From LA.com -
10/12/07
BY EVAN HENERSON
Two actors yank down a curtain, and the audience takes a quick
and quite vivid journey from rural Ohio to a fire-ravaged hillside in Northern
California. On the trip, the tone of Jane Anderson's new play "The Quality of
Life" shifts as well.
We've moved from the home of Bill and Dinah, who are quietly
existing on the precipice of despair, to the life embracing "play the cards
you're dealt" pragmatism of Dinah's cousin Jeannette and her husband. There will
be many more stops along the emotional spectrum before this ride - to use a
Jeannette phrase - is done.
Playwright Anderson ("The Baby Dance," "Looking for Normal")
took nearly five years to complete this commission for the Geffen Playhouse.
Some things are worth the wait.
Bleak as it often is, "The Quality of Life" is rich with
thought, emotion and intelligence. Anderson - also the director - guides her
travelers with a steady hand, cannily shifting the ground underneath them. In
Scott Bakula, JoBeth Williams, Dennis Boutsikaris and Laurie Metcalf, Anderson
has deployed one of the best casts to grace a local stage in recent memory.
"Quality" begins in the wake of the savage murder of the
college-age daughter of Dinah and Bill (Williams and Bakula). Though they've
become born-again Christians, the couple isn't doing well. They have grown
distant, and their occasional words of comfort to each other read hollow.
Then Dinah learns of her cousin Jeannette's (Metcalf)
misfortune. A fire has gutted her home, and Jeanette and her academic husband
Neil (Boutsikaris) are living in a tent on the barren hillside. On top of this,
Neil has terminal cancer. "It doesn't compare," Bill says to Dinah as though
misfortune were grounds for competition. "They can rebuild." Nevertheless, he
reluctantly agrees to accompany Dinah on a visit there.
It's here where the curtain drops and the play kicks into
gear. Set designer Francois-Pierre Couture has fashioned a vivid campground-like
compound with charred trees and all the makeshift comforts of a temporary home.
The tent, called a yurt, doubles as a screen for Jason H. Thompson's
projections.
Our introduction to each of the characters isn't promising
dramatically. Bill establishes himself as a moralistic, faith-
spouting prig, and Dinah is a chirpy do-gooder bearing canned
preserves and pickles. Metcalf's Jeannette, with frizzy wig and costumed by
Christina Haatainen Jones in aging hippie regalia, is a chattery font of carpe
diem bravery. Only Boutsikaris' Neil - largely a listener, not a spouter - lacks
the early mantle of cliché.
Then Anderson shakes up her characters' beliefs, and everyone
proves considerably more complicated. Turns out Jeannette and Neil are preparing
for Neil's suicide and Jeannette's got some radical plans of her own. Their
mentality challenges Dinah and especially Bill, whose faith dictates a very
different way of dealing with misfortune. There are no winners in this debate.
It would be too easy - particularly for a liberal-minded
audience - to see Bill as the rotter of the play. Bakula embraces the man's
ill-timed insensitivity - but also the engine that drives it. The playwright
gives Bill one of "Quality's" key last words, and Bakula knows exactly how to
deliver it.
Williams is quite good as well. Neither Dinah's folksy
benevolence nor the pent-up grief are overplayed. Dinah is, in many ways, the
play's most conflicted character, the one with a journey to continue. We believe
her when she sides with Bill and when she turns on him.
Recent stage history (the Geffen's "All My Sons" and even "Pot
Mom") have established that nobody can nail despair with quite as much finesse
as Metcalf. Her Jeannette is shrewd, caustic, grimly funny, a bit myopic and
deeper than she at first appears. Jeannette and Neil have a showdown toward the
play's end. In it, Metcalf will rip your heart out.
As will Boutsikaris. His thoughtful examination of a dying man
is as much the play's spine as Dinah's journey, Jeannette's realization and even
Bill's misguided attempt at fortitude.
Granted, that's a lot of baggage to process, but it's well
worth the investment.
THE QUALITY OF LIFE
>In a nutshell: A sneaky-smart look at
red state/blue state mentality performed by one of the year's best ensembles
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