as a chronicle, they work only intermittently as a set of variations on a theme. Too many scenes repeat from play to play and it becomes wearying to see TCC and the others repeatedly make the same bad choices. Clearly, everyone involved hoped to present an expansive account of Thurber's vision, but the joining together of the plays is subtractive rather than additive. Time after time, the author serves up another dish of the same misery stew, adding little or nothing in the way of insight or character revelation. The willingness of Rattlestick to expend so many resources on a single writer is certainly admirable, but, the next time around, they might choose more carefully. --David Barbour 
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