Groping through the 'Mud' for an explanation

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Three's a crowd for Malbin, Vershbow, and Posnett.

Yet, while the characters move us individually, the production as a whole fails to deliver the wrenching climax it promises. From the start, Mae (Kim-Thu Posnett, MC '99) works fiercely to rid herself of the poverty and ignorance she's always known. She's going to school, learning reading and arithmetic, ironing shirts for extra money; she's determined to die clean, "in a hospital." Henry (Ben Vershbow, BR '01) is, in Mae's eyes, just the kind of person she wants to be: literate and "not base." She invites him into her home and tells him she loves him in an attempt to keep close the man who inspires her and "makes her feel smart." Lloyd (David Malbin, SY '01) is not so inspired: once Mae's lover, he can't read, write, or understand why he's been kicked out of the bedroom and sent to sleep on the kitchen floor. He blurts out that Henry "came here only to take things from me." Mae cares for both men, trying not to see Henry's baseness while protecting Lloyd from his own desperate violence.

"I know some things that I've never learned," Mae tells Henry, "and I don't know what to call them." The play progresses in short intervals separated by pauses, as if grappling with the same problem: how to express the laws of need and compassion that Mae understands but can't articulate. As Mae is driven closer to despair—"Everything turns bad for me," she tells herself near the play's end—the succession of segments quickens in pace and intensity. Some pauses seem a mere beat, a realization, while others seem to be longer separations bridging days and months. In this production, however, the gaps are treated uniformly: they're brief, frozen moments that want to convey more than is possible in just a sustained glance or pose. These problems in timing thwart an accelerating momentum that would otherwise provide the final scene's required punch. Speeding up most of the transitions would increase the production's intensity.

There's still plenty of intensity, though, in the interaction of the characters. Some moments of dialogue are heartbreakingly stark: Lloyd's desperate attempts to make Henry notice him, or Henry's insecure pleas for Mae's affection, or Mae's groping attempts to explain memory and wisdom. Mae, of course, is at the very center of Mud, and the breadth of Posnett's portrayal convinces us of both her optimism and regret. Posnett gets more and more comfortable as the play progresses: some odd pacing and inflections at the start—which make Mae more pathetic than she needs to be—are soon resolved.

Posnett's also a wonderfully graceful actress; she conveys Mae's inarticulate weariness with a slouch or a shrug, her fragile delight in a clasping of hands, and her growing repulsion to Henry in a mute stiffness. Malbin's Lloyd is equally expressive in his physicality. Too mentally limited to understand what is happening to him, he recoils from Henry and Mae and awkwardly tries to demonstrate his strength and sexual power in bursts of destructive energy. And Vershbow, in perhaps the show's most difficult role, is extraordinary. At first a pompous, strutting know-it-all ("What would be the use of knowing things," he asks Mae, "if they didn't serve you?"), Henry gradually realizes the leveling forces of love, lust, and physical weakness and is finally crippled by his own arrogance. By his last, desperate scenes with Mae, we don't know whether we ought to pity Henry or loathe him.

Some of these confrontations are marred by their staging: Posnett has to deliver several of her best lines upstage, Malbin and Vershbow are occasionally trapped in improbable positions while conversing with each other, and certain entrances and exits are awkward. Yet a good bit of audience discomfort is effective. Director Kimberly Jannarone, DRA '99, encourages her audience to sit on the floor, right next to the "stage," and Justin Beal's, CC '01, gorgeous set is intimate enough to make that proximity unsettling. The claustrophobia of the space makes the play's tragedy seem more inevitable. "There's nothing I can do and there's nothing you can do and there's nothing Lloyd can do," Mae tells Henry. Mud proves her right, as even her most desperate attempts to escape fail.

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