Teens find a connection in Forward Theater’s ‘I and You’
Spend 90 minutes with two high school students while they prepare a school project featuring Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”? Watching grass grow might seem more alluring.
But don’t ever bet against playwright Lauren Gunderson or Madison’s formidable Forward Theater Company.
Gunderson’s “I and You” — which does indeed feature teens wrestling with Whitman — is among the chief reasons Gunderson will be the most produced playwright in the country this season after Shakespeare.
Having introduced Wisconsin to Gunderson in its 2015 production of “Silent Sky,” Forward is demonstrating anew through its beautiful, justopened production of “I and You” that there’s an elective affinity between Jennifer Uphoff Gray (director of both productions) and this gifted playwright.
At first blush, the plot seems predictable.
Bedridden, 17-year-old Caroline has a failing liver that not only keeps her out of school but also threatens to kill her if she doesn’t get a transplant. Fresh from playing in a high school basketball game, the popular Anthony shows up unannounced to work on a joint Whitman project. The two don’t even know each other; Anthony had volunteered for this collaboration.
Little wonder that Caroline, who is black, suspects she’s become the white Anthony’s pity project.
But as made movingly clear by Chantae Miller — a promising Milwaukee-based actor and Lake Country Lutheran junior — Caroline projects as prickly and defensive because she’s so vulnerable. She hides within social media because she hungers for connection, even though she’s afraid to either touch or feel. Sure she’ll be rejected, she pushes others away first.
Luckily for her, Alistair Sewell’s sensitive but seemingly guileless Anthony refuses to take Caroline’s periodic hints and leave the attic bedroom in which this play unfolds. He instead sings the virtues of Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” Most important, he explains why he loves Whitman, whose own love for his fellow creatures and all the world simply will not be denied.
Returning repeatedly to the glorious concluding section of Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Anthony underscores what Allen Ginsberg once said of these lines: Whitman “dissolves himself into you the listener, the reader,” as his poem becomes “a part of your consciousness.”
In sharing Whitman’s insistence that “every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you,” these two teens gradually learn to share with each other. Miller and Sewell exude trust; when Miller credibly travels Caroline’s long arc and finally lets Anthony in, what ensues is so intimately tender it steals one’s breath.
And that’s before we’ve even reached Gunderson’s brilliant eleventh-hour reveal, a gob smacker that left the Sunday matinee audience audibly gasping. It’s among the best and most satisfying moments I’ve had in a theater all year — for reasons that will become clear if you make the drive to Madison and see it for yourself.
“I and You” continues through Nov. 19 at the Overture Center, 201 State St., Madison. For tickets, visit forwardtheater.com. To read more about this production, visit TapMilwaukee.com.