Theatre in Review: Stargazers (Page 73 at Connelly Theatre)

	Kelly McAndrew. Photo: Valerie Terranova

Stargazers is either terrible or the work of a writer with an entirely original sensibility -- I don't know which. Then again, even when I started to balk at Majkin Holmquist's play, I was never bored. I was also, alternately, gripped, amused, and, at times, appalled. I'm still making up my mind about it.

Holmquist breaks nearly every established rule of playwriting, beginning with a structure that amounts to several plots stitched together. The action centers (if that's the word I want) around Rita, a Kansas farmer who, following the death of her daughter, Cate, has withdrawn from the world, spending ten years or more in a perpetual state of cold fury. She won't let anyone touch her land, even though it has plenty of potential takers. They include Jessica, Cate's close friend, eager to escape her father and brothers, who treat her as a glorified housekeeper; Al, Rita's ex-husband, who still doesn't understand why he was cast out; and Casey, a neighbor and contemporary of Cate's, who, trying to be helpful, plows a small piece of Rita's acreage, driving her into a baffling bout of hysteria.

Then there's Clementine, employed by a shifty-sounding "visionary" property developer, who wants to convert Rita's homestead into a female-friendly utopian community. It will be "a woman's haven," Clementine says. "Men, of course, will not be excluded from the space, but the space is for the primacy of a diverse group of female-identified people and voices." In her best deadpan manner, Rita asks, "Have your people been to Kansas?"

With this setup, Stargazers looks like a fairly conventional comic drama about characters wrestling with trauma; especially given its heartland setting, it feels like the sort of thing Circle Rep produced in the 1980s. But Holmquist, who is interested in the ripple effect caused by Cate's death, has plenty of curveballs at her fingertips. The focus shifts to Cate's high school crew, a twentysomething breakfast club that includes Jessica; Casey; Aracely, visiting from her new home in Los Angeles; and Avery, Casey's new boyfriend, a coach at the local high school, all of whom have wandered into adulthood looking a tad lost. These scenes strike a different, much more wistful mood. (To be sure, we get some of the gruesome details of Cate's grisly death by electrocution.) There's also a ghost-story undertone: Rita is convinced that Cate sends her signs, Aracely says she has felt Cate's presence, and Casey thinks he has seen her after death.

And, for good measure, the playwright introduces Andy, hired by the developer to scope out Rita's land, and Bridget, his dim-bulb employee (and sister-in-law), who is given to musing, "Sometimes I imagine myself somewhere else. Stare at the moon and when I look down, could be I'm in Dubai. Or Maui. Or...or Milwaukee." (Amusing as Bridget is, she and Andy could probably be excised without harming the script.) Then just as we're trying to make sense of it all, Holmquist gets our attention with a grisly (and not entirely convincing) confession from Rita, who subsequently enlists Aracely and Jessica in a macabre act of restitution.

As you can probably tell, Stargazers is all over the place, a jumble of plots and characters marked by a blatant juxtaposition of everyday humor and gothic horror. Then again, maybe it is better built than it initially appears: Maybe Rita's farm, which has been in her family since the Grant administration, is the protagonist, its fate shaped by tragedy, social change, and the erosions of time. In that view, everyone in the play, a parade of drifters and deceivers, is a supporting character, merely passing through.

It's an intriguing concept and it goes a long way toward explaining why the play exerts a grip even when it appears to be spinning in several directions at once. Whatever one thinks of Stargazers, the director, Colette Robert, handles its whipsawing moods as nimbly as possible -- for example, staging a suicidal act so subtly that it takes a minute to assimilate -- aided by an especially game cast. Rita's shocking disclosure might not be convincing in less skilled hands than those of Kelly McAndrew. Similarly, Keren Lugo deftly navigates Aracely's drunken ramblings about her love/hate relationship with Los Angeles, offering an amusingly contemporary twist on the you-can't-go-home-again theme. Lizzy Brooks earns laughs with Clementine's too-practiced smile and overrehearsed sales pitch. The others -- Baize Buzan, Andrew Garman, Fernando Gonzalez, and Miles G. Jackson -- are double-cast, giving each of their characters a sharply defined profile; Jackson is virtually unrecognizable as both Casey and Jim, Clementine's colleague and boyfriend.

Lawrence E. Moten III's set, featuring a barn façade, precariously leaning telephone pole, and campfire, amplified by such details as a rusty weathervane and little red wagon, creates the deep sense of place the script demands and Reza Behjat's lighting sensitively delineates different moods and times of day. Alicia J. Austin's costumes feel spot-on and Tosin Olufolabi's sound design ranges from cicadas to melancholy bass guitar passages to the ABBA hit "Fernando."

At times, Holmquist relies too much on the audience's credulity; for example, would Clementine, who is so concerned about making a good impression, really consent to fool around with Jim on Rita's picnic table? She's already on the thinnest of ice with Rita. The climax is so grotesque that it might make Martin McDonagh giggle nervously but one keeps waiting, in vain, for psychological repercussions. But such issues don't interest the playwright; instead, she focuses her steady, faintly unnerving gaze on the Kansas landscape, watching it be profoundly transformed thanks to a wildly random chain of events. I was poleaxed by Stargazers; days later, I still don't know what to make of it. I only know I want to see whatever Holmquist writes next. --David Barbour