Solstice

Last weekend I saw John Crutchfield's new play in Asheville, Solstice. It's about two twenty-somethings, one of whom lives in a horrible apartment (where the play takes place). His downstairs neighbor, "Sparky", is a crack whore, though costumed in Limited Too, etc., etc., a few other creepy details. Our introduction to Sparky is the moment one of the male friends hears her having a hyena-like orgasm through the thin walls. But instead of the actress actually making the hyena sounds or whatever, we only get mugging from the guys and a lot of lines about how impressed and disgusted and intrigued they are at this unbelievable noise.

This play was supposed to the The Magnetic Theater's first attempt at realism. A few things earlier in the play struck me as failing this attempt. Their in-house lighting designer, whose other work I have absolutely enjoyed heretofore (witty lighting--heck, noticably positive lighting--seems a significant accomplishment in itself [attn designers: I do not mean to discredit your work!]), amplified a fist fight in the very first scene with a strobe. You're not fooling anyone! Strobes don't happen in real life!

But beyond these inconsistencies, the whole thing had a really smooth, interesting flow. The Sparky character was very well drawn and beautifully acted, but I was concerned by our introduction, which seemed unfair in two ways:

1) Hypersexualizes before we get a chance to meet her, then there is so much extra effort needed to explain her hypersexualization in a worthwhile way

2) Why deprive us? If you're going to make an introduction to a character that's two guys reacting with extreme facial gymnastics over this hyena orgasm, why are we not invited? Why is the actress playing Sparky not invited?

My friend Monica has this great story (that I will likely misrecall here) about presenting an idea to a writing instructor where the most incredible sight happens in the next room (I think it was talking dolphins revealing the meaning of life or something). The audience emerges in absolute intellectual and spiritual ecstasy, their lives changed forever by what they've just seen. Her instructor's reaction was something like "that's idiotic. Just put the dolphins on stage."

So which play would I rather see?

My full review, posted where it is safe from edits:

"Every playwright wishes the back of their file cabinet looked as good as John Crutchfield’s. It is hard to believe that his latest potent, heartwrenching piece, Solstice, now in its second weekend at the Magnetic Theater, ever had a humble beginning.

The Magnetic Theater, known throughout town (and, progressively, throughout the region) for producing exclusively original work of excellent quality, has been fostering Solstice for some time now. When the Field’s team began developing work in 2009, Artistic Director Steven Samuels demanded the full body—even the so-called dregs—of each artistic associate’s work. “He said, ‘show me everything you’ve written,’ so I pulled this from the back of the file cabinet,” humbly says Crutchfield, who also directed the production. What began as a one-act student show at Appalachian State has been workshopped several times since the theater’s birth in late 2010, and now boasts an ensemble and design team that have turned what Crutchfield calls “a tense little play” into a truly powerful, committed, and important production.

Solstice is smart and true and painfully good.  The Magnetic’s first concerted effort at realism, it tilts fearlessly towards the darkest spaces of the psyche. “I was bothered by some questions,” Crutchfield says of developing the piece, “can one remake oneself? Can one really change?” For a playwright, and a theatre, whose work has heretofore been characterized by the whimsical, the highly theatricalized, and, at times, the ridiculous, Solstice is a daring and incisive straight answer.

The play concerns three twenty-somethings caught, on the shortest night of the year, in a run-down apartment in a southern metropolis. Innocently enough, it explores the transitioning friendship between Carlton (Scott Fisher) and Eugene (Glenn Reed), but the unspeakable boils blackly right underneath the skin of this remarkable piece. Characterizing the bile of Solstice with astonishing nuance is Lisa Smith as Sparky, “a nice kid and a crack whore” who lives in the apartment downstairs.

And such an unsuspecting skin! Each of the three good-looking white kids who, with a shower and slight change of costume, could walk comfortably onto the set of “Glee”, we find plagued (with immediacy, and poetry, and gorgeous execution now expected of Crutchfield’s writing) with gruesome predicaments. Crutchfield is, in his own characters’ words, a bit of a “Socrates getting busy,” juxtaposing a rigorous catechization of human character with the more immediate concerns of a good pizza and/or a good lay.  “I wanted to show a rational approach to life alongside its irrational undercurrents,” Crutchfield says. Throughout the work, Crutchfield succeeds in weighing the quotidian laments of his young characters (a girlfriend who has decamped in favor of a “Kerouac-O” cross-country trip, bad cell reception, no groceries in sight) against layered moments of inconceivable repugnance.

This tension plays out most subtly in the minutiae of direction and acting as well. Eugene at one point declares a vehement hatred for Carlton’s music while he sits down for more; he deftly delivers the looming question regarding Sparky: “how can a hippy chick be fake?” Glenn Reed is quite moving in this incredible role. The actor’s boyishness plays well—so well that Reed could do much less and still be successful. Fisher’s is a superlative performance as Carlton, and Crutchfield’s humor oozes from his delivery, cadence and posture. It’s worth reiterating Smith’s talents, which exceed her years and do justice to the intense and finely-crafted Sparky.

My single qualm with Solstice concerns the theater’s apparent lack of confidence in this break from their previous work. The Magnetic promised of Solstice “Fisticuffs! Strange noises! A wooden sword! A Darth Vader mask! The return of the repressed! An attractive girl wearing an apron and little else!” and in so doing catalogued precisely the production’s weakest moments. Smith, for instance, is indubitably attractive in her cake-baking habiliments, but Sparky’s story is crippling and Smith’s ability to tell it beautiful, so why rob focus? Crutchfield needn’t have injected the absurd into Solstice’s richest moments: they are, after all, abundantly rich. A handful of unwelcome glimmers of misogyny and gaggy reliance on properties betray the wisdom and maturity of the theater being made and discredit the audience’s ability to understand—and enjoy themselves during—a stripped-down display of human truth.

As this was a swing at realism, I did question the marriage of deft technical naturalism (the sound and glow of the city culled from the black as Carlton cracks a window) to the hyperbolic-imaginative that we have come to expect of the theater’s work (out-of-place strobe lights and heavy metal to open the show). Call me a purist, but I think this project would have greatly benefited from sound and lighting that more thoughtfully reflected the—dare I say it—normalcy of Crutchfield’s words. Such inconsistencies suggest that there is still work to be done, but without doubt, Solstice is tremendously successful. Moreover, it is a significant moment for Crutchfield, and proves, perhaps for the first time, that the Magnetic Theater is a sound home for this level of seriousness. This finely designed and beautifully structured play closes February 4^th, and it would be a shame to miss it."