My overall impression
RICHARD ADAMS, The World Socialist Website (posted soon)
Written by company member Paul Elliott and his husband Ed Boswick, Gentle Passage is an hour-long two-hander featuring Gary Rubenstein and Rachel Boller. Structured as a series of blackout scenes, Gentle Passage tells the story of Joe, an aging gay man who has enrolled in an Alzheimer’s study conducted by Anna, a callously abrasive UCLA research fellow. Anna’s just been dumped from a deep-pocket ADHD study and forced to take on what is clearly a second-tier project backed by a pharmaceutical company that’s testing a new Alzheimer drug. Anna isn’t at all shy about indulging her resentment at having to deal with these “old people” and forced to work out of a small room in the Hollywood LGBT Center.
At first, it’s not clear whether Joe actually suspects that he’s experiencing the first stages of dementia or if he just volunteered to earn the participation fee. Anna initially treats him with all the courtesy and care she’d give a recalcitrant lab rat. But as the weekly clinical interviews proceed, Joe’s nightmarish backstory begins to emerge: a sexual history that began when he was a child, with partners ranging from an older brother, male strangers, and his own schizophrenic mother. Played with a disarming childish sweetness by Gary Rubenstein, Joe doesn’t see any of these sexual encounters as abusive and accepts the horrible events of his life with the blithe acceptance of a naif. Anna, the “objective” professional, is horrified. The more she learns, the more she begins to care. There’s a question of whether Joe’s problems arise from psychological blocks, what he calls his “black outs,” or if, like his mother, he too is schizophrenic, or if, in fact, he is indeed in the early stages of Alzheimer’s – or some toxic brew of all three. We track Joe’s gradual deterioration through his weekly memory tests. The moment when Joe is no longer able to place blocks in their appropriate holes, and now sympathetic Anna, overwhelmed by a desperate hope that Joe is not falling through the Alzheimer rabbit-hole, places the blocks for him, marks the turning point in this deeply moving play. It’s heartbreaking. Suspecting that Joe is part of control group receiving a placebo, she tangles futile with project’s corporate bosses to get what Joe calls “the good stuff.” A critique of Big Pharma’s exploitation of the vulnerable to fuel its profit-driven enterprise is implicit. The play ends with Anna abandoning her role as clinician and becoming Joe’s sole nursemaid.
Elliott and Joswick’s play has clearly been edited from its full-length form to fit the one-hour time slot, a compression that harms the play only in its final scenes. While one appreciates the commercial allure for playwrights to write two-handers for a theatre world that finds downsizing of cast-size increasingly attractive, Anna’s “scenes” with her unseen advisor/boss (with whom she had a calculated affair) are covered in one-sided phone calls. I, for one, ached to witness these emotionally and narratively complex scenes as face-to-face encounters, even if it meant adding a third actor. Yet, all in all, Gentle Passage is one of the first jewels to be discovered in the Festival’s happy clutter.
