Another new play

Sunday evening, my friends Jim and Meredith and I went to the Kennedy Center to see a new play sponsored by the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. It was a busy night at the K.C., as we were competing with sold-out performances of The Lion King and the 210th anniversary concert of the U.S. Marine Band, and lost-looking people were everywhere! Fortunately, though, we were upstairs in the Terrace Theater, away from the bulk of the crowds.

The Terrace Theater is a nice, 500-seat, steeply-banked theater designed for more intimate performances of plays, chamber music, and other things not suited to the 2,000-plus seats of the three large houses downstairs. It was a bicentennial gift from Japan, and the design shows a calm Asian simplicity, with plain pink panels on the walls separated by gold-tone sound deflectors, and a full proscenium stage.

This particular play is called Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter. Written by Julie Marie Myatt, it premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival before coming to Washington for its first real theatrical production, having opened here on Saturday night.

Welcome Home is the story of a young woman (played by Gwendolyn Mulamba) returning home from service as a United States Marine in Iraq after having suffered devastating injuries there. She is having difficulty making the transition from soldier to veteran, and she doesn't quite know how to return to California to her mother and her two small children, fearing their rejection of her. At a bus station along the way, she meets Lou (Kate Mulligan), an eccentric, funny woman who takes Jenny to stay with her for a few days at Lou's home in a squatters' camp in the middle of the California desert called "Slab City." There, Jenny is able to interact with the other residents and make decisions about her future and her life.

It's a challenging topic. Certainly, it is a challenge to try to portray the emotions of returning soldiers after their traumatic experiences in the Middle East, and playwright Myatt wanted her work to focus on the viewpoint of a woman, not just be another masculine "war story."

The problem with Welcome Home is that it's a story about Lou, not Jenny. Lou is the only character with lots and lots of lines and scenes and with a fully developed character; we hardly got to know Jenny, let alone learn her feeling and emotions, or develop any real sense of sympathy for the character. About all Jenny does is sit or lie there while Lou chatters away. The war trauma aspect was demonstrated with the clichéd balloon pop that made Jenny tackle and "shelter" Lou from "danger," and the worry that no one would love her now that she's injured—both thoughts that have been used in any number of war stories from Iraq to Vietnam to Korea to World War II and probably every other war in history. I think Mulamba's understated performance did what it could with the part of Jenny, but the weakness was with the script. The world went on around Jenny who did little else but quietly sulk and watch things go by, yet we never looked into Jenny's soul or began to hear her thoughts, understand her motivations, or feel her pain.

Director Jessica Thebus also took a rather languid approach to the show, thinking, perchance that due to the short script (the play only ran 95 minutes in one act), she could afford lots of dead time and silence. While that may have worked at the beginning of the play when we spent a long time in silence watching Jenny change clothes on stage from her military fatigues to civilian clothing, by the time we're well into the play listening to the denizens of Slab City, those silences merely become awkward and I kept waiting for the prompter to step in.

One bright spot in the production is the lighting design, by Tony-nominated designer Allen Lee Hughes.

That's not to say there isn't merit in the play. It's going to have to have a serious script review and overhaul, though, keeping Lou's part where it is, and substantially fleshing out Jenny's character. What is it that makes this story unique to Iraq? What makes the experience and viewpoint uniquely feminine? There were also two potentially very interesting characters we met but hardly got to know, Hugo the bus station attendant, and Donald the cynical observer who seemed to have an interesting history of his own. Yes, it will require increasing the play to a two act production, but I think it's going to be a necessity to have any hope of conveying the play's message.

Welcome Home, Jenny Sutter runs through July 27.