Theater: Renaissance performs ‘Luna Gale.’
Caroline Cox, the fiftysomething veteran social worker at the heart of playwright Rebecca Gilman’s “Luna Gale,” has barely arrived in a hospital waiting room before she looks at 19-year-old parents Karlie and Peter and asks how long they’ve been smoking meth.
Just after that, Caroline tells both teens that it’s she herself who decides when they get to see their own daughter. Soon after that, we see Caroline arrange for their baby girl — Luna Gale — to be placed with Karlie’s mother, Cindy. Shortly after that, Caroline is trying to return Luna to her birth parents, after convincing herself that Cindy’s religion trumps Cindy’s concern for the baby.
That’s just for starters, as Milwaukee will see for itself in a Renaissance Theaterworks production of “Luna Gale” beginning Jan. 20, under Mary MacDonald Kerr’s direction.
The cast includes Marques Causey and April Paul as the two young parents and Laura Gray as Cindy, alongside Matt Daniels, David Sapiro and Solana Ramirez-Garcia. Tami Workentin plays Caroline.
“There are so many things in this story that absolutely took me by surprise, and that’s really exciting,” the 55-year-old Workentin said, during a post-rehearsal discussion at the Broadway Theatre Center. “And the surprises are believable.”
It’s not giving too much away to reveal that one of those surprises involves Caroline’s willingness to bend the rules in the hope of achieving the end she wants: returning baby Luna to her birth parents — even though, as Workentin pointed out, the odds of either parent beating a meth addiction are slim.
“Everything about the system is broken,” Workentin said, noting that Caroline is supposed to have 13 cases and instead has nearly 90. “That’s part of why she starts working the system. She also sees herself in Karlie. The ends for her justify the means. I think there’s going to be a lot of conversation in the lobby regarding how people feel about her.”
And not just her. Peter and Karlie may smoke meth, but they clearly love their baby girl. Cindy and her pastor may have an agenda, but they’re not bad people. Cliff, Caroline’s boss, is a careerist with a bureaucrat’s mentality. But with him, too, there turns out to be more than initially meets the eye.
“If you don’t end up in this play really feeling for and liking all of these characters, we’ll have teetered too far one way or the other,” Workentin said.
“And if every actor in this play doesn’t hit some raw point, we haven’t done it justice,” Workentin continued. “If we don’t all go to the ugly place, the uncomfortable place, we’re not telling the story. Then it’s just a play. This one should hit you between the eyes.”
It’s not lost on Workentin that Gilman’s play may pack even more of a punch now, in the wake of November’s election and potential further cutbacks in social services that are already stretched too thin. “Even ‘The Foreigner’ resonates differently now,” Workentin said, speaking with regard to the recently concluded Milwaukee Repertory Theater production of Larry Shue’s play.
But whatever its political relevance, “Luna Gale” ultimately succeeds because it tells a good tale. Workentin began our conversation by focusing on Gilman’s storytelling; she returned to this theme as we were wrapping up.
“Especially in the theater right now, things can be so formulaic. I get so bored with it. This play isn’t that. It’s a good story, and it’s going to bring up some interesting issues,” she said, referring particularly to Caroline. “Every one of us has crossed funky lines in our lives. Survival is funny. It brings out and brings up behavior you never recognized or knew.”