Heller Theatre Company: Double Feature
Lynn Riggs Theater
March 15, 2025
I can’t imagine how hard it is to write a play that works.
It's like writing a poem that works, only with multiple characters whom you also have to make move around, interact, and talk like real people (unless you’re Samuel Beckett). Delivering clear emotional resonance while creating believable situations is the craft of theatre, and Double Feature—Heller Theatre Company’s annual spring showcase of two new short plays by local writers—is always an education for me in those creative mechanics: what sort of pacing lets emotional beats hit, what sort of dialogue lets the story sing, how a playwright wrangles the universal into the particular.
This year’s plays—Wilson Bledsoe’s Return (by David Blakely) and The Reunion (by Alex Isaak)—both revolve around an absent woman: in the first case, a mother who died by suicide, and in the second, a sorority sister taken by leukemia. In both cases, the absence is present in the lives of those left behind, who are (or are not) dealing with the hole in ways that reveal their own broken bonds and fractured selves. How we deal with loss, both plays suggest, shows us how we’re not dealing with ourselves and our relationships.
In Wilson Bledsoe’s Return, we aren’t told about the family’s loss until late in the play. The reveal helps make sense of the inexplicable tension among a father (Steve Barker as Truman Bledsoe) and his two sons (Quinn Blakely as Jefferson Bledsoe and the terrific Aniq Zoha, new to Tulsa theatre, as Wilson Bledsoe) that ricochets through the play’s first half—tension that mounts, breaks, then mounts again after the father tells his sons about his terminal diagnosis. The questions that roil under the surface at the start—why is Wilson Bledsoe returning, and from where? why do the brothers hate each other? why is Jefferson always at some kind of boiling point? why has the father redone his patio in homage to a long-ago family trip to Taos?—are never fully resolved; we only see further into their messy depths.
A stirring, unifying monologue for Barker is the play’s centerpiece, but its revelatory clarity doesn’t change much for the family: the boys return to bickering, the father returns to regretting his inability to fix them, the audience returns to wondering what this “return” might turn into. The characters’ presidential names could be a clue here, mirroring a broken nation that badly needs to face its own inheritance of falsehoods, violence, and betrayal. A powerful prayer by Blakely’s Jefferson closes the play: “Transform all of us if you can, for we are in sore need.”
Wilson Bledsoe’s Return is studded with sparkling symbolic gems, hilarious Southern baroque cussing, and honest renderings of mental illness and the powerlessness of those in its orbit. We could have used a content warning for gunplay along with the one given for language—and maybe also one for yelling, of which there is a lot, so that Blakely’s more subtle humor and character development get lost in relentless loudness that sometimes feels like a shortcut to intensity.
The Reunion is a quieter but no less potent piece of work that touches on the ways in which denial is simply a reflection of absence. Five sorority sisters meet up five years after graduation to remember a sixth sister who has died; they haven’t seen each other in the meantime, and their gathering turns into a bubbling, sizzling stew of joyful memories and bitter resentments they only think were left in the past. I have zero experience with sorority life, but in her first fully produced play Isaak drops the audience so fully into the world of this group that it could have been my story—as, in fact, it was hers in real life.
The excellent Amber Leilani Awalt provides an object lesson in emotion bypass strategies as Jess, who immediately starts spiffily triple-checking her event-planning timeline for the gathering about to happen. The rest of the former sorority suite-mates trickle in; the room fills with chatter; frictions and revelations rise to the surface in dialogue that rushes and rambles like real young women’s everyday speech. Under the direction of Kathleen Hope, this fluid ensemble (which also includes Hannah Gray, Nichole Finch, Élle Evans, and Élise McGouran) could not have felt more natural or unified; their sisterhood is completely believable.
Ironically, the most present person in this play—a young woman named Jordan—has no lines at all until the final scene. As Jordan, Evans sits silently onstage throughout the action, wearing headphones and looking at a laptop, like an unacknowledged wound: one of many risky-but-worth-it theatrical strokes by Isaak. Jordan’s sisters move and talk around her, saying things like “just give her some space”—so when, at the end of the play, she explodes with a monologue about the impact their friend’s death has really had on her, we see that she’s been holding the heart of the group the whole time. Her righteous torrent of grief and love stuns her friends (who literally freeze as she speaks), then softens them out of their rigid self-preoccupation and into each other’s arms. In the hands of a less skillful director and cast this might swing towards corny, but not here.
I didn’t expect to get plunged into meditation on the ripple effects of loss, denial, and grief when I headed to Double Feature. To be honest, I’ve got a really solid avoidance strategy going for that particular subject, against the advice of my therapist. Was I crying by the end of the show? Yes. Was I sad about it? Nope: it was actually a relief, especially with so many laughs to balance it out. That's the gamble you take when you get a ticket to an original theatre show. You literally don’t know what you’re getting into with these writers and performers. What you do get into can nudge open doors you might have thought were firmly closed.
