Premiere: “Every Breath You Take” delves into tragedy and grief
LANSING, Mich. – Dramas can be heavy stuff. They’re often not for the faint of heart and can take an emotional toll on their audiences.
Every Breath You Take by Graham Farrow premiered at Ixion Saturday night and it is a tragedy that launches with high emotion and doesn’t let up through the entire 90 minutes (unless you count the intermission).
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The playwright keeps the audience in suspense as to the particulars of the plot for the first half of the show and any discussion of the whys and wherefores of the conflict or actions in a review smacks of spoilers and interferes with what the playwright is trying to accomplish.
So, instead of telling you what the play is about in terms of what happens, it is instead necessary to talk about the play’s emotion. There isn’t really an arc. It starts out intense, with Mr. and Mrs. Conway, played respectively by Rick Dethlefson and Sadonna Croff, launching immediately into an argument that cuts to the very soul of their marriage and relationship. The tragedies of their lives—whether recent or 30 years past—are tearing them apart and both have plenty of accusations to fling at the other.
Dethlefson and Croff play the tension well—with Croff constantly on the verge of tears and fraught with stress and misery and Dethlefson unhappy and unable to empathize with the path his wife take to her pain. They show the tension well in both their voices and the way they move. Director Michael Hays is able to open up wide gaps of distance between them even on the small stage that the play inhabits.
Miranda Hartmann plays Mrs. Hunter, a woman who shows up at the Conway doorstep begging for help and entrance. She never quite appears to be in shock the way she is described, but much of that is supported by what is revealed in the second act where Hartmann really comes into her own and is able to play the part with power, intensity and conviction.
Rounding out the four players is Todd Heywood as Mr. Hunter, the man summoned to rescue his wife and who plays a key role in the plot’s twists. His is a demanding role because he must switch between emotional states quickly and sometimes without justification. The major holes in the plot, which I’ll get to in a moment, fall most heavily on his character and he’s got to play each part in the moment, rather than with a character background that supports what he does. That said, Heywood makes the most of the role and gives us a reason to relate to him. He stays fully immersed in the character and is as believable as the script allows him to be.
The script, which is likely still under development, has some holes which are difficult to get past. A minor one is the length of time that it takes for Mr. Conway to arrive on the scene. Excuses are given in the dialog, but once everything is revealed, it makes no sense in the reality of the play’s world that it should take him so long. Nor is it necessary for the dramatic action of the show. His earlier arrival would cover a certain amount of awkward, unnecessary interactions where it seems the actors and their characters are both simply waiting with not much new to say.
More importantly, Mr. Conway undergoes a change, a growth in the play that is due to a crucial revelation. However, we learn that he knew of this revelation before the actions of the play began. So, the logic falls apart. It makes no sense that he would have helped initiate what takes place in the play given the knowledge he came into it with. The motivation for his change and the events that that change leads to don’t work.
There are also other minor inconsistencies, such as Mrs. Conway being distraught at the play’s opening because there were reporters at the door. She said she opened it because she didn’t know it was them, but later in the play it is revealed that the reporters show up at the same time every day. At another time, Mrs. Conway says Mrs. Hunter can use her cell phone, but she makes no motion toward getting it and instead sits down and then later tells her she can use the hallway phone because it is more private. Nor did it make sense why they would not immediately provide a phone and why Mrs. Hunter had to ask for it several times before being granted the request.
While it is Mr. Conway’s change that drives the ultimate resolution of the play, the themes rest on the shoulders of the two women. Both of them are faced with tragedies that have forever changed them. We don’t really get to know what they were like before, though both are described to a certain degree. We see that they are now women who are obsessed with their tragedy, who breathe it in with, as the title says, every breath they take. There is no relief, no distraction, nor anything else that exists in their life. As an audience, we are called upon to ask what we would do in their shoes—how do we deal with a tragedy from which we are emotionally incapable of escaping? To what extremes would we go?
While Hays handed the blocking well, making each move count in the intimate space of the Robin’s Theater, there did need to be a better managing of the silences. When there are pauses, they often came across as awkward and it was unclear whether the actors were lost or whether the pause was intentional. In a play that relies on constant emotional tension and the expression of misery and anger, that makes things tough. The silences should provide suspense and a building of the story.
“Every Breath You Take” doesn’t hesitate to show its audiences the price of grief and the misery it can cause. It asks you to consider what an obsession with one’s tragedy can lead to. Don’t expect a catharsis in this show, rather it is a serious drama that delves deep into the lives of four people whose lives have gone in a direction they never planned or wanted.