One-Winged Dove
The Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Closed
It’s Sunday night and the room at the Brooklyn Center is packed. There’s a rave going on upstairs — not officially part of the play, but a separate event. Weighty bass shakes the ceiling.
Before the start of the show, Matthew Gasda — writer and director of One-Winged Dove, the play we are about to see — informs us that this is an unusual situation, that they usually do a better job about not double-booking events, that there’s nothing to be done but grin and bear it …
In Gasda’s own words, “This New York industrial loft theater, roll with the punches.”
But that fact is, from an audience perspective, the throbbing bass was a welcome addition.
If it weren’t for the audience already seated, walking into the staging room at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research on Sunday night would have felt like an intrusion worth apology.
Actress Meg MacCary side-eyes my partner and I as we scooch past to find a seat. She’s on the couch in the center of the room, burgundy hair, black dress, and a tight-lipped visage of concerned severity. MacCary looks away from us and down to the man on the floor, reassuming her position, ignoring the bustle around her.
The man on the floor can’t be bothered. His arm is over his eyes. He’s wrapped up in a blanket like a child post-nightmare at the foot of its parents’ bed. He sighs.
Once we are seated, and from a new vantage, it’s apparent that MacCary hates him. Around this frozen scene the crowd mingles.
It may have frustrated the actors, made lines difficult to deliver, stomped on certain subtleties in the writing and performance, but it brought with it a verisimilitude that would have been absent had the theatrical vacuum remained uncompromised.
One-Winged Dove is a tightly scripted, cleverly structured play in two acts surrounding the disappearance of one of its characters — namely, the man languishing on the floor, Sam, a writer at the edge of a small success whose neuroses are pushing him back to the bottle. The play is in the round and the claustrophobia of our collective voyeurism renders the air thick. A small bar is set up near the window. The cute bartender, plaid skirt and gleaming smile, serves drinks and sells books to a crowd of cool kids.
The play itself is simply two conversations. The first is between Sam and his editor Valerie, portrayed by the aforementioned Meg MacCary in a knifey and cruel performance that keeps the audience of artist-types from ever falling into the trap of identifying themselves with the puddling Sam. The second conversation is between Sam’s girlfriend, Lydia, and his brother, Larry, three days after his disappearance.
I’ve seen several of Gasda’s plays at this point, so the maturity of this piece wasn’t too much of a surprise (not to say that it wasn’t an accomplishment). It’s no secret that Gasda’s reputation is that of emeritus playwright for the downtown Dimes Square scene. In fact, if you know his name but not his work, you undoubtedly know him as the guy who wrote Dimes Square. This has all been said again over again upon again, so I’ll spare repeating anymore and settle here: One-Winged Dove is no smart-ass satire. It’s not a cultural milieu making fun of itself. It’s less knowing but wiser than the large ensemble pieces that have received the most attention. The piece is, at its core, tender and quiet. Quiet, even with the bass pounding a floor above.
Sam askes Valerie to put on a record. He can’t get up. She begrudgingly obliges. We can barely make out the music, a piano reduction of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring from Bach’s choral cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben.
It’s an apt selection for the conversation, given Sam’s inability to allow the good in his life to be good, but the pummeling from above makes it all the more clear. It gives us a taste of what success would be a material reprieve from, namey the noisy neighbor. The success he rejects is the peace he hopes for.
The rave continues through the second act, which takes place in the same apartment, but with Sam absent. Lydia and Larry come to terms with Sam disappearance, the dance upstairs acting as his shadow.
Though the party above us is not part of the piece, it does little to dull the edge of Gasda’s craft. The play itself is a small and modest masterwork. Gasda’s been staging plays in environments like this for years now. Apartment lofts, warehouses, etc. spaces where most would host a party, Gasda has seen an opportunity for theater. This has certainly had an influence on his craft.
The play is short, about an hour altogether, as though written with the knowledge that the audience is also here for the post-show mingle. It is quickly paced, strung through with jokes, and gets to its point from the first. We need no introduction, no epilogue, no beginning, or end really. There’s only meat, conflict, and juice. One-Winged Dove is tight through and through, not a wasted word and bereft of self-indulgence — all executed with a steady, purposeful hand. There are several moments of monologue, but even these are cut down.
In the second act, Larry, played by Zachary Hendrickson with all the hobbled self-consciousness of a late-career David Foster Wallace, quotes a lengthy passage on the subject of meaning, the ineffability of purpose, and prayer, which resonates deeply with the audience but is shattered to pieces by Alida Delaney’s Lydia.
“Who said that?” Lydia asks as though she knows she should know and hates that she doesn’t.
“Wittgenstein.”
“Figures.”
These passages, all things unsaid, the dialogue short and crippled by the character’s narcissistic vying for attention, are the real strength of the piece. There’s a pervasive feeling that these people should just drop their pride, cry, and give up their image of themselves.
It’s an honest image of humanity, generous and contemptuous simultaneously. An accomplishment, and an approach that is sorely needed in contemporary letters. It’s enough to make one want to shout, to interrupt, and hug these people despite their prickle.
But of course, we can’t do that. Not only is this a spectacle which cannot be interrupted, but we are not welcome here, we are gathered, in the round, witnessing private moments. Even if we were to barrel through the first, second, third, and fourth wall, they wouldn’t be able to hear us. The rave upstairs, the chaos in which our bitterness drowns us, is deafening.
