Heller Theatre Company: Double Feature
Lynn Riggs Theatre
Tulsa
March 8, 2024
What does it mean to be “good”? Two new plays presented by Heller Theatre Company last weekend raised that question — with a host of complicated, challenging, emotionally intelligent, and deeply relatable answers. (There was no question about the goodness of the tunes played onstage before the show. “The city of Tulsa’s gonna subsidize our queer love affair,” Bronco Henryetta’s Jessa Gianna DiPesa crooned, to universal cheers from the crowd.)
In Healthy and Well, Heller’s current playwright-in-residence Bailey James chose an ingenious setting for exploring the sincerity, self-deception, doubt, and sacrifice that often go into “being a good person”: a blood donation center. Her play’s mix of sharp humor, frank realism, and philosophical meditation started in the very first moments, as a phlebotomist completing a rote intake questionnaire asked first-time donor Kenzie whether she “feels healthy and well today.” It’s the kind of question most people respond to unthinkingly. When Kenzie hesitated — ”what does ‘healthy and well’ really mean?” — the real questions began.
James kept things specific — this was a world of tourniquets, fainting spells, dubious motivations, awkward conversations, and single-serve snacks, with an unseen host of sick people waiting for platelets outside — while letting big ideas roam and connect. She’s skilled at using metaphor and voice to lever things free from the obvious, to loosen the knots of our assumptions. Small lines of dialogue opened up into prismatic meaning: “I had nothing left to give,” said Kenzie, who’s trying to do some good by donating blood to balance out harm she feels she’s done, and who finds solace in the staff and regulars in this room. “You let me surrender.”
With its inquiries about losses and gains, selfishness and generosity, purity and connection, Healthy and Well kept a lot in motion, and I sometimes found myself wanting all its scintillating notes to fully link up into one decisive chord. But James’ funny, sensitive, turn-on-a-dime writing and director Angela McLaughlin’s thoughtful pacing succeeded in bringing these universal concerns home with a lovingly detailed human touch.
The skillful cast (Hannah Gray, Kaley Jobe, Quinn Blakely, Everett LeViness, Grace Fallon, and Alex Isaak) delivered Simone Weil quotes, side-eye jokes, and vulnerable confessions alike as naturally as if they’d all just walked into the theater off the street — one of the most assured and believable straight-play ensembles I’ve seen in a while. This is James’ first piece as Heller’s playwright-in-residence, and her perspective here — both uncomfortable and refreshing — is so welcome. There’s no arrival at perfection in the world of this play, no achievement of total and unquestionable goodness, wellness, or health. It’s the presence, the exchange, that matters: being part of the bloodstream of life, the complex flow of giving and receiving that, by its nature, never reaches stasis.
Strong original work continued in One Perfect Thing, which took place in an even more concentrated space: around a kitchen table. Williamson, a longtime theatre worker from St. Louis, had never written a play before she turned 70; the mastery she shows in this one makes me hope she lives another hundred years.
That kitchen table belongs to Smitty, a self-described “prickly” single-with-dog woman whose lifelong friend, Margaret, regularly comes to visit. Margaret couldn’t be more different, so it seems: she’s soft and bubbly, always surrounded by family, content with her life, whereas Smitty (smoking her cigarettes, drinking her scotch, reading her New Yorker) hangs out at the lonely edges of what could be, what might have been, what’s out there still to seek.
We don’t often see works of art about women in their elder years, and this felt like a revelation. Williamson’s script ranges across territories as naturally as a conversation with anyone you’ve known for decades. Over the course of each scene, Margaret and Smitty reflected on the past, hilariously needled each other about their choices and peculiar ways, debated political and social issues, challenged and affirmed each other’s sense of self, and discovered spaces in their friendship that were still, after all this time, unknown. The clear-eyed humanity of Deborah J. Hunter’s direction let those pockets stay open while the extraordinary Ruth Seefeldt (as Margaret) and Miriam Mills (as Smitty) moved nimbly in and out of them, keeping the audience engaged through an hour of one-on-one dialogue: no small feat.
The tables turn, so to speak, in the play’s final act: it’s Margaret who insists on risk and independence as she reaches the terminus of her cancer, while Smitty finds herself wanting to hold on, and the friends end up asking things of each other they might not have known it was possible to give. Except, in this friendship, everything is possible. The tension between the two as they navigated this twist in life’s river felt moving, honest, and true, and Seefeldt and Mills held nothing back. Sometimes “being good” means honoring oneself and the truest self of the person we care about. That’s not an easy path to chart — that one between continuity and change, loyalty and integrity, the stripping of illusions and the love underneath. One Perfect Thing showed us one perfect way through.
Next from Heller Theatre Company: “Oklahoma Red” by Shadia Dahlal, May 10 – 12
