What you first notice about Sharr White’s impressive The Other Place, currently on stage in a solid Tampa Rep production, is the disjunctive nature of the scenes. There seems to be no logic to the way protagonist Juliana Smithton’s address to an audience of doctors alternates with confrontations in which she accuses her husband of adultery, emotionally turbulent phone calls with her refractory daughter, and cryptic office visits to an M.D. who takes notes on their interview without identifying — to Smithton, to the audience — her specialty or purpose. If there were no narrative necessity to this splintering of Smithton’s story, it would still work effectively as a modernist device referencing everything from the cubism of Picasso to the experimental music of Charles Ives. But as the drama proceeds and we begin to suspect that Smithton is suffering from dementia, the bizarre progress of events begins to make sense: This is Smithton’s mental world, this confusion of hopes, memories, fears, hallucinations. What author White has concocted is a wonderful example of form equaling content, requiring us to piece together reality even as her damaged heroine tries to do the same. This is courageous, original playwriting, and it’s winningly effective.
What sort of things do we have to make sense of? Well, Smithton may be a pharmaceutical representative, pitching a new drug to an audience of doctors on the island of St. Thomas. There may be a strange young woman, whom Smithton wishes to torment, wearing a string bikini and sitting with the M.D.s. Smithton’s husband may be having an affair with a younger woman, and he may be trying to divorce his middle-aged wife. She may know a “Dr. Teller” who looks just like her much-missed daughter. Her daughter and daughter’s husband may be trying to reach her, or maybe her daughter’s not married, or not even alive. Smithson and husband may own an “other place,” a second home on Cape Cod. Or maybe not. Or maybe they once did.
The Other Place at Tamp Rep Credit: Megan Lamasney
You get the idea. And yes, by play’s end (which is a little too straightforward for my modernist comfort), most of these mysteries are resolved. On the way to that resolution, we enjoy the excellent acting of Lynne Locher as Smithton, and the tolerable, if not outstanding, work of Larry Corwin as Smithton’s husband Ian, an oncologist (another possibility: Smithton has brain cancer); Lisa VillaMil as Smithton’s daughter Laurel, as Dr. Teller, and as a freaked-out innocent householder; and Jon VanMiddlesworth, identified in my playbill as “The Man,” in various small roles.
Credit: Megan Lamasney
To begin with topnotch Locher: she has the mightily difficult job of switching emotions at a moment’s notice, veering from clarity to confusion, from rage to deep love, from scientific expertise on chromosomes to unreliable perception of “facts” that never had material existence. Though she manages it all splendidly, she’s perhaps at her best when demonstrating the anger that’s common among some sufferers of dementia. She’s got the other stuff as well: I’ve known two persons with Alzheimer’s, and I was potently reminded of both when Locher’s Smithton couldn’t remember the names of common objects. Locher’s also quite convincing when portraying Smithton’s lucid moments, when addressing that audience of doctors, for example, or when calmly admitting that she’s had “an episode.”
The other actors with sizable parts are adequate but not nearly as dimensional as they need to be in such an efficiently constructed play. Corwin as Ian clearly loves his wife, is pained by her errors, is even overwhelmed, at times, by her condition; but all the emotions he gets right are the ones on the surface, and he doesn’t ever give much evidence of a rich inner life. VillaMil is at her best as the householder late in the play — here she genuinely seems a young professional burdened with all sorts of cares that she can’t easily forget, even when faced with oddly-behaving Smithton. But as Dr. Teller she seems clueless, as if dementia were something new to her, and as Smithton’s daughter she comes across as little more than mean-spirited and egoistic. C. David Frankel’s direction allows us to be perplexed when we should be, and understanding when that’s appropriate; and he’s much helped by Jo Averill-Snell’s clever lighting. Lea Umberger’s set is little more than a coffee table and two chairs, but that’s enough; her costuming is almost equally innocuous.
But the real attraction here is Sharr’s ambitious play which, at least until the too-easy ending, greatly succeeds. I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind doing some work as an audience member.
And I can tell you that work will be amply rewarded.
