Without neurotic characters, the history of Western theater would be drastically different. Where would our stages be without Medea, Hamlet, Hedda Gabler, George and Martha? Neurotic protagonists turn every play into a whydunit; we don’t just follow the plot, we also get the pleasure of psycho-analyzing Oedipus, Macbeth, Miss Julie, and Blanche DuBois. This one has a self-image problem, that one has gender issues, this one wants to murder his father, that one is a sado-masochist with a peculiarly strong death wish. Fixation, obsession, mania, you name it, there’s a character in the canon who illustrates it abundantly. And there are individual dramatists – did someone mention Strindberg? – whose work is a goldmine for Freudians and their disciples.
Which brings me to Jennifer Haley, whose haunting play Breadcrumbs is currently on view in a fine production at Sarasota’s Urbanite Theatre. This talented dramatist introduces us to two troubled women, one a fiction writer in her 60s and the other a nurse’s aide in her late 20s, both of whom have had problematic relationships with their parents, and one of whom needs the other with a not-entirely-healthy urgency. The needy one is the younger, Beth, who does her utmost to insinuate herself into the life of famous Alida, perhaps because her parents threw her out of their house when she was 15, and she’s been seeking some sort of stability — usually with not-very-faithful men — ever since. But novelist Alida’s no less damaged: Even before the onset of Alzheimer’s brings her into contact with Beth, she’s living a reclusive, misanthropic life in the shadow of the mother who once criss-crossed the continent with her, losing lover after lover in an abortive search for “Prince Charming.” We see episodes from Alida’s childhood in several flashbacks, and the more we witness, the more disturbing become the parallel backgrounds of the two women. They’re both victims of men’s inability to commit, they’re both lost in a strange forest out of a perilous fairy tale, they’re both fundamentally alone. If they fail in this one last opportunity to connect, there may be no saving epilogue.
Barbara Redmond plays Alida, both as an adult and as a child, and her performance in both cases is superb. As the grown Alida, experiencing the first signs of Alzheimer’s, she’s dismissive, imperious, angry, and suspicious. When Beth tells her that she wants to help her write a memoir, she haughtily rejects the idea, and when Beth needs a place to stay, she coldly limits her to three days. We begin to understand the forces that shaped her disdain for humanity when we see her as a girl in the play’s several flashbacks. Now Redmond portrays an unusually bright daughter of a desperately lonely mother, one who flits from unreliable man to unreliable man in a vain search for a port in an ever-building storm. Perhaps the most harmful of these candidates is Harry, a film producer in the midst of a divorce. Alida shows us her confusion when Harry insists that she and her mother live in servant’s quarters; and then Alida stumbles onto certain forbidden activities in Harry’s basement. Finally, we come to understand, perhaps to forgive, Alida’s hostility toward the rest of the world.
As for Beth, she’s solidly played by Brittany Proia, but I think the part needs a more prismatic approach. Still, Proia makes it clear that Beth is remarkably needy, and so loose with the truth that Alida eventually puts a Post-It Note with the word “Liar” on her clothes. Beth’s credentials as a neurotic can be found in a black grocery bag that she apparently deposits with each boyfriend before he drops her: it’s full of the stuffed animals that her parents gave her in better times. But what’s most insidious about Beth is how she covers her desire to make Alida into a second mother with protestations of deep concern. It’s not that she doesn’t honestly fear for Alida’s well-being; it’s that she uses her compassion to solve selfish needs of her own. Proia also plays Alida’s mother in the flashbacks, and appears as a briefly-seen witch. Whether this character is more witch than waif is the question.
Breadcrumbs is tautly directed by Brendan Ragan; the simple set is by John C. Reynolds, and the contemporary clothes are by Becki Leigh. Like most Urbanite productions, it’s put together lovingly and intelligently. I continue to be impressed by this theater’s ability to find scripts no one else has noticed, and I’m cheered by the quality with which each of them is produced. It’s not often that a theater makes its presence felt so rapidly; but already Urbanite has become well-nigh indispensable.
Breadcrumbs
Three-and-a-half stars of five stars
Urbanite Theatre,1487 Second St., Sarasota.
Through Sept. 18: Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. $5-$28
941-321-1397. urbanitetheatre.com.
This article appears in Sep 1-8, 2016.