The Shakes’
brilliant production of “The Luckiest People” makes the everyday compelling, Matthew J. Palm writes.
A cloud of sadness hangs over “The Luckiest People,” the final mainstage production in Orlando Shakespeare Theater’s season.
It’s not just that, as the story opens, the matriarch of the Hoffman family has died. Her husband, Oscar, and their children, Richard and Laura, are understandably grieving. But playwright Meridith Friedman and director Kristin Clippard beautifully capture the melancholy in these characters’ souls.
It’s that pang you get in the wee hours of the morning when a little voice whispers in your head, “Is this how you thought your life would turn out?”
“The Luckiest People,” which had a staged reading at the Shakes’ 2015 PlayFest, tackles the years when adults find themselves responsible not only for partners and children, but aging parents as well. Oscar resides in an assisted-living facility. He hobbles with the help of a cane, and his eyesight is fading swiftly. There’s a prickliness in his relationship with his son so his surprise plan to move in with Richard and his boyfriend, David, leaves the younger Hoffman aghast.
The show has more talking than action, and conversations are ordinary — why are there only two kinds of bagels for breakfast? — until deeper issues come to the fore. As seen at a preview performance, Clippard’s actors make the everyday consistently interesting and effortlessly lift the inconsequential to the compelling.
Alexander Mrazek radiates goodness as David, the outsider among the family. He makes it easy to see why everyone opens up to him, and his own heartbreak is devastating. J.D. Sutton physically and mentally brings sad, angry, confused Oscar to life in a sharply etched portrait.
Steven Lane has the trickiest role as Richard, who keeps things bottled up. Lane handles this emotional distance deftly, with jolting flashes of a frightened child inside the tightly wound man, though it sometimes feels as if he’s holding back from the audience as well.
And Suzanne O’Donnell puts a delightful human streak in flighty Laura, as she comes to realize she’s missing something from her life.
“The Luckiest People” caps a particularly strong season for Orlando Shakespeare Theater, which demonstrated it can excel in multiple genres: comedy (“Native Gardens” and “The Hound of the Baskervilles”), romance (“Shakespeare in Love”), musicals (“Man of La Mancha” ) and Shakespeare (a thrilling interpretation of “Twelfth Night.”)
This play doesn’t shine as brightly as those bigger and bolder shows. But its quietness has a way of grabbing your heart.