Theater Review: ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ at DreamcatcherThe middle-aged couple at the center of the drama obsess over their daughter's college prospects and wonder where all the fun in life went. By Theresa Burns | November 11, 2009 If you’re one of those parents who have started referring to their child’s word study drills as “our” homework or slipped into telling neighbors which third grade teacher “we” have, you should run, not walk, to Dreamcatcher Repertory Theater’s production of "The Pursuit of Happiness," written by Richard Dresser and directed by Laura Ekstrand, playing at The Baird through Nov. 13-15.
And if you have a high schooler who’s mulling over college choices, forget running. Take the car. Preferably with a police escort, so you can skip the lights. If you don’t, you may risk becoming like Annie, the well-heeled mother at the center of this insightful but hilarious family comedy. Annie is attractive, articulate and socially plugged in. She has a nice husband, Neil, who’s devoted to her and their lovely 18-year-old daughter, Jodi. But Annie is unhappy, or maybe she’s just bored. She misses her college days, when she was “really, really popular”—not merely attractive, but hot. (She once wrote a poem about an orgasm that was published in the school literary journal.) Her middle-aged life has become focused not on literary or romantic pursuits, but on shopping and the accumulation of things. “Soon you have so much stuff you can’t close the closets,” she admits to Jodi in a rare moment of self awareness. Neil, too, seems vaguely disappointed with life. Though his youth was filled with idealistic adventures involving Scottish castles and irrigation ditches in third-world countries, he has settled into a sort of friendless, passionless survival mode. (“I wave to people,” he says of the extent of his personal relationships.) We never really understand what he does for work, but the soul-crushing atmosphere he describes makes "The Office" seem like a Berkeley graduate seminar.
The one thing in their lives that Annie and Neil are both clearly pleased with is their daughter. A product of private schools and countless sacrifices on the part of her parents, Jodi, who has a 3.96 average and a raft of extracurriculars under her belt, is a shoo-in for a really good college. So deeply invested are they in their promising offspring’s success, Jodi needs to escape to her friend Mindy’s house to experience “the pleasure of being ignored.” So when Jodi announces one night that she’s decided not to apply to college, but instead to take time off and change the world in some small way, it’s no surprise that her parents’ middle-class dreams seem to evaporate on the spot. Neil takes a philosophical approach to the situation. But Annie is undeterred. She dolls herself up good and marches off to the next reunion of her own alma mater, where she suspects a certain admissions officer for the school will be in attendance—an admissions officer who used to have a thing for Annie. The extreme lengths to which Annie will go to get her only child into school next fall are both ridiculous and painfully understandable. Any parent who doesn’t feel at least a twinge of recognition in her overbearing ways must be made of very strong stuff. Yet the play does not feel heavy handed or overly moral in tone. The script moves along like a locomotive and is genuinely funny and fresh. Every member of this small ensemble cast is outstanding, including Sarah Albano (Jodi), a college senior who is on the professional stage for the first time. We need our children around, the play seems to say, if only to remind us of what we once were and what we don’t have to give up in order to become adults. Theresa Burns may be reached at the South Orange Patch.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
