All-One!: The Dr. Bronner Play

Or: Unity and Alterity

What I like best about Beth Hyland’s plays is her sense of an ending. There is a lot to recommend her as a playwright: a dashing sense of humor, a flair for the theatrical (without an attendant disdain for production designers), linking the details of her stories together with strands strong and subtle as spider silk, and the ability to juggle and care of both her collaborators and her audience. Hearing Hyland’s work is like running in an open field, playing Calvin Ball with a good friend. You don’t know quite what’s coming next but it’s wild and you’re having a wonderful time. Until your friend produces a baseball bat from nowhere and slams it right into your stomach. And then kneels with you as your gasp and blubber to gently point at something hard edged and enormous that was just buried under the field the whole time. That’s a Hyland ending: shocking, but illuminating.

The original reading of All-One!: The Dr. Bronner Play was to have been performed at the Passage Theater of Chicago but was swept into the dustbin of possibility by the Pandemic. Instead, the ten actors scheduled to appear took to the slightly glitchy lapis screen and performed under the direction of Sammy Zeisel (and the editing prowess of Evelyn Landow) and from their separate apartments a play about togetherness, otherness, and soap. All topics that resonate well with todays audience.

The play is based around a brand of soap, an 18-in-1-Use product wrapped up in a label made of words; text so bizarre it seems as though, “The author is writing it as you read it.” It is the relic of a singularly soapy (literally and figuratively) historical figure “Dr.” Emmanuel Bronner, scion of Jewish soap makers, disappeared dad, and preacher of the All-Faith God church, that sought to unify humanity and make us better compatriots and crew members of “space ship earth.”

The play works remarkably well over Zoom as it would in a live space. Each cast member tests the worthiness of the 18 uses of Dr. Bronner’s through a personal monologue while picking apart the life and philosophy of its maker. As the attested properties run from the simple (washing hands, hair, dishes) to the bizarre (washing fruit, cleaning teeth, “controlling” dust mites), so the stories are strung from the silly (Jen Allman’s power point presentation of the sauna trip from hell, Ned Baker washing his clothes in the bath… while wearing them) to the heartfelt (Joolz sharing with us the memory of two stunning smells, Nico Kruger on complexities of shaving, Abby Pajakoski on the philosophy of Alterity: enlightenment by recognizing the irreducible uniqueness of others. It’s hot.)

In turn, Hyland’s own history of Bronner swings about from the hilarious plot for a public crucification twixt Bronner (Kruger) and Fred Walcher (Carter Caldwell) to the sudden musical appearance of his mysterious Wife 2 ( Deanalís Resto) to the darker and rooted stories: Bronner’s abandoned children (Alice Carryn Torres, Baker, and Allman), Bronner’s (Pajakoski) visits to his fist wife’s grave, and a truly quietly wrenching scene between Brunner (Joolz) and his parents (Will Sonheim, paternally blustery and fatherly chilled by turns, and Park Williams with a wry tenderness).

In a time when as people we’ve never felt further apart, in body or spirit, the story of a man who taught to unites all races, religions, and creeds together, no matter by what bug house strategy or bludgeoning loquaciousness is something to sit about. And thank heavens we can be introduced to him through a simple bottle of soap, and the artistry of a fantastic playwright who can sucker punch us in the most constructive way possible, and keep us laughing and delighted. Right to the end when Resto sings us off with one of Bronner’s most infamous and brilliant plagiarisms, we feel, well, cleaner. Cleaner and connected and a little closer to having touched another life in a way that blossoms, however painfully, into something beautiful. And that is the ending that Hyland always delivers.