CONTRASTING LIFESTYLES Chalrles Michael Howard and Antonio Jackson
“Home” isn’t necessarily a discrete, concrete place. More often, it’s a whole lot of spaces — the remembered as well as the immediate vistas, scenes, and encounters, along with myriad states of mind, body, and emotion. Sometimes all these elements come together harmoniously, but other times they are a hard fit, or even react and rile against each other. The recently reunited family members of Cynthia Babak’s Where I Dwell reside in their old South Boston hometown, but the finer points of where they’re at — and how they are to live there together — require some navigation.
| Where I Dwell | By Cynthia Babak. Directed by Kevin O’leary. Produced by the Lanyard Theatre Company, at the Chocolate Church in Bath, through August 16. Call 207.442.8455. For mature audiences who can handle sexual situations and lots of creative Boston-Irish cussing. |
The Lanyard Theatre Company will present the world premiere of Babak’s drama, for one week only, at the Chocolate Church, in Bath, under the direction of Kevin O’Leary. I recently sat in on a rehearsal. Babak’s play explores the difficulties, in an ever-changing world, of living simultaneously in a community, a family, a relationship, and one’s own body.
Jimmy Keane (Paul Haley) has lived far different from everybody else in his working-class Irish-Catholic hometown. After a promiscuous coming of age as a gay man here, he left Dodge, cut ties, made it big as a fashion model, and spent years lounging around Rome with beautiful, concupiscent people. But now he’s out of the industry and back in the town that his family never left, and there are some fraught dynamics to negotiate.
Jimmy’s 21-year-old sister Arlene (Elizabeth Lardie), still living at home and battling depression, could use some big-brotherly attention, but their gruff, very traditional father James (Charles Michael Howard) wants nothing to do with him. Sweet matriarch Rose (Cathy Counts), however, is in trumping position: recently diagnosed with breast cancer, she insists that the whole family sit at the same table for Christmas dinner.
How will Jimmy reconcile his openly gay lifestyle with the rough and clannish denizens of the local bar, not to mention with his father’s prejudices? To add to the upheaval, the formerly sluttish Jimmy now also has a commitment-friendly new boyfriend named Paul (Joseph Barbarino), a real-estate cosmopolite; they were set up by Christine (Karen Ball), who has a long history with Jimmy and his family. Jimmy is evolving, and so is the old neighborhood itself, for that matter, as evidenced by his family’s encounters with a Sudanese immigrant named Bartholomew (Antonio Jackson). The tectonic abutments of new and old loyalties and m.o.’s shake up everybody’s status quo.
Babak’s script feels both epic and intimate in its lens on this town’s community. Characters have many connections to each other — the sleezoid Sean who harasses Arlene (Keith Anctil) works with her father, for example, and Sean’s father is also in the business. It’s to Babak’s credit as a playwright that the complexity of everybody’s relations doesn’t feel just dramatically convenient, but like the genuine knotwork of living in a close-knit community. And some of the area’s mightiest and most agile actors inhabit these roles. Especially moving is the rapport between the great Howard, marvelous in conveying both the warmth and the ugly obstinacy of James, and the fine and sensitive Counts.
