City’s dynamo cast powers up bleak ‘Downstairs’
It’s a plausible enough situation: a dissatisfied, irresolute woman of middle age; her eccentric, possibly paranoid, brother holed up in her basement; and her irritated husband, looming unseen upstairs.
But this situation at City Theatre isn’t just what it seems. What verges on the banal turns narratively unstable: Whose point of view are we to believe? What’s factual, let alone true? Gradually, that basement thrums with menace, like the unsettling world of early Harold Pinter.
It’s “Downstairs,” itself a banal title with darker implications, by Theresa Rebeck, no slouch herself in the destabilizing point of view department.
The physical setting is solidly familiar, though, which may be one reason everything seems at first so
plausible that its oddities are mainly funny. It’s just an ordinary basement. I don’t think master set designer Tony Ferrieri has ever been in ours, but he must have been working from stolen photos, because I recognize every detail, from the cluttered workbench to the old commode in the corner, from naked light bulbs to dusty golf clubs.
Meanwhile, up above there’s a ghostly glimpse of a cellar door and indications of eaves or flights of stairs that I swear began to look like teeth, and not in a friendly way.
The story also starts off seeming simple enough: The brother, Teddy, just needs a temporary haven while he gets some big project together (we have our doubts), while his nervous older sister, Irene, wants to shelter him. There’s also a skeletal backstory about inheritance, perhaps more unsettling because so incomplete.
The only hint of what you might call a plot is in Irene’s fear of her hubby, Gerry. Oh, there’s also this supposedly dead computer, which might hide something — as of course it does, in a variant of the old theatrical truism that if you show a gun in Act 1 it’s going to be put to use in Act 3. Come to think of it, there are also all those old tools lying around, with their own fearsome potential.
Still, the real heart of the matter is Teddy and Irene. They and their relationship are what absorb us.
By the way, I might have gotten to this point in my review sooner, but in this I just mirror the play, which could easily lose 10 or 15 minutes itself in getting past the obviousness of situation and place to where the drama flares up.
Because it’s the people who matter, it’s fortunate that the strength of City’s production is a deeply capable cast well able to handle Rebeck’s language, which makes quasi-poetry out of the everyday. In retrospect, we realize that the repetition and slow build have forced us to listen for nuance and piece the story together for ourselves, waiting for the time bomb to go off when Gerry finally appears and plot catches up to character.
So what is the play all about? I’m just a theater critic, not an op-ed columnist, but I’d say for all the sly humor it’s a pretty bleak picture of where we stand in 2020.
We like Irene and Teddy, certainly, now more, now less, as the situation fleshes itself out, but their dysfunction is just plain glum. Then Gerry, who might remind you of Donald Trump without the charm, expounds his haircurling view of humanity, and judging by the world news each day, how can we deny that what he says is true?
The flashiest role — because it’s the most robust and mysterious — is Teddy, and it meets its match in Martin Giles, who relishes every quaver and assertion, every cackle and U-turn. The most frustrating role must be Helena Ruoti’s Irene, because she has to bank her fires for so long, serving up easy lobs for Giles to score. But the juiciest line-for-line is John Shepard’s Gerry, where a great deal is packed into relatively little stage time.
It’s a wizard trio, all three former Post-Gazette Performers of the Year. And it’s no surprise that it’s directed by City’s artistic director Marc Masterson, who as the theater’s boss has very appropriately given himself the best possible cast, backed by superior design work — not just Ferrieri’s self-effacing set but also Steve Shapiro’s sound and Brian Lilienthal’s lights, which heighten the menace in subtle ways.
I call the play bleak. Some may differ — it does end with a glimpse of hope that you might even turn into an affirmative moral. And bleakness is relative. The transforming art of playwright and performance can make even stark reality seem oddly affirmative.