The Ordinary Yearning of Miriam Buddwing
Whatever the topic, the wearied sense that we’ve heard it all before is an indictment not of the subject but of the writer. There aren’t many complaints that Ulysses is just another goddamned book about how life is a journey. But Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros’s new play, commissioned by Steppenwolf, is just another goddamned play about how families don’t work–about how children consume their mothers and mothers eat their young.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In contrast to her scalding, flawlessly heard, highly specific autopsy of two marriages in the 1992 My Thing of Love, The Ordinary Yearning of Miriam Buddwing is an utterly routine, overfamiliar–one might almost say ordinary–account of contemporary family life as it’s lived somewhere in suburban New York. It’s not surprising that a relatively young playwright should know more about the traps of early marriage than she does about the disappointments of late life, but then she’d best leave the latter topic alone until she’s ready for it. The earlier piece was painfully true, and its comedy served real emotions, but everything about the new play rings false. Both humor and pathos are forced, resulting not in tragicomedy but in melodrama with shtick.
Even more troubling is the portrait of Serita, the family’s Hispanic home health aid (Charin Alvarez): she lacks only fruit on her head to be a full-blown caricature. Serita says things like “When I was a girl-ita” and dances around the kitchen representing primitive high spirits while her employer is dying. Her attempt to seduce poet son William (Andrew M. White, filling in for John C. Connelly) rests on all the stereotypes of hot-blooded Latin spitfires. No one would do a play featuring a comic African-American mammy, and people ought to be equally troubled by a comic Latina maid/sex object.
