Theatre in Review: The Recommendation (Flea Theatre)

	Austin Trow and James Fouhey. Photo: Hunter Canning

Friendship is many things in The Recommendation -- patronage, commerce, and blackmail, among others -- but it is rarely truly friendship. That's because the three characters in Jonathan Caren's cracklingly paced, coolly observant comedy are caught in a tangle of race, money, and class -- in words, life as we live it America today.

Our narrator is Iskinder Iudoku -- you can call him Izzy -- from Charlotte, North Carolina. The child of an Ethiopian father and a white American mother, he is the embodiment of young America in the era of Barack Obama. Hardly a child of privilege, he earns a spot at Brown University, where fate throws him together with his new roommate, Aaron Feldman. Aaron, from Los Angeles, is the very picture of entitlement. "This was the guy whose father managed to get Wayne Gretzky to leave a voice mail for his bar mitzvah," Izzy marvels.

In the play's uproarious opening sequence, Caren has no end of fun exploring Aaron's cheerful, party-hearty brand of narcissism. For example, here's how he talks on the analyst's couch: "I think my problem is I'm too self-absorbed? Maybe because I put all this pressure on because of my dad? My mom was never there for me. God, my screenplay sucks. Can we do the exercise where we float back to childhood? I like that one. Thanks, Elaine!" Equally amusing is a sequence detailing the letters of recommendation that have fueled his academic career. A family friend compares Aaron's youthful paintings, as seen on the family's refrigerator door, to "a young Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock." One of his high-school teachers confesses to the Brown admissions board, "One time when Aaron read a passage out loud about his volunteer work with leukemia patients, I had to excuse myself from the classroom and privately weep in the teachers' lounge, reflecting on my own battles with mortality."

An avid student of the system, with an overflowing account at the favor bank, Aaron knows exactly how to manipulate any situation to his advantage. "Rules are like lanes on a highway," he instructs Izzy. "They like--suggest where to go. But you have to cross lanes if you wanna keep up with the traffic."

Of course, Aaron is as insufferable as he is irresistible, winning over Izzy by immediately establishing them at the center of campus social activity. (Izzy's immense stash of pot proves to be a big help here.) Anyway, despite Izzy's obvious reservations and frank jealousy ("He's like a tick that burrows in your skin and sucks all the blood it can retain."), he benefits from knowing Aaron, most notably when his father writes a recommendation letter that gets Izzy into UCLA.

In Los Angeles, Izzy works at his studies while Aaron, who really wants to direct, gets a film industry job, proving to be the ideal phone-wrangling, latte-bearing assistant. The games really begin when Aaron, stopped by a cop for having a broken taillight, ends up in jail for reasons that are not immediately made clear. (This part is a little contrived, although I suppose it could happen.) In the holding pen, he meets Dwight, a black man who improbably claims to be a Harvard grad and a close friend of Steven Spielberg. Dwight is also a motormouth who may or may not be deluded and who is almost certainly violent; he is also a repeat offender who understands prison, the only world where Aaron's influence doesn't reach. Aaron, off his game in this strange environment, makes an admission he lives to regret. When both are transferred to the county jail, Aaron, for once in his life cut off from his army of contacts, flies into a panic. He begs for Dwight's assistance, promising to get his father, a prominent lawyer, to intervene in Dwight's case: "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours."

After that, Caren makes fine use of the law of unintended consequences while ensnaring all three men in a cat's cradle of promises, lies, and altruistic gestures that usually cloak other motives. Aaron, fearing exposure of his dark secret, abandons Dwight, who doesn't forget him, to the prison system. Later, he is horrified to learn that Izzy, now a lawyer in a big firm, is taking on Dwight's appeal as a pro bono project. He tries to intervene, setting off a sequence of events that alienates Izzy and does nothing to dispel the specter of Dwight. Then again, Izzy's decision to represent Dwight has surprising repercussions for his legal career. By the time Caren (again, a little bit too neatly) arranges for all three men to face off in a health club sauna, everyone's relationships are subject to chilling revision; even Izzy's reliability as a narrator is brought into question

Caren is well served by Kel Haney's fast-paced production, which features three equally strong performances. James Fouhey's charismatic Izzy disarms us with his charm and candor, revealing the complex mix of affection, appalled fascination, and self-interest that informs his friendship with Aaron. Barron B. Bass captures, the odd, almost-believable quality of Dwight's talking jags, as well as the menace lurking underneath; this latter quality is put to especially good use in the climax, when we keep wondering nervously exactly what Dwight wants out of Aaron. Austin Trow reveals the terror and fury under Aaron's indefatigably cheerful manner, whether expressing his anxiety by snapping, "I swear, nobody has texted me for an hour!" or trying to win back an alienated Izzy with tickets to the premiere of his first film. ("I hear Johnny Depp's gonna be there. Ok, Johnny Depp's not going to be there but Skeet Ulrich is.")

The downstairs theatre at The Flea is not the place for design fireworks, but Caite Hevner Kemp's set gets a lot of mileage out of a nearly bare space and a handful of props, for example, when two sets of Venetian blinds are used to represent a sauna. Nick Solyom's lighting gets a surprising number of looks out of a handful of instruments. Sydney Maresca's costumes easily delineate the differences between the characters, and Elisheba Ittoop's sound design persuasively mixes a variety of effects with a playlist of current club favorites, including "Get Lucky" and "Holy Grail."

The Recommendation is a far-from-perfect work -- so much of it is narrated that you have wonder if it began life as a novel -- and Caren arguably tries to make too many points in the final three-way showdown. But he has a way with words, a wicked eye for his characters' flaws, and a disturbing point to make about the viability of friendship across the social and economic gaps that separate most of us. It's a nearly ideal barbed fable for these recessionary times. -- David Barbour