A pit stop in the 'Milwaukee' of the mind

Kerry Silva is a New Hampshire playwright. You need to know this, not because Milwaukee is about New Hampshire, but because it is a play that addresses the geography of America and the myths that rise out of it. Silva does not write for a regional audience, but she is intensely aware of the importance of place. The places in Milwaukee are elusive—many scenes play in highway cars and long-distance phone booths. As the same piece of floor adopts one identity after another, it becomes clear that these places are important mainly as they exist in the minds of the characters.

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH "Hey. Where you headed?"

The places that matter to these characters turn out to be New York City and Milwaukee, Wis. Tucker, played by Chris Burke, MC '03, is 26 years old and has been working in the same convenience store for over 15 years. His "boyos" have moved away from the New York neighborhood that they grew up in, leaving Tucker in a state of suspended animation. Desperate to break away, he borrows his brother's car and finds himself following a woman he doesn't know for four days on the highway, ending up in Milwaukee.

The slides which introduce many scenes influence the audience's sense of place. Photographer Danica Novgorodoff, SY '02, casts Milwaukee as a stop along the road. Scene changes are covered by countless images of bridges, roadsigns, tunnels, and gas stations. The pair of twilight images that lead into the play's final scene provides one of this production's strongest moments. The sun setting over the highway suggests both rest and movement, and defines as clearly as anything in the play the myth Tucker is following when he goes to Milwaukee.

Novgorodoff's street level images of New York establish that the city they call "The City" is just as mythic as the road they call The Road. Even before the name is spoken, New York is instantly recognizable in these black and white images. Silva's New York embraces opposing images of urban life. Scenes of Tucker and his friends at 18 portray a close-knit neighborhood. Tucker's mother, played by Jackie Sibblies, DC '03, describes her street with a sort of Wednesday-night-is-Prince-spaghetti-night romanticism. Tucker's brother Ralph, however, embodies a different New York. Jackson Loo, DC '02, makes a gutsy and rewarding choice to play the adult Ralph as obnoxious, self-centered, and unrelentingly abrasive. He spends the play's first scene abusing his brother for stealing his car, and despite the difficulty Tucker has caused him, it might be impossible to sympathize with a character as loud as Ralph if we could not see that this is the way Ralph's job as a banker and his experience of New York has taught him to deal with people. His is a city of car horns, stubborn customers, and muggers on the subway.

Silva's script is aggressively cinematic, and on reading it I actually wondered if it wouldn't make more sense as a film. Erika MacDonald's, SY '02, staging of the play, however, emphasizes one aspect of the play's structure that is specific to the theater. The action begins with a divided stage picture as the two brothers talk on the phone. They are far enough apart that you can't watch them both at once. As the play progresses, characters grow even more isolated from one another, culminating in one scene in which the lighting, by Daisuke Nonaka, SM '02, bumps from one character to another, never pausing for more than a few lines, and more powerfully in a scene where Tucker and Molly, the woman he follows, drive in their separate cars, their simultaneous monologues overlapping into chaos. The effect is heightened by the contrast between Burke's Tucker, whose stoic brooding thinly disguises his desperation, and Maria-Elena Kolovos's, PC '02, relatively carefree Molly. Molly is enjoying the chase, and her expectations are small. She is not caught up, as Tucker is, in the mythologizing of the places they drive through, and perhaps this acceptance of reality is the escape she offers him. Betty Wolf, BR '01, wonderfully costumes Kolovos in a worn souvenir t-shirt commemorating "Bourbon Street, New Orleans: the birthplace of jazz."

These divided scenes are contrasted with the warm comedy of Tucker and his boyos, nine years earlier. The division of the stage creates an increasing tension, a desire to see the stage as a single place, which is resolved in the final scene. However, though the play resolves its formal tensions, it does not settle for a simple resolution of Tucker's conflicts. MacDonald's production presents the play clearly, without narrowing the complexities and ambiguities of the script, making for a thoughtful and thought-provoking performance.

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