Eric LaRue
Seven years later it seems the entire off-Loop theater world is watching. This year Neveu has had three plays produced by three different companies—a feat I can’t recall any other local playwright achieving—and a fourth is scheduled at another theater next spring.
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Unlike most successful playwrights in town, Neveu doesn’t make things easy for the audience. You won’t find life-affirming lessons or sops to current “right thinking” in his unsparing takes on middle-class America. You won’t know where your sympathies should lie in every scene. Instead worlds are torn asunder and people plunged into morally uncharitable territory—although his characters often proceed through their banal routines as if nothing has happened. Sometimes the tumult results from a tiny tear in the fabric of everyday life: in Eagle Hills, Eagle Ridge, Eagle Landing, a nondescript executive realizes his world is bounded by tract homes and golf vacations and flings himself into a life of near savagery. Other times Neveu’s characters confront a national crisis: in Empty, two middle-aged couples try to make sense of their lives after the September 11 attacks.
It’s an ingeniously crafted first act, with tension building incrementally. Like Pinter, Neveu bases his dramatic arc on seemingly ordinary, repetitious conversation, never indicating his characters’ emotional states in stage directions or suggesting their motives in the dialogue. Janice, Calhan, and Ron spend most of the first act talking about nothing—and in this production it too often feels that way. Neither Will Clinger as Calhan nor Douglas Vickers as Ron finds enough behind his words to drive the scene forward; they hardly progress beyond a well-meaning ease. They repeat their advice to Janice without changing tactics, though people who state their case ten times tend to do so in differing ways or with varying degrees of urgency. The act lacks stakes—it’s especially hard to believe that the father of a teenage murderer would be so complacent—leaving Kate Buddeke as Janice with little to respond to: Clinger’s and Vickers’s responses aren’t enough to drive her to violence.
It’s no surprise that veteran Buddeke gives her half of this demanding scene everything it needs. The surprise is 17-year-old Jarrett Sleeper, who’s never acted outside of school productions but who turns in a performance every bit as powerful as Buddeke’s. Apparently coached to put all his faith in Neveu’s words, he conveys enormous passion through the simplest statements. “It’s very bad in here,” he calmly intones, and every terrifying prison story you’ve ever heard comes to mind. Near the end of the scene, when he finally falls apart, his dissolution is instantaneous and complete—and perhaps even more astonishing, he pulls himself right back together, unwilling to let his mother see him in such a state. To sit backstage for 90 minutes and then take command of such a difficult scene would be an astonishing feat for an actor of any age.
