“Spay” puts face on complexities of addiction

By LARRY ADAMS
A Seat on the Aisle

“There ARE no solutions, okay?” – Aubrey, from “Spay”

American Lives Theatre (ALT) prides itself on “presenting a mirror to this country, reflecting the lives and history of all Americans with new work and neglected classics.”

As it closes its fourth season this month, ALT delivers on its mission with its production of Spay, a thoughtful and challenging snapshot of life in crisis. Opening night at the Phoenix Cultural Centre in downtown Indy saw an audience rewarded for their attendance with a simultaneously entertaining and disturbing glimpse of the “raw, real” struggle of everyday people caught in the crosshairs of the present-day American opioid epidemic.

The cast, as I’ve come to expect from ALT, is well-chosen and uniformly stellar. Lead actresses Jaddy Ciucci and Shawntê Gaston stand out as Noah and Harper, respectively, half-sisters in Williamson, West Virginia, a small town beset by economic hard times and the scourge of drugs. As the play opens, Noah is trying to put the pieces of her life back together after a spectacularly public overdose, flailing about in the grips of heroin withdrawal, embarrassment, and the false promise of her unrealistic dreams for the future. Meanwhile, the more responsible and level-headed Harper stoically grapples with the increasingly impossible burden of caring not only for Noah, but for Noah’s developmentally challenged son.

Ciucci and Gaston deliver powerful and remarkably nuanced performances in their portrayals of these multifaceted characters, fleshing them and their relationship out with a chemistry that exudes the complex concoction of familiarity, disappointment, gentle humor, and resentment – yet underlying love – that binds them together even in the midst of poor choices and personal calamity.

Connecticut native Julie Dixon portrays Aubrey, the wildcard thrown into the mix of this terrible situation. Although not quite rising to the theatrical heights of our leads, she does yeoman’s work with a borderline unlikable character offering a morally dubious proposition. Saddled with the most ham-fisted of the play’s dialogue, her early scenes come off sounding rather like factoid-heavy, late-night PSAs, but she shines brightly in the passionate delivery of her later scenes.

In the other supporting role, Matt Kraft gives us Jackson, an unemployed auto parts store worker making ends meet by slinging dope to locals, including his girlfriend, Noah. Somehow, Kraft transforms this utterly low-life premise into a surprisingly sympathetic, if somewhat pathetic, character, a man who clearly cares about Noah, her son, and even his drug addicted customers. “I’m not an idiot,” he protests to the understandably disapproving and skeptical Harper at one point. “I’m not a bad person. I’m good! At least, I’m trying to be.” And we believe him.

The crew of Spay also deserve high praise. Jen Johansen makes her directorial debut with ALT in this production, and she serves the story well, with good pacing throughout and wonderfully overlapping dialogue that draws the viewer into the emotion and reality of the scene. The one puzzling choice, if indeed it is her choice at all, is the vastly different accents of Noah and Harper, two sisters supposedly brought up in the same home and living their lives in the same community. I get that this is supposed to further differentiate the two characters, but for one to evoke a woman from deep Appalachia and the other to sound as if she were pulled straight out of an Indy suburb was a bit of a head scratcher. Further, having Harper lean into that West Virginian dialect would have better underscored the outsider status of the questionably helpful Aubrey. That aside, ALT is clearly in good hands with directors such as Ms. Johansen in the bullpen.

Kudos also go out to the rest of those working behind the scenes. Lighting, set design and decoration, costumes and even music all serve to set the tone without drawing undue attention from the actors and the story – just as it should be.

My gripes with the production are few and, for the most part, directed at the playwright. The script is at times frustratingly uneven, with long, beautiful passages of natural and genuine-sounding dialogue jarringly offset by some clunky information dumps and stilted, preachy schmaltz. And the large number of scene changes, surprisingly high for a play that clocks in at less than 90 minutes, often serves to stifle any emotional momentum being generated.

The play’s end, however, is sheer genius: abrupt, poignant, unexpected, and subtly brutal – hitting the audience like a dagger to the heart and putting an ironically unseen human face on a societal problem so broad in scope and devastation as to become almost faceless for most of us. That one’s gonna stay with me for a while.

The opioid crisis in America has been termed an “epidemic,” and while I suppose this is in some ways accurate, I find the term somewhat misleading, as it implies it is an infection, contagion, something outside of ourselves. It is not. The drug crisis that has blossomed, at least since the early ‘90s, is rather the result of a perfect storm of medical ignorance, corporate greed, poor public policy, personal irresponsibility, and yes, even moral failure on a societal level. It is equal parts physiologic, economic, political, and spiritual. We are the cause. We are responsible. There will be no pill, no vaccination that solves it all. There will be no single solution.

I’m not sure that Spay brings us any closer to resolution, but it can at least help foster the conversation.

American Lives Theatre’s production of Spay continues at Phoenix Theatre Cultural Centre through June 30. Ticket information can be found at phoenixtheatreorg.vbotickets.com/event/Spayby_Madison_Fiedler/100226.

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