I and You

Or: And A Rock Feels No Pain

Lauren Gunderson, a playwright famed for the tearfully earnest biographies of ideas, sweeps us into smaller, more intimate space and a different tack. I and You takes us not down the white shell path of luminaries like Henrietta Levitt or Marie Curie, but into the bedroom of local sick girl Caroline (Katie Wilmorth), waiting for a liver transplant and for her life to either begin or end. Suddenly into her bight, clothes strewn prison bursts Anthony (Keith Livingston) with the words of Whitman on his lips. He has volunteered to partner with her for a presentation on the poet and in hopes of cracking her spiky shell.

In the bright, art festooned bedroom, Wilmorth and Livingston flutter and flit and dance their way through Gunderson’s script, gaining assurance as their playwright does. Gunderson’s glory is in her dialog, but it takes a few minutes (maybe even half an hour) for her to connect. The “youth speak” slips like a mic jack, popping in and out of connection, before finally connecting with a click and a flooding of clarity. Similarly her stitching of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on the proceedings runs sometimes tight and even and sometimes wrinkly and billowing.

Still as a playwright she nails the last twenty minutes, and then blows us away in the last five, and her words are able in the hands of of her actors. Wilmorth flits and curled her way around the space, full of dachshound fury and careful, wry expressions as she bears the hidden core of herself. She carries off the best lines, and carries both chronic pain and a certain sweep of youthfulness, juggling both effortlessly. She can also play a mean Air Piano. Livingston is sweet full of endearing excitement, both for Whitman and his new partner, but tempers his ardor with wryness (particularly about Whitman frolicking carnally all through the poem, a fun ongoing gag). He’s so tender and she’s so tempestuous, that every time they got from their respectfully distant corners of the bedroom to share a page, or explain where the liver lies, I keep whispering “Y’aaaaallll should kiiiiiiisss” under my breath.

I and You transcends its foibles and hooks its audience a full net of gasps in its final minutes. But its build up the friendship growing through poetry and posts, sharing pain and dreams, makes all the mistakes seem like stepping stones, clues toward a better story.