If you’ve ever spent a long time in a busy section of a major metropolis – New York City, for example, or Chicago – and suddenly found yourself in a panic over the missing trees, grass, and bodies of water, then you’ll easily understand even the most surreal moments in My Barking Dog.
This surprising play, written by Eric Coble and currently appearing in a first-rate production at Sarasota’s Urbanite Theatre, is about two city dwellers and their desperation for contact with nature. When that contact comes at last in the shape of a stray coyote, neighbors Toby and Melinda react, at first tentatively, then determinedly, and at last, fanatically, spending the last parts of the drama exhibiting a bizarreness that surpasses the impossible. It’s this ending that makes My Barking Dog memorable, and something more than a passing comment on a denatured landscape “seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil;/And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell” (Gerard Manley Hopkins). We Floridians may not need the play the way a Manhattanite might (or any other urbanite – it was commissioned by a theater in Cleveland). But because of that ending, and the dramaturgical courage it displays, I’m more than satisfied with My Barking Dog. I only wish more American plays were this daring.
The first minutes don’t really prepare us for what’s to come. With alternating monologues (deftly staged by Daniel Kelly), we’re introduced to Melinda (the excellent Caitlin Hargraves), who works at a printing plant and hardly has a life outside her work; and Toby (talented Miles Duffield) who lost his job not too long ago and is at wit’s end trying to replace it. Set designer Mark Beach has created two platforms for most of the action, the higher representing Toby’s sixth-floor apartment and the lower Melinda’s fourth-floor space. Toby and Melinda don’t know each other, and for that matter seem to have no friends or family to check up on them and evaluate their sanity. But then that coyote appears on the fire escape they share, the monologues turn to dialogue, and a cautious friendship is created over this emissary from the green world. Melinda’s first impulse is to feed it; Toby’s is to learn as much as possible on the internet, including the information that more and more critters seem to be returning to urban centers.
If you expect the next plot point to be a romance between our neo-naturalists, I have to warn you, this isn’t that sort of play. Playwright Coble is after something else altogether: an idea of nature that doesn’t include for human nature. So when the coyote fails to turn up on the fire escape one evening, Toby doesn’t seek solace in Melinda’s arms. Instead, he learns what it takes to track the wayward critter (its dung, known as “scat”) and hits the trails in a nearby park. Meanwhile, Melinda, who has admitted to a fear of animals stemming from a childhood trauma, has apparently lost all her phobias, and sets out on a mission of redemption for furry wayfarers.
I won’t spoil the play by saying more, but I can mention that something happens to Toby that’s either real or a hallucination – even the two characters can’t decide – and by the last moments of the play, we’re in a fever dream of a world, a demented fantasy in which Nature finally has its revenge on Culture. If you think you’ve guessed what I mean, I guarantee you’re mistaken.
Is Barking Dog entirely a success? Not quite: for one thing, the relations between the humans and the coyote dominate the narrative so much, you can’t help but wish there were a subplot or two to add other dimensions. And then there’s the non-romance. I think it was scholar of religions Mircea Eliade who opined that city dwellers are so fascinated with sex because it’s their one contact with nature. Keeping that in mind, it’s odd that lonely Toby and Melinda don’t recognize their own urges – at least their sexual drives – and solve several of their problems in bed. Why does this never occur to them? Has city life so abused them that it’s deadened their libidos? Then shouldn’t that somehow be alluded to in the play?
These problems aren’t dealbreakers. My Barking Dog remains a provocative piece on an uncommon subject, and it eventually becomes nothing short of shocking. See it and then head for somewhere on the water, with maybe a few cypress trees, maybe some egrets and herons. We’re never too far from nature in Florida. If this drama’s any evidence, that’s a good thing.
My Barking Dog
Rating: Three-and-a-half stars
Urbanite Theatre,1487 Second St., Sarasota, through Dec. 18. 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sunday. $28, under 40 with I.D. $20, students with I.D. $5. 941-321-1397, urbanitetheatre.com.
This article appears in Dec 1-8, 2016.