I could picture the eye rolls coming, the sheer exasperation. There could be no other reaction.
“It’s a play about this Brooklyn couple– they’ve been married for years, now they’re opening things up”.
“Of course it is.”
Sitting down for a late-night coffee at a Qahwah House in Morningside Heights, I struggled to explain my evening’s entertainment to my classmates– a production of Matthew Gasda’s new play Soonest Mended at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research– without reducing the two-hour character drama to a tired checklist of cliches. I say ‘struggle’ although, from 7 to 9 PM, I was an enthusiastic voyeur to the ‘first world’ agonies of Gasda’s (writer and director) sometimes funny, often frustrating characters. A married couple in a well-decorated apartment opens up their marriage. Both are writers with wants and needs. Under frequent tirades of unmet desires and self-loathing, I could feel a cogent idea shaping– by well-set performances and the play’s subtle theatricality– in the room. Something is rotten in the state of Brooklyn (at least for 30-something intellectually inclined creatives), Gasada seems to be saying. Still, despite a clear fixation on literary and critical theory, the play’s true thesis felt just out of reach. Gasda’s play looks to use the tools of conventional American drama to examine what the decades of critical theorists sought with their notebooks and desks, couches and bookshelves. What is the root of desire? Of dysfunction? Is neuroticism an individual defect, or is the ‘new– increasingly flexible and personalized– marriage a failed experiment? If all else fails– if finding answers proves too tall an order for this four-character dramedy– aren’t we at least amused by these miserable, inarticulate strivers?
The small (but full) audience is given plenty of time to scrutinize its subjects on arrival. Many theatrical venues are billed as ‘intimate’, yet few have a sink with dirty dishes three feet from the box office. A table with half-drank water glasses sits in the corner. It set the tone; this was a lived-in space– sprezzatura by way of set design. These qualities moved into the staging area allowing us, unencumbered, to judge the character’s embodiment of space. Only a flimsy ring curtain stands to mark the ‘house’ from the ‘stage’. That is all we need. Three at-capacity bookshelves– featured are works on psychology, theory– sit on one side of the playing space, and two tall shelves of vinyl records– jazz, classical, soul– on the opposite side. There is a child-sized roll-top desk in the corner. Front and center at the apartment’s bar space is a conspicuously placed bottle of Snoop Dogg’s 19 Crimes Cali Red Blend. Is this an inside joke? A subtle bit of character work? Regardless, my attention was drawn– haunted by the grinning celebrity label. We return to that idea of intimacy. Someone is being exposed: somebody related to the production, at one point or another, bought that bottle of wine to accomplish something. What did this person intend?
The coming scenes feel equally deliberate. They are underscored by jazz, soul, and opera played in a way that rises to television levels of melodrama. What feels like an entire Nina Simone album plays over the first scene as we meet the unfortunate couple, Jonah (Jonathan Fernandez) and Alexa (Haley Phelan). Who is the music for? A couple unable to parse their feelings in silence? An audience encouraged to take in a full-bodied living space? I’m inclined to say both. Over the four scenes, we probe this couple’s search for authentic gratification in their arrangement. It begins with them congratulating one another in painfully forced check-ins about their recently opened marriage. Fernandez, as Jonah, with a wonderfully awkward, well-timed stiltedness, has his reservations. The idea of cheating is hard to break, but Alexa is confident the decision will improve their intimacy. Phelan sits neatly on a little couch, revealed to be slightly too small for the characters to appear comfortable together when he later joins her, looking out as Jonah nervously palms his fist. Gasda makes no effort to incubate any hope for the pair. “Have we laid into the trap we set for ourselves?” Jonah wonders out loud. It comes as no surprise, in the final scene, Jonah reveals to Alexa that the arrangement is too frustrating to continue. We get breadcrumbs. Finances are shared, but careers are separate, and Alexa’s latest book is sure to land. Jonah is struggling with writer’s block. Much is said, but the chatter of this first scene serves to obfuscate as much as it exposits. For all we learn of their work, their economic and relationship status, we are taunted by the inauthenticity of their mediated navel-gazing. To what degree do they buy their psychoanalytical speculation? Jonah in particular will drop several abrupt bombshells– he mentions grieving a dead father at one point, then a cheating episode in another – but he (and the play) leave these as single exchanges here and there. They are seemingly of little consequence to the rest of the play. There is no big secret to reveal. There are no major diagnoses or breakthroughs. The following scenes work like rounds in a game: a stable marriage analyzed through narrative action. Another play might live in the messy chaos of forcing its cast together, but Soonest Mended keeps people far apart.
