Theatre in Review: Grand Concourse (Playwrights Horizons)

	Lee Wilkof, Quincy Tyler Bernstine. Photo: Joan Marcus

In Grand Concourse, the playwright Heidi Schreck seemingly assembles her characters as if pitching a sitcom pilot to one of the networks -- but hang on, for she has some real surprises in store, each of them ready to drop at the right devastating moment. We are in a soup kitchen in the Bronx, presided over by Shelley, a tough-minded, eminently practical nun. She dresses in street clothes, although, she notes, the younger nuns favor more traditional garb; in fact, she notes, a group of them "play basketball across the street in their habits. I have no idea why." The daughter of a feminist academic, now deceased, and a "jerk lawyer" of a father -- needless to say, they're estranged -- she freely admits that she entered the convent as a way of annoying her parents. Recently, however, her very real faith has begun to flag, and, in order to revive it, she has developed her own oddball spiritual exercise -- timing her prayers, using the kitchen's microwave oven. She has modest goals: She hopes that soon she will be able to talk to God for more than 60 seconds at a time.

Providing the muscle in the soup kitchen is Oscar, a Dominican guy in his 20s, who cleans up, breaks up fights among the clientele, and scares away the neighborhood kids who throw rocks at the kitchen's door. (Entering with a pair of pliers, he says, "I threatened to cut off their fingers.") Eyeing an attractive volunteer, he says, "You really are pretty, like a Greek goddess, what's her name, Icarus." Shelley impatiently notes that Oscar is a student at City College and his streetwise attitude is just a pose. His response? "It's a full moon tonight, Sister Shelley. Don't get too wild."

The clientele are not allowed in the kitchen, but somehow the rules don't apply to Frog, a scruffy leftover from the Age of Aquarius who never recovered from the pharmaceutical excesses of his youth. On a good day, his hold on reality is tenuous, and his madness tends to express itself in conventionally cutesy ways. He tries to sell joke books to the staff. (Sample item: Why didn't the chicken cross the road? No training.) He also claims that carrots have bones and swears that he can say epilepsy -- from which he suffers -- in five different languages. Caught raiding the refrigerator -- which is absolutely verboten -- he is told to back off and that lunch is coming soon. "Yeah, but I'm a snacker," he replies.

Surely, you see what I mean. For the first 15 minutes or so, it looks like Grand Concourse will be a very conventional, very slick comedy about life among the urban underclass, in which each of its colorful characters touches a feeling just a little more false than its predecessor. But there's a wild card in this deck of jokers, in the form of Emma, a 19-year-old college dropout who joins up as a volunteer. Naïve to a fault -- to Shelley's distress, she can't identify Gloria Steinem, let alone Dorothy Day -- and not entirely skilled in the kitchen -- we first see her warily eyeing a carrot -- she would seem to be just another member of this calculatedly eccentric company. Then she blurts out that she is being treated for leukemia. Even odder, she flirts outrageously with Oscar, who is devoted to his longtime girlfriend. And one night, when Oscar, serving as night watchman, is catching forty winks, Emma slips in, and, without even trying to wake him, starts performing oral sex on him. Stunned out of sleep, he doesn't try to stop her.

This scene acts as a warning: Schreck is about to spring a trap that will hold fast and cut deep. I can't say much more, except to note that Emma has a profoundly destabilizing effect on the other characters; more to the point, she sows chaos and pain as only the weak and deeply needy can do. The person whom she devastates the most is Shelley, leading the latter to a profound moment of clarity that reorients her life. I will simply add that, in many ways, Grand Concourse is about the death of faith.

It is also about the nature of evil, and chances are you'll exit the theatre debating Emma's character, her responsibility for the trouble she causes, and her prospects for becoming a better person. But that's the cleverness of Schreck's concept: She lulls us with crowd-pleasing gambits and then suddenly puts us face-to-face with fundamental existential questions. In addition, this still relatively inexperienced playwright has a real knack for writing scenes that, out of nowhere, suddenly explode with tension.

Kip Fagan's direction is especially good at catching those moments when casual conversation suddenly becomes pregnant with meaning, and when an understated confrontation suddenly freezes into an ugly silence. The role of Shelley offers Quincy Tyler Bernstine something of a tour-de-force and she seizes it, creating a character we haven't really seen before. Shelley is defined by work, seen in the weariness of her voice, her slightly stiff-legged walk, and the stoicism with which she approaches the lost souls who line up for her soup. She handles her laugh lines with ease; chasing after some troublesome neighborhood kids, she shouts, "Jesus loves you. But you are making it hard for him." She also handles with the utmost sensitivity a speech about the eczema that marred her childhood, as well as her account of the strange dream that led to her vocation. When made the victim of a horrifically unthinking act, her pain is terrible to see, and, in her final showdown with Emma, she displays a smile that is ever so scary. This is surely Bernstine's finest performance to date.

With his sleepy eyes and slouching, slightly too-casual manner, Bobby Moreno is just right as Oscar, carefully revealing the decent, thoughtful soul behind the jokey pose. He is especially good in the scene in which Oscar tries to set some boundaries with Emma, an effort that quickly spins out of control. Lee Wilkof brings his honed comic timing to the role of Frog without forgetting to show us the frightened, angry soul within. (As Shelley points out, he once broke a man's collarbone over nothing at all.) The role of Emma is the trickiest of the four -- for quite a while, we don't know what she is up to, and when we find out, you may find yourself changing your mind her several times in rapid succession -- but the fast-rising Ismenia Mendes goes about her cagey business with real assurance, whether provocatively adding pepper to Oscar's soup, shyly revealing her chemotherapy patch, or suddenly flying into a fury in response to a polite rejection.

Fagan's production is also exceptionally well-designed, beginning with Rachel Hauck's photorealistic kitchen set, which is lit with an acute eye for each scene's time of day (or night) by Matt Frey. Jessica Pabst's costumes are the products of a fine eye for each character's personality and station in life. Leah Gelpe's sound design is unusually sophisticated in the way it uses layered effects -- a choir singing mixed with bouncing basketballs, or traffic noises mixed with an airplane overhead -- to suggest the world just outside the kitchen door.

Grand Concourse ends on a teasingly ambiguous note. Something profound has happened to Shelley, but what? She explains herself in a powerful final speech, but it's hard to know how much to take her at her word. Suffice to say that, for some time after you've seen Grand Concourse, you'll find yourself wondering what happens next to her, and to Emma, too.--David Barbour