The Keegan Theatre: Boy

"Boy" by Anna Ziegler is about a true story of a couple in rural Iowa who had twin boys in the late sixties.  As infants, one of the boys was emasculated in a medical procedure gone wrong.  Desperate, the couple reached out to a noted psychologist with a reputation for working with adults who were seeking gender reassignment surgery.  Before the wounded twin was a year old, the Dr. and parents decided to raise the child as a girl.  The play is about what happened after that.  It takes place on an idealized and simple stage with four chairs rearranged to signify different settings.  The scenes are short and move back and forth in time with time place determined by projections on the stage floor as actors assume their characters in different years over a period of 18 years.

There are five characters.  Doug and Trudy Turner and their daughter/son Samantha/Adam.  There is Adam's first girlfriend, Jenny Lafferty, and the psychologist, Dr. Wendell Barnes.  As you might image it's a rather intense play. Squeezed into 90 minutes, it is also a play with little excess ornamentation.  The lead role of the little "girl"/young man is played by John Jones.  John is gender non-binary and a senior studying at Catholic University.  They're a double major, one being theatre, and you might think it an enlightened move to cast a non-binary person in a role where they must jump between a confused and angry young man and a confused and angry little girl--who better to play both worlds?  But I dunno.  They held their own.  They didn't drop any lines.  They handled the angry moments very well.  Yet, they failed to rise to the role's full potential.  Something the majority of actors around them managed to more than compensate for.  The role of the Dr. Barnes went to Vishwas.  One name and no pronouns used in the program, I am pretty sure Vishwas identifies as male.  Another very competent performance.  He was exactly what you'd expect a psychologist to behave like.  No detraction from the play as a whole, but no surprises or nuance either.

The rest of the cast; however?  WOW!  Mike Kozemchak as Doug Turner was the epitome of the quiet, tormented yet loving father.  He so present with authenticity in his actions in his early scenes, that when he came to the characters apex moment with his adult son, it cause some eye leakage.  Karen Novack as Trudy Turner was stunning in her mastery of the dialogue wed to the rest of her presence in character--I was just excited to see what would come next every time she walked into a scene.  Yet, by degrees more, the star was Lida Maria Benson as Jenny, Adams adult girlfriend.  Like Karen's portrayal, I never doubted the authenticity of her character for a second.  She expressed a full range of emotions with both power and subtly exactly as they were needed.  In one scene, were John was engaged in a longish monologue with their character, Adam, I found watching her listen in the character of Jenny was so much more compelling.  Not because they were bad, but because she was that much better.

As usual, I enjoyed playing the pre-show voyeur.  The audience was atypically inter-generational.  I would say 30% - 50 and over, 40% - 30's-40's, 25% - 20's, and 5% children.  It's a small house, so we're talking maybe 8 kids, but still--I was impressed.  A catty gay couple of 20-somethings that sat to my right were not!  I fought every urge in me not to turn to them at one point and say, "You do realized that kids know a helluva lot more than even you did 15 years ago?"  But it stayed in my head.

On balance the power of the great performances outweighed that of the good, and I imagine this play will be remember come next season's Helen Hayes Awards.  It certainly should.