Theatre in Review: What I Did Last Summer (Pershing Square Signature Center)

	Juliet Brett, Noah Galvin. Photo: Joan Marcus

World War II is drawing to a close, but the hostilities are just getting started in What I Did Last Summer. On one side is 14-year-old Charlie; on the other side is everybody else, a state of affairs that will be familiar to just about anyone who remembers his or her early adolescence. Charlie's father is on a destroyer in the Pacific, his mother and sister are constantly telling him what to do, and, most frustrating of all, he is still too young to drive and, therefore, date the fetching Betsy, who is in danger of being snapped up by his best friend, the slightly older Ted.

"This play is about me," says Charlie, greeting the audience -- although nearly everyone else in A. R. Gurney's sweet-and-sour memory play will, sooner or later, attempt to claim it for him or herself. At its best, What I Did Last Summer zeroes in on that moment when, in transitioning to adolescence, a young boy becomes a positive trial to everyone around him. Driven by the twin pressures of sexual urges and the need for independence from the clinging and/or critical females around him, Charlie is a bundle of frustration and anger, and every conversation turns into in a pitched battle.

Charlie belongs to one of those well-off Buffalo families who populate so many of Gurney's plays, who here are summering on the Canadian side of Lake Erie. He is supposed to spend his vacation helping out increasingly embattled mother, Grace, and being tutored to pass the Latin course he failed the previous spring. But Charlie, edgy with energy, itchy with feelings he can barely name, let alone understand, and jealous that Ted has a job earning fifty cents an hour, determines to get himself a job. Even this act, at first praised by Grace, turns out to be controversial when he is hired as general helper to Anna Trumbull, otherwise known as the Pig Woman.

Anna was once part of Buffalo's moneyed elite, giving art lessons to the young, but, as her father's business declined, poverty and the fact of her part-Native American ancestry contrived to make her a social outcast; now she is a recluse, living in a converted pigsty (hence the name) and farming the land; any young person who crosses her path is filled with her socialist critique of Buffalo society. With her bluntly honest manner and iconoclastic opinions, she is the perfect adult to oversee the summer of Charlie's discontent.

Or so Gurney would have you believe. For What I Did Last Summer to work, we have to fall a little bit in love with both Charlie and Anna and, frankly, each character proves to be a tough sell. Gurney, almost certainly drawing on memories of his own teen years, gives an unsparing portrait of Charlie, heavy on misbehavior and light on the vulnerabilities that cause him to act out. Similarly, Gurney is uninterested in making Anna some kind of charming Auntie Mame eccentric; she's a tough old bird, her bitterness on full display. She's also a bit of a problem drinker and isn't above using manipulation to keep a hold on Charlie. And because the author never really supplies the moment of recognition that would allow us to see what binds them together, we never really believe in the fragile little dissenter's utopia that they briefly inhabit together.

This is nothing against the two fine actors playing Charlie and Anna. Noah Galvin's Charlie is a convincing bundle of teenage nerves, a wandering eye attached to a short-fuse temper and a desperate need to be treated like an adult -- now. Indeed, he seems to be trying on a new personality every few minutes, searching for one that fits. That's a tough assignment for a young actor, but, whether he is steamed about being consigned to the back seat on a date for three, imperiously informing Grace that "Latin is the language of the leisure classes," or cringing as she initiates a too-frank discussion about nocturnal emissions, he is every inch the obstreperous young outcast of Gurney's imagination. Kristine Nielsen's radar-like ability to find the laughter hidden in the flattest of lines is well-known, but there is little she can do to coax humor out of the character of Anna; she does capture her deep-dyed eccentricity and her acid view of Buffalo society. There's a real edge to her: When she says, "I'm a great teacher -- and great teachers are dangerous," she cannot be doubted.

Most of the play's charm comes from the characters who inhabit the margins of Charlie and Anna's pretend world. The highly underrated Carolyn McCormick, currently one of the finest interpreters of Gurney's characters, is supremely touching as Grace, who, behind her fixed smile, is desperately trying to hold her family, and her marriage, together. She is lonely for her husband, more than a little guilty over her behavior with the men at home, and lumbered when it comes to the problem of Charlie; in one her finest moments, faced with another one of her son's outbursts, she gathers herself and her daughter, Elsie, up and announces they are going to have a simply marvelous time at a neighbor's party, and damn the consequences. Pico Alexander is engaging as Ted, who, having shot up over the previous summer, is bemused to discover that the local mothers view him as a menace to their daughters. Kate McGonigle, just out of Juilliard, makes a fine debut as the priggish Elsie, who every so often looks up from her copy of War and Peace to pronounce Charlie a lost cause. (She amusingly describes Anna as "an artist manqué," adding, "It means that she gives art lessons but nobody takes them.") Juliet Brett is just right as young Bonny, who isn't entirely sure she is happy to be the center of a triangle that includes Charlie and Ted.

All of them perform well under the direction of Jim Simpson, who has a fine eye for the moment when a bit of extended family banter turns into a full-blown row, or when a young person drops his or her oh-so-confident manner to make a private disclosure. His creative team has provided a dazzlingly stylized slant on a play that never forgets for a moment that it is a play. Michael Yeargan's all-white set is essentially a blank page on which John Narun's projections deliver many of the script's directions and descriptions. There's a particularly lovely moment, near the end, when a mass of letters scattered in abstract form across the upstage wall merge to become an image of a lake surrounded by trees. Brian Aldous' lighting makes fine use of sidelight to carve out the actors from the set and projections. Claudia Brown's costumes neatly contrast Grace's elegant '40s-era wear with Anna's back-to-the-land look, and she makes all the play's young people look attractive. Janie Bullard's sound design combines the sound of a typewriter, to accompany the projections, with such period recordings as "Swinging on a Star" and "Accentuate the Positive" and the tolling of bells to signal Japan's surrender.

What I Did Last Summer starts to come together late in Act II, when Grace, on a mission to retrieve Charlie, who has run away, faces off with Anna, with whom she has a past connection. Suddenly, the gentle, nostalgic humor of the earlier scenes gives way to a no-holds-barred confrontation from which neither character emerges unwounded. This is followed by a genuinely touching farewell scene that informs us of Anna's fate as Charlie, Grace, and Elsie return home to greet the postwar world. These scenes leave one with the impression that this basically good-natured comedy isn't strong enough to contain the angry emotions hidden inside it. In his best work, Gurney keeps his fondness for his heritage in exquisite balance with his critical feelings about it. Although it contains many delights, What I Did Last Summer is fundamentally out of whack. -- David Barbour