To the chef, condiments
Mustard Tarragon Theatre
At the Tarragon Theatre, a play called Mustard. My condiments to the chef.
The title denotes a character clad mostly and appropriately in yellow, with a jester’s cap on top. He’s the imaginary friend of a girl called Thai, and he’s stuck around much longer than children’s imaginary friends usually do, in plays or in life. Thai is 16, and still talks to him. So, as Kat Sandler’s play progresses, does Thai’s mother Sadie, whose husband walked out a year ago, leaving Sadie a pill- popping alcoholic. Thai and Sadie fight a lot, with words, and Thai is violent in other ways; she has a track- record of attacking her schoolmates and leaving them with, we are told, bloodied faces. Both ladies could use a friend, and for the time being Mustard is the one they could use.
He needs them too. Unlike any other imaginary friend in fiction, Mustard isn’t all that imaginary. He isn’t exactly human either. He belongs to a species called boons: as in, presumably “boon companion” or “a boon and a blessing.” Boons are subject to rules, and Mustard has broken them by long outstaying what was meant to be his welcome. Two other boons are dispatched to drag him, kicking and literally screaming, from his refuge under Thai’s bed to the place where all superannuated boons go, the Boon Hollows. ( The author, who’s pretty hot on wordplay, has heroically refrained from calling it the Boon Docks.)
The play, under Ashlie Corcoran’s direction, unfolds on three unevenly distributed levels. The most successful is the most realistic, or shall we say the most domesticated: the feuding of the mother and daughter who would love to love one another but keep falling back on reciprocal resentment, pumped by the conflicted feelings they still have for their errant husband and father. Rebecca Liddiard burns through Thai’s teenage rage while mostly main- taining our sympathy and, remarkably, never exhausting our patience; she’s uncompromising and she’s lost. Paolo Santalucia is charming and funny as the older man (by four years) who gets her pregnant and who’s last seen with the bloodiest countenance she has yet inflicted; this doesn’t necessarily mean their relationship is over. As Sadie, Sarah Dodd is glorious, her face a conduit of deep desolation that blossoms into nervy incredulity when she meets her Mr. Mustard (who isn’t mean), and into wondrous joy as their relationship ripens and he invites her to go on a date: her first in years, his first ever. She never quite believes it’s happening, but she goes for it anyway, happy to be bemused.
Mustard himself is caught, not just between two worlds but between two styles. He’s meant to appeal to our feelings but he can’t, because we don’t believe in him. He’s broken the rules of his fictional species, and the play, try though it might, can’t invent a new system to supplant the old one, the one in which imaginary friends stay imaginary. What he does appeal to is our sense of humour; he’s well-meaning and observant, and he has an inquiring wit. He’s delightfully played by Anand Rajaram who, having charmingly shown us all these aspects, shows us some different ones in a brilliantly conceived near- final scene in which the author keeps us guessing while the actor keeps everybody hopping. Rajaram almost has us believing that the play has done what it needs and aspires to do: created its own mythology.
When we get to the third level, though, it’s clear that what we’re getting is not new myth but old whimsy. Whenever the two boon- catchers appear, the heart sinks: partly i n sympathy with Mustard, their destined prey, but mainly because as a duo, despite being perfectly decently acted, they feel so tired. One of them ( Tony Nappo) is rough, the other (Julian Richings) smooth: like the pairs of cross-talking hitmen who recur in Harold Pinter’s plays. They also have a strain of anxious pedantry, being much given to wondering whether certain words are actually one word or two. It seems to be a concern common to boons, as Mustard himself is ahead of them, pondering at his first appearance whether it’s “for ever” or “forever.” (No blame to him: it could be either.) The tic gets more creative when, told to “begone” he asks, very reasonably, “where should I bego?” The fizziest and deepest exchange, though, comes when he tells Sadie that “saying something makes it real” and she, with the bruised and tender wisdom of humanity, corrects him with “it’s true — for the moment.” That’s Sandler’s writing at its best, describing itself.
Mustard runs through March 13 at the Tarragon Extra Space
WHAT WE’RE GETTING IS NOT NEW MYTH BUT OLD WHIMSY