Sycamore, a new play by Sarah Sander

Or: Fractured Households

Celia and David Jacobs (Selina Fillinger and Tom Hickey) have never been very good at sharing. They’re coming to the end of an adolescence spent in a small college town, on a quintessential American street, where neighbors swap produce on the front steps, and children and parents can never quite speak the same language, and alcoholism lurks like a demon in every kitchen at the end of every day. Their toys, their time, their clothes, their parents affections all lie torn between them. But now they have to share John (Jonathan Nieves) the new boy next door. Does he favor one, or the other, or both? How will this fadge?!

Playwright Sarah Sanders casts herself as an Inge-y dramatist. Her writing lives in the unspoken, in the ellipses at the ends of sentences and smiling recriminations. Her master stroke is a malevolent metaphorical squid, undulating in the undercurrent of the Jacobs consciousness: a shadowy incident with a school play the past spring, that has wrenched the siblings apart and still has it’s tentacles wrapped around David. Unfortunately her prose can get a little ponderous and flat footed, particularly with the parents (though she favors mother Louise, and her actress Robyn Coffin carries them out with a tense forthrightness and a weary panache), and the jokes can feel soldered on. Her construction of story tends towards the cinematic; short scenes that more often than not rather hand out nuggets of information and hurrying on rather than sparking the story along. Director Devon de Mayo strings together and mitigates the sting of these “cuts” by conjuring brief moments-in-transition, in and around the porches and kitchens of Jeffery D Kmiec’s skeletal set, much like the shots of John’s camera.

The cast thrives as the script does, in the unspoken but meaning-fraught communication between parents, siblings, friends. Fillinger and Nieves bring the most out of their fellow players and give and, what’s harder, elicit nuanced, heartfelt detail, from a play more concerned with the sweep. He has mastered the polite swagger of a young courter, delighting in delighting and bamboozling Celia and David, but clamming up into a taciturn caretaker when his mother, Jocelyn (Jaslene Gonzalez), strays into her cups. He also can burst out in lightning flashes of earnest, naked need, quite touching. Fillinger keeps Celia alive with thoughts, her intentions and emotions read in a shifting shoulder or steeling eye. Clear voiced, in a cast of mumblers, she is by turns bitterly sharp, charmingly flustered, and petrified as she keeps an even voice clamped over a seething pot of frustrated hopelessness. And all this done without crashing broadcast, but with the simplicity and honesty that separates performance from inhabitation.

Sycamore is pieces about pieces, both in the story it tells and its subject matter. But after slow fuse explosions (with slightly damp powder, alas) and the tinkle of lost chances for understanding, the final notes that Sander gives us are neither pat nor bleak but eloquent in their simplicity. But its story of shattering and mending, and how families broken by reverses or simply the wear of years can slowly but slowly, make itself into fractured whole, if only we can learn to share our shards.