Blue Surge, Goodman’s latest offering from wunderkind playwright Rebecca Gilman, has a lot going for it: masterful direction by Robert Falls, an amazing set by Walt Spangler, moody, evocative lighting by Michael Philippi, and a bravura performance by Rachel Miner. Too bad the script didn’t live up to the formidable talents bringing it to life.
Blue Surge is the story of two cops, two hookers, and their intersections in a small, Midwestern locale. The play opens with a thwarted bust of a massage parlor where the two young prostitutes work. The bust is sort of an ice-breaker for the boys (the cops) and the girls (the hos) to meet each other and begin seeing each other socially. Curt (Joe Forbrich) is the earnest cop, the poor white boy for whom law enforcement is his glass ceiling. Being a detective is his career pinnacle, because he comes from reduced circumstances. Gilman sets him up as a do-gooder, and as such, he can’t get the troubled teenage hooker Sandy out of his mind and sets out to help her. Sandy (the astonishingly talented Rachel Miner), also from reduced circumstances, is refreshing because she realizes that she is making the most of her life by being a prostitute…it’s easy money. Miner makes us love her Sandy, who, in her own way, is the smartest and most realistic character in the play, a whore with a heart of gold and no illusions. The other side of this cop/whore coin is Doug (the usually formidable Steve Key, here reduced by the script to an unbelievably stupid detective, who borders on brain damaged) and Heather (Rebecca Jordan, in a caricaturish, but hilarious, turn), who fall for each other. I suppose Gilman meant for this pair to be the comic relief in her story of the gap between the middle and lower classes, but the two of them ring resoundingly untrue: he because he would never be smart enough to make detective even in a small town, and she because we never see why she cleans up her act by the end of the play (the love of a “good” man?).
Rebecca Gilman has potential as a playwright, but she’s not firing on all cylinders here, in spite of the inarguably high production values the Goodman has given her latest effort. The problem with Blue Surge is its lack of authenticity. Gilman wants to write about the kind of folks who inhabit the lower depths, the economically deprived class who dare not dream too big, but the lack of credibility on display demonstrates that Gilman doesn’t know these people very well. She’s imagining them…and their strifes. Curt, the “good” cop at one point (in a meandering monologue that goes on far too long) bemoans the fact that he “doesn’t know how to act.” Gilman’s Curt is too self-aware; he wouldn’t say that. There’s also no motivation for the felony he commits near the play’s climax, whether his goals were altruistic or not.
Blue Surge (the title is a play on words, from the Duke Ellington jazz piece, Blue Serge…get it?) is clever, but the playwright never delivers on the poetry of its promise: the play lacks both genuine blues and we leave the theater still wanting a “surge” we can believe in.