RTW’s ‘Luna Gale’ is ambitious, relevant
Actors in key roles strong
“We’re idiots,” 19-yearold Peter (Marques Causey) says, in Renaissance Theaterworks just-opened production of Rebecca Gilman’s “Luna Gale,” under Mary MacDonald Kerr’s direction. “We’re stupid,” 19year-old Karlie (April Paul) agrees. “But we’re not bad.”
We’ve all been there, staring down dumb decisions that don’t reflect our best selves.
But this utterly lost couple’s stupidity involves a meth addiction; as a result they’ve neglected and thereby endangered the health of their baby daughter, Luna Gale. They’re making their case as parents to Caroline (Tami Workentin), the beleaguered social worker responsible for placing Luna with Karlie’s mother, the evangelically Christian Cindy (Laura Gray).
Causey and Paul — two of the brightest young stars in Milwaukee theater and both doing excellent work here — leave no doubt that Peter and Karlie are madly in love with their baby girl. But is it enough? Particularly when Paul so persuasively suggests that Karlie doesn’t even love herself? And when Causey’s Peter suggests a cowed and forlorn puppy?
For all the no-nonsense toughness Workentin projects in the play’s early scenes — as a 25-year veteran who has seen it all and learned long ago to leave her emotions out of it — Caroline clearly wants to answer “yes.” As we’ll see, she’s even willing to bend the rules to get her way.
Part of what drives Caroline is her dislike for Cindy and her pastor (a well-meaning but insufferably righteous Matt Daniels).
Caroline is also driven by her aversion to her boss (a smug and bullying David Sapiro), a careerist more concerned with his budget than kids. He’s written as a borderline caricature, in a play where most of Gilman’s characters are more rounded.
But Caroline also wants to say “yes” to Peter and Karlie because she has a big heart; we watch her keep tabs on onetime cases like Lourdes (a heartbreaking Solana Ramirez-Garcia), even after they turn 18 and leave the system. And, finally, Caroline wants to say “yes” because she sees more than a little of herself in Karlie, for reasons I can’t fairly disclose.
There’s much about this play that can’t be disclosed, given numerous twists in its plot. Not all of them are convincing or even necessary; time spent on evangelical Christianity as an antidote to state-sponsored social work, for example, is a distraction.
Still, I’ll always plunk for an ambitious and socially relevant play about the down and out like “Luna Gale” over much of the safer, more boring fare clogging Milwaukee stages.
Caroline is among the most memorable of the many Gilman heroines trying to make sense of a morally complex world they never made. Workentin offers a compelling, credible account of why this overworked and overwhelmed woman carries on, trying to save one more child while despairing that far too many need her.