Playwright: Tracy Letts
At: Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Phone: (312) 335-1650; $42-$52
Runs through: Jan. 18
Those who liked Tracy Letts’ Killer Joe and Bug because of their noir comic essence and rich veins of violence and sex will be disappointed with Man from Nebraska. But those who liked Letts’ strong theatricality and pithy writing will find their judgment confirmed by this contemplative and understated—but possibly unfinished—world premiere.
Sixty-ish Ken Carpenter is from Lincoln, Nebraska; a successful husband, father, and businessman married almost 40 years to Nancy. Set and content in his ways—he and Nancy have a nearly wordless routine—Ken is buoyed by deeply rooted Baptist faith (the play is not about religion). Without warning he undergoes a crisis of faith; an ecstatic crisis one might say, for Letts reveals so little about Ken beyond superficial routine that we cannot detect underlying causes, if any. Weeping in the night, Ken says to Nancy, ‘I don’t understand the stars! Can you explain the stars? Then there’s nothing you can do!’
Ken, Nancy, their adult daughter Ashley, even their pastor are marvelously unable to verbalize feelings and fears. Dependent on rock-solid Ken, the others don’t wish to know about his crisis, and grow petulant when his despair challenges their life routines and rote assumptions. Ken tells Ashley she didn’t earn her faith, but merely inherited it from him. ‘How do you earn it?’ she asks. ‘I don’t know,’ Ken replies. And so Ken’s journey—and the audience’s—is engaged.
Both the writing and direction (by Anna D. Shapiro) are less-is-more. Ken is revealed in highly evocative brief glimpses played against designer Todd Rosenthal’s towering backdrop of 20 shadowboxes, each of which lights up—a kitchen, a bedroom, a church—like a snapshot capturing a particular moment. With small actions and images far more potent than spoken words, Letts and Shapiro require the audience to live in the moments of Ken’s life and listen to the silences. It’s easy to do, gazing upon the craggy brow and square jaw of Rick Snyder as Ken, who seems to brood even when at ease, and the matronly carriage of Rondi Reed as caring but unperceptive Nancy. They exude sincerity, even warmth, beneath their stolid bearings. There’s well-etched supporting work all around, too, particularly from Barbara Ann Grimes as Ken’s invalid mother, Thomas White as Ken’s comical pastor and lithe and sharp Shannon Cochran as a would-be femme fatale.
The wonderful Act I is tight, moody and intriguing. It invokes the mystery of faith and leaves you caring about what happens. However, Letts doesn’t—or can’t—sustain the tone in Act II, a rather standard picaresque in which Ken sojourns to London and rediscovers long-suppressed senses through alcohol, drugs, art therapy and improbable much-younger friends. Letts returns to his pithy and deeply subtextual form only as Ken comes home for his mother’s funeral; her death having sparked an ecstatic renewal of faith as unaccountable as Ken’s earlier moment of loss. The London friends disappear as they, the pastor and even daughter Ashley prove to be ciphers in the play, which rather negates the excellent supporting work.
Only wife Nancy parallels Ken’s journey, although not as deeply, and is there to face the future with him in a final moment as conservative as it is uncertain for them.
Man from Nebraska wants to kick into a more profound gear when Ken goes to London, but does not. The parallel stories—Nancy, maybe Ashley—want to be more fully told, but are not. Letts reveals welcome new facets of his writing talent, yet may have whittled away too much in rehearsals or written too little. Perhaps he doesn’t have the intellectual chops of a Stoppard or Kushner to explore cosmic ideas and intensely personalize them, or doesn’t have the chops yet. It would be splendid if he put this play aside for 20 years while he gathers additional life experience, and then took another swing at it. As it stands, Man from Nebraska is concrete at either end but sand in the middle.