As I suspected it might be, last Friday was an interesting day to see a play titled Love Alone.
Nationally, love was not in the air. It was a day for pomp, trumpets, calls for “allegiance” and for “America first.”
So Shaker Bridge Theatre’s production of Love Alone was both a balm, in a way, after the gray ceremonies on the Washington Mall, and a cautionary tale. Well acted, and smartly directed by Richard Waterhouse, this drama begins with a death and digs into the complex emotions that spring from that offstage event. Playwright Deborah Salem Smith pulls apart the intersection of medicine, the law and same-sex partnership to get at something universal that lies beneath them.
How word of Susan’s death is communicated to her partner, Helen, played by Lebanon resident Suzanne Dudley Schon, is indicative of the events that follow. Dr. Neal, played by the New York-based actress Qurrat Kadwani, stands at the opposite corner of the stage and tells Helen that her partner of 20 years didn’t make it, that an unforeseen issue during what was supposed to be a routine procedure had claimed Susan’s life.
Helen and her daughter, the 20-something Clementine (Jaime Schwarz), want answers from the hospital, but none is forthcoming.
Meanwhile, Dr. Neal, an anaesthesiologist and self-described “hot-shot doctor,” is dealing with the first “bad outcome” of her young career, which leads her to create some emotional distance from her husband, J.P. (Lebanon native Ben Roberts), whom she followed across the country so they could live near his relations and start a family.
It isn’t long before all of these characters are enmeshed in a legal dispute that threatens a ruinous outcome. Since Clementine was Susan’s biological child, and Helen has no legal standing as a same-sex partner back in the bad old days — the play premiered in 2012, before the Defense of Marriage Act was repealed — Clementine files suit in the hope of finding out what happened during the doomed procedure. On the defensive, Dr. Neal is consumed by the legal case that menaces her career, just as Helen is consumed by a legal process that gives her the leverage that society declines to confer on her.
“If they won’t pay me in words, then I want to be paid in money,” Helen says at the end of the first act.
This seems a direct result of the distance — legal and otherwise — that the medical establishment places between itself and the public. Mistakes lead not to an apology but to stony silence that only a day in court can resolve. Salem Smith, who has been playwright in residence at Providence, R.I.’s Trinity Repertory Co., since 2007, knows what she’s writing about; her spouse, Christine Montross, is a doctor.
The legal case drives a wedge between Helen and Clementine, and between Dr. Neal and J.P.
“You have the power to make them see me,” Helen tells Clementine, who is wavering. “If you drop it, you betray me.”
Salem Smith dramatizes these divisions in an uncommon way, often placing the two families on the stage at the same time, still in their separate worlds, talking in turns, often rapidly, about their emotions and travails.
In hands less deft than those of Waterhouse, and of producer Bill Coons, this challenging play, part of Shaker Bridge’s 10th anniversary celebration of female playwrights, could have been a mess. Even so, there are times when the dialogue moves so quickly that it is less about the individual words and who is saying them than about a common texture of feeling moving back and forth like the warp and weft of the play’s fabric.
The actors weaving that fabric are almost uniformly capable. Schon portrays Helen with a kind of haggard grace. As Dr. Neal and J.P., Kadwani and Roberts have an easy rapport, even as their union frays. At times, I expected more raw emotion from Schwarz, but Clementine is young, tough and plays in a punk band, and who can claim to understand the young? The redoubtable Mike Backman lends a welcome gravitas to the lawyer Clementine consults, and Leah Romano shows her versatility in a handful of smaller roles, notably as a sassy, even slightly freaky nurse from whom Dr. Neal bums cigarettes.
We never do find out precisely how the legal case is resolved, although we are given an inkling. But it doesn’t matter. At the end of the play its title comes alive. There’s no professional reputation, no law, no sense of past or future. Love alone took the stage and stayed until the lights went down; fragile, momentary, enduring, hopeful, tragic love.
For a hard-headed viewer, the ending might seem pat, but the sentiment is real and is worth connecting with. As a nation, we’re only a couple of years removed from legal prevention of same-sex marriage. If you think love isn’t fragile, maybe this play is for you.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
