Route

A new play by Alexandra Shields

Or: Life Out of the Fast Lane

“When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” There sometimes come days, week, (a year, even,) when life singles you out for a game of cosmic dodgeball and throws everything at you at once. It’s terrible to go through, but makes for good stories and great theater. But while life need not concern itself with the bounds of reason, a good playwright has to carefully temper any litany of woe they heap on the poor souls of their imagination, lest they end up with a trauma stew, overly salted and with too much Roux.

How delicious then, that Route, Wayward Sisters Theater’s kickoff for their Sisterhood Series, keeps crisp and tart from first sip to final gulp. Playwright Alexandra Shields sits us in the car of the orphaned Franklin sisters, Scarlet (Rylie Ann Taylor), Jade (Eliza Kang) and nine-year old Georgia (Capri Gehred-O’Connell). It’s the anniversary of their parent’s deaths, and they are sailing down California 82, trying to escape a day that has gone from bad to worse and from worse to just awful.

But however dark their circumstances we cannot help but laugh. Shields keeps popping up sharp and cacklesome jokes in surprising places, like coins found between the seats. Moreover, her depiction of the sisterly bond that ties and tangles are highly relatable and realistic. The three know exactly which buttons to push on each other, both to irk and ameliorate. Scarlett, now her siblings legal guardian and terribly unprepared for her circumstance, has an uneasy foot on the throttle of her affections and the break of her authority, grinding against Jade who wears her teenage rebellion like a royal cloak, but keeps getting tangled up in the hem, while Georgia in the back seat and resentful of being kept in the dark is, well, exactly what you’d expect of a nine year old: young enough to wheedle and old enough to threaten.

Alas, it is not a play that translates well to zoom, and you are left hungry for all the inventive environmental elements that Shields implanted in her play: the acrobatics of blocking inside a car, the freeway as a distant river of sound, the dueling mixtapes through which the sisters side for dominance, rendered only as silence. Still the reposts of laugh and gasp, and slow slither of catastrophe, all read perfectly from the computer screen as they would from the stage. We also get a nice good look at the actors: Taylor letting Scarlet unravel by handfuls (and a gorgeous moment where she lays her forehead and forearms on the unseen steering wheel, entirely at a loss) while Kang shines when Jade’s hauteur melts into an energized panic, wildly perplexed and totally profane.

I love the suffering of others, and Route takes its characters down dark, dark turns, but it still remains touching and affirming. We are very conscious of the life the Franklins have made together, their routines and shorthands, rooted in hundreds of cantrips like this before it, even reaching back to happier times. But when sorrows come… However calamitous their current circumstances, however terrible their mistakes and sharp edged the consequences, however bad things get for them, we feel like it is not impossible for the sisters to rescue themselves. We find them pulled over on the shoulder of the road to ruin, with no exit in sight and an impassible barrier. But they have each other, and its entirely possible that a u-turn may avail them another mile onward.