Lungs at Homegrown Theater

Or: They May Not Mean To, But They Do*

In Jessica Nebeker's white alley-style set, we find ourselves choked with plastic. The walls leading into the space, and creeping kudzu-like down to our seats are bottles, containers, Styrofoam, the clear-lit moulds of the future that might outlive any work of art or act of grace. It’s an immediate jolt to take us into a play about a world in decline, becoming more crowded and hotter by the year. But the real visual kicker bobs on closer examination: mixed in with the dreck,spray painted white, are children’s toys dinosaurs and trucks and a single forlorn polar bear stuffy, the things that might be treasures beyond value or cast aside in the progression of years.

In the middle of this, ourselves and our beer bottles crowded together are Her (Lilly Yasuda) and Him (Chad Ethan Shohet), a modern couple who pride themselves on their concern (for the planet, for each other) trying to figure out whether they ought or ought not to have a child. Duncan Macmillan’s play (tangily British but transports to Idaho, rootball intact) is fast and sharp, for all its set-less amorphousness. Yasuda and Shohet fly a mile a minute, coming together and breaking a part, time and space splintering or running together like beads of mercury. Questions hard and glassy of causality and morality wiz past us before being broken by a request for tea or sex or to lower your voice please because we’re in the middle of Ikea and that child is staring at us.

Yasuda is the principal driver, her speech, clipped and sprinting, arms cutting at the air as though willing her palms to grow mouths and articulate what is trapped inside her. Her replies to her partners fumbles switch back and forth like data transforms, carried on an electricity of a wry smile or surge in tear-eyed ice when the she is pierced by shards of the unforgivable. Shohet runs slower pace but is hummingbird balanced; his face flashing into a look of horror, or hurt, or deadly seriousness, absent of any kind of mugging but that burst laughter from both sides of the aisle like a split hydrant. Weighed down by the trials of relationship and responsibility, he can also be tender and heartfelt, taking in and marveling at his partners flights of intellect and fancy, possessing that quality that make up for so much: good listening.

Lungs is a pinching play, it lays thumb and forefinger to your softest places and wont stop until its final five minutes when it sinks its teeth into your ear with a pain that almost feels pleasant. The politics and morals of the play itself are not the most copper-bottomed, but the youth of the characters, their feelings of convincing them selves they know everything while being privately terrified they know nothing at all, does much to trim away the thorns of the script itself. Midway through the story, as things begin to calve and start to slip towards the ocean depths, sniffles broke out amongst the audience and continued as a soft chorus of wet, heartbroken crickets (not the judgmental kind) on through the end, as Yasuda and Shohet broke and rebuilt each other, collapsed upon and kissed, and were finally left with not much to show for their lives but each other, something soft and loving amid all the sharp, immutable edges of the world.

*Courtesy of Philip Larkin