The review in
The New York Times. In the picture, Davy (Kevin Sebastian), left, performs a magic trick for Sarah (Meredith Napolitano) and Jim (Rusty Ross) in “Sick,” by Zayd Dohrn.
Memories of my Aunt Roy’s apartment in the Bronx flashed through my mind when I saw the stage setting of “Sick,” Zayd Dohrn’s prickly new play receiving a stellar production at New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch. Plastic sheeting adorns both sofa and club chair, and the bare floors scream out for cover.
But while Aunt Roy kept her furniture under wraps and her carpets rolled up under the bed because she still wasn’t sure, 15 years after buying them, that they were keepers, Maxine, the control-freak, über-mother of this loony contemporary household, has another agenda.
Committed to protecting her two home-schooled teenage children from the contaminants and allergens in the outside “cesspool” of a world, she has created a cocoonlike environment in their antiseptic New York City brownstone that would make the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention proud. Plastic sheeting also covers the windows; air purifiers and filters hum softly in the corners; and a bucket
filled with clean water sits at the ready to wash off any dirt accidentally brought in from outside. Everyone’s dressed in white scrubs, and face masks are de rigueur.
Mr. Dohrn — he is the son of Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, the former Weather Underground members, and spent his early childhood on the run with them — was living in Beijing during the height of the SARS epidemic when he wrote this rather heavy-handed dark comedy. “Sick” suggests another play in which a suffocating mother in extremis creates a prison for her children, “The Glass Menagerie,” by Tennessee Williams. Maxine, played here with an excess of histrionics by Liz Zazzi, brings to mind the overbearing Amanda Wingfield. Maxine’s two children, Sarah and Davy, are stand-ins (though of the opposite sex) for Tom, the aspiring writer and duty-bound son in “Menagerie,” and Laura, his crippled, emotionally challenged sister.
All hell breaks loose when a gentleman caller named Jim (even the name is the same) arrives at the house for a post-tennis schmooze with his grad school mentor, Sidney (who is also Maxine’s husband and the father of Sarah and Davy, and is played with warmth and a boundless integrity by Jim Shankman). Meredith Napolitano is lovely as Sarah, the steadfast, brilliant young poet yearning to accept the college scholarship she has just received after surreptitiously applying.
Kevin Sebastian captures perfectly the fragility and pathos of Davy, who is prone to anaphylactic shock and whose gruesome response to Sid’s desperate effort to debunk the allergy “myth” that paralyzes the household ends Act I in a bloody fury.
As Jim, Rusty Ross becomes the interlocutor, bringing some solace to various members of the family, and to Sarah in particular, by his mere presence and calming vocal exchanges. Mr. Ross is wonderful in this role; in one beautifully realized scene, he and Ms. Napolitano have a discussion about the role of an abnormal childhood in predicting genius that segues into a burgeoning mutual infatuation.
Benjamin Endsley Klein has directed ably, yet no amount of effort on his part or on that of the fine cast can keep Mr. Dohrn’s work from seeming melodramatic and rather transparent. With the Krebs family gyrating between appearing genuinely ill and simply in the thrall of a rather screwy mother, it’s hard to feel much sympathy. Like Davy’s magic tricks, this family’s angst strikes one as more illusion than reality.
“Sick,” at New Jersey Repertory Company, 179 Broadway, Long Branch, through March 15. Information: (732) 229-3166 or njrep.org.
The review in The New York Times. In the picture, Davy (Kevin Sebastian), left, performs a magic trick for Sarah (Meredith Napolitano) and Jim (Rusty Ross) in “Sick,” by Zayd Dohrn.