Jonah brings a woman– a nurse named Cora (Natasha Walfall)– to the apartment. Eager for connection, she asks, he overshares, she doubts, but regardless, they have sex. Next up, Alexa enters with a man– a masseuse named Kieran (Eric Olsson). They share the same dance. Both Cora and Kieran are subtly fascinating. Each is of a commonly fetishized healing profession– Cora coyly asks Jonah about his most cliché fantasies– yet both Alexa and Jonah show little enthusiasm or willingness to play along or accept the care being offered. A particularly memorable exchange sees Alexa reject a massage, literally cringing away from Kieran’s outstretched arms. These are band-aid flings. They can stay together and challenge one another intellectually while subcontracting sex to partners less threatening. This isn’t intended to be demeaning. Alexa shows interest. She tries to ask about Kieran’s young daughter– revealed to be out of his custody– but his response is dismissive. He doesn’t mind his forced upon positionality and peacefully nods when Alexa reduces his raison d’être to “being hot and good at your job”. This is a convenient response. It is a wink in service of both a main character too apathetic to empathize and a plot too streamlined to dismiss its own elitism. The effect is one of estrangement. We lose an opportunity to connect to another struggle– parenting, custody, divorce– and instead gain a stronger sense of Alexa’s alienation.
If each play– in staging– is a lesson on looking, how to see and be seen, then Soonest Mended is sacrificing greater pathos to interrogate how we ‘live’ with people in shared spaces. Jonah and Alexa live with one another by hyper-fixating on their own careers. They keep an unseen upstate home– a totem of their success– to resolve the contradictions of a loveless cohabitation. They maintain their desires like objects in their apartment. Midway through the play, in her scene with Kieran, Alexa properly breaks down part of the staged space by identifying each bookshelf. The history is Jonah’s, the psychology is hers, the fiction and vinyl are shared. It symbolically highlights the intellectual processes and objects of personal tastes, diverting attention away from simpler, bigger feelings.
A fleeting moment of catharsis arrives in Jonah, finally admitting, face-to-face with Alexa, that he is too insecure for an open marriage. This is something the audience knows and has keenly observed over the past two hours. That it structurally fills the role of the big-reveal, the final speech-action is frustrating, but at least everyone is on the same page. Then the play ends. Jonah leaves. If Jonah’s character can be accused of being one note, it is only because we never meet him outside the confines of the forced-upon open arrangement, his period of unproductivity, and creative inadequacy. When Alexa alludes to his past career highs– successes in academia and publishing– we are unable to visualize how he might have sat ‘on top’. Still, this final moment of clarity is not a total rejection of intellectual framing and construing. He specifically calls out their experiment for laying bare that “the workers are gone” in a “factory producing marriage”. This last bit struck me. For Jonah and Alexa, it is one last intellectual flourish to paper over the real emotional stakes. He seems to be paraphrasing some version of Deleuze and Guattari’s famously slippery model of ‘Desiring Production’. But what of the playwright? Is this an ambitious last-minute attempt to tie up a main argument? What is admirable about Soonest Mended is its journey to the end of a tightrope. Jonah and Alexa reach a new status quo; in their story is the critique of impulses as mediated through institutions and individuals in concert, rather than the former or the latter in isolation. Is this meant to turn the story against sexual desire as a map of specific libidinal wants? It feels like a case of too-little-too-late.
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