There are lots of reasons to love Grey Gardens, freeFall Theatre's latest offering and surely one of its most memorable. There's Doug Wright's super-intelligent book, grotesque and hilarious and then suddenly melancholy. There's Scott Frankel's wonderful music, redolent of the '40s and of now, and occasionally reminiscent of the best of Kurt Weill. And there are Michael Korie's dazzling lyrics, so original and scintillating, you don't want to miss a single word.
Next comes the acting: brilliant performances all 'round, especially by Wyn Wilson, Katie Zaffrann and Ann Hurst as the Beale women, kin to Jackie Kennedy but destined for disappointment and squalor. Directed by the formidable Eric Davis, these three performers and six others grab our attention and don't let go till they've also earned our horror, our laughter, and, not least of all, our gratitude.
In fact, more than any other freeFall production this year, Grey Gardens lives up to the outsize promise of The Wild Party, that 2008 production which put the Bay area on notice that something splendid was this way coming. The show may be idiosyncratic — how many of us can relate to the Beale ménage? — but it's so consummately professional, who cares about relevance? I haven't seen a new musical of this quality in years — and that includes Rent and Billy Elliot.
There are two parts to this story, and if they match up unevenly, well, too bad, life is sloppy. In the first, Big Edith Beale (the terrifically talented Wyn Wilson) dominates and damages her daughter Edie, who (in this fictionalized account) has a good chance of marrying the eldest Kennedy brother, Joe Jr. Joe (Fred Ross) is smitten with young Edie — played with startling effortlessness by the radiant Katie Zaffrann — but older Edith knows just enough of her daughter's scandalous past to scare off the young politico and keep the girl to herself.
In the second act, it's years later, and now older Edie (the frighteningly credible Ann Hurst) is an egocentric layabout who depends on her daughter — Wyn Wilson again — for food, conversation, recriminations and eccentricity. The East Hampton mansion in which they live — "Grey Gardens" — has fallen into shabbiness so extreme that the local Board of Health is demanding a rehab, and even the Beales' one visitor — a dopey kid named Jerry — wonders if they could use an abandoned washing machine he's got his hands on. As mother and daughter shout at each other without giving way, and as Dr. Norman Vincent Peale insists from the radio "Choose to be Happy," we realize that sometimes entropy can affect whole families, that occasionally diamonds turn into paste. If the show weren't so funny, it might be mightily distressing.
But it's not. I mean, how can you feel blue about lyrics that rhyme "Fanny Hill" with "de Tocqueville," and "deb" with "cause célèbre"? How can you not delight in little Edie's undying optimism in spite of all the evidence that her life is an awful wreck? Even the kids playing child Jackie and her little sister Lee — Natalie Cottrill and Caroline Howard — are topnotch, and so are Byron DeMent as houseguest/pianist George Gould Strong, Micheal Edwards as opinionated Major Bouvier, and Dean-Carlo Grant as compassionate servant Brooks.
On Tom Hansen's turntable set — revolving into one wall, leaving the other three sides of the theater for audience seating — the singers of Grey Gardens offer us one wittily complex song after another, all backed by a note-perfect band led by music director Michael Raabe. Ty Christine Massola's fine costuming gives us upper-crust elegance in the first act and embarrassingly unfashionable togs in the second, and Jo Averill-Snell's lighting could hardly be excelled.
There is one flaw in the production, however, and that's that seating arrangement that has the audience staring across the stage to more audience. In a Brechtian context, this sort of theatricalism can make sense. But Grey Gardens has no such ambitions, it's about the Beales and not the stagecraft, and would be even more powerful, I think, if we weren't always being reminded we were watching a play.
But this is no great problem. More importantly, Grey Gardens is a terrific, artistically daring show, one of the best you'll see anywhere. If you want quality, here you've got it. Buy a ticket and see for yourself.
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2011.