Trick or Treat, a play by Jack Neary now having a run at the Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction, was selected last year for Northern Stage’s New Works Now festival, the company’s vehicle for finding and, in some cases, commissioning new work by talented American playwrights.
It’s remarkable that the company is now in the position both to stage world premieres and to bring drama from other regional theaters to the relatively small market of the Upper Valley, and in turn bring those plays to New York, as it did last fall with Orwell in America. That’s to be applauded and supported.
Written by Jack Neary, a New Hampshire-based actor, director and playwright, Trick or Treat is a New England play through and through, from the setting to the accents to the humor. But its premise is more powerful than the play that eventually ended up on stage.
Directed by Northern Stage’s artistic director Carol Dunne, Trick or Treat has as its kernel the relationship between a husband and his wife, who has Alzheimer’s disease.
What happens to a decades-long marriage when a spouse is stricken by a disease that robs her of almost everything she ever was? What happens to the family? What are the awful choices that families must make?
The first act of Trick or Treat has flashes of tender empathy, profound sorrow, dark wit and the kind of agonized frustration that comes from having to contend with the disease’s many challenges, both for the children and the parents.
But then one too many contrivances begin to work their way into the story, and drama becomes melodrama, courtesy of some implausible plot twists that weaken the strengths the play does have.
The play begins promisingly. Johnny Moynihan, played by Gordon Clapp, calls his daughter Claire (Jenni Putney) over to the house to discuss her mother Nancy.
He tells Claire that he found Nancy in the attic in a miserable, confused condition and after he’d brought Nancy back to a kind of reality, and helped her to get into bed to rest, something even more devastating had happened.
An additional complication is that it’s Halloween, and children keep ringing the doorbell, and Johnny insists on answering it himself and passing out candy, despite, or because of, his family’s crisis.
Although set in the present day, the comfortable, middle-class New England house is a throwback to the 1960s and 1970s, with Sinatra records sitting on a shelf and such board games as Life and Monopoly stacked under a table. (The set, by Michael Ganio, is pitch-perfect, and takes maximum advantage of the dimensions of the Barrette theater.)
As in any family, there are tensions, but what happens in one evening at the house is a crack-up, the moment when an enormous fault line opens up and the family will either be swallowed up, or survive.
Whatever happens, Neary makes clear, the family will not be the same again.
For Johnny, the family must be preserved at all costs, no matter how flawed its internal structure.
Claire, the younger daughter, is tough and pragmatic, but with a tender heart; her brother Teddy (David Mason) is a study in contrasts. Ambitious, he’s in line to become the town’s next police chief and his behavior from the moment he enters the stage makes it clear that he is prepared to deal roughly with people who cross him.
We all are assigned certain roles in a family, which is why the subject hasn’t run out of steam in centuries of playwriting.
And if the play had centered on the family alone, the maelstrom of emotions unleashed would mean more.
But a deus ex machina, in the form of a neighborhood snoop, Hannah, enters, and she throws an unnecessary monkey wrench into the play’s mechanics. Hannah lives next door and comes over to complain when Claire, in the midst of dealing with her father, yells and throws a bowl of candy at some kids, one of whom is Hannah’s son.
Katie Bruestle, who plays Hannah, is a capable actor, but her character’s behavior and dialogue are, for the most part, improbable, and she appears to have been written that way solely for the purpose of making the wheels of the plot turn.
One of Hannah’s repeated lines is, “There’s something wrong here,” a case of Neary underlining something that doesn’t need extra emphasis, as if he didn’t quite trust the audience to grasp what’s happening.
It feels as though Neary couldn’t quite decide whether to write a straight-up drama about Alzheimer’s, which would have been a credible decision, or a savage comedy about a dysfunctional family, which would also be a credible decision. But Trick or Treat is neither steady drama nor blistering comedy, so the tone wavers.
Contrast it with last year’s production at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield of the Nicky Lyons’ play The Silvers, which was an unabashed, go-for-the-jugular piece about a warring family. Like or dislike it, you had to admire Lyons’ commitment to going over the top in his depiction of the Silvers as a monstrous entity that engulfed everything in its path.
The acting in Trick or Treat goes quite a long way to compensating for the play’s unevenness.
Clapp, a New Hampshire native and Emmy-winning actor for his role in the 1990s police drama NYPD Blue, is familiar to audiences through numerous appearances on TV, film and theater, including playing Scrooge in a 2014 Northern Stage production of A Christmas Carol. He’s near perfect as the clueless, stumbling Johnny, whose idea of family is as warped and dated as the old vinyl records he hangs onto.
Clapp has the dry, occasionally abrasive humor you associate with New England, although Johnny’s jokes sometimes feel, as they’re supposed to, a bit tired. Ditto, the stale lines of reassurance that Johnny dredges up in moments of drama and uncertainty.
The scenes in which Clapp, as Johnny, painfully recalls the way Nancy used to be, are poignant and wrenching, and his sporadic shows of explosive anger are also utterly authentic.
As Claire, Jenni Putney, who last appeared at Northern Stage in its 2014 staging of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Clybourne Park, is nuanced as the one level-headed person in the family who is dragged into a situation over which she has no control.
The last thing Claire wants to do on this Halloween evening is come over to the old homestead to deal with her parents, but she does it out of duty and love of her family. Putney is very deft at putting across Claire’s myriad emotions: exasperation, pity, unease and panic.
One thing Neary does well is to show how one family can encompass many realities.
Claire’s understanding of the family dynamic is more astute than that of her father, but is also more limited by what she doesn’t know. Her father, on the other hand, is a keeper of the family’s secrets but his understanding of how the family operates is far less astute, and even willfully obtuse.
David Mason is a suitably truculent, belligerent Teddy, although of all the family members, his role seems the least fleshed-out. In the role of Nancy, Kathy Manfre matches Clapp’s uncertainty with her own guileless, childlike sincerity: their scenes together are by far the most affecting.
Carol Dunne is particularly good at directing ensemble pieces, at moving people around on stage in a way that feels natural; and she’s also nimble at showing the vulnerabilities behind a character’s facade.
The play ends with a devastatingly quiet scene that exemplifies what Neary is able to do when he tones down the melodrama, and brings the drama back to its essential human dimensions.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.