Father-son duo excel during play at Barrington Stage
A young man, his eyes destroyed and hands amputated after an attack by a crazed co-worker at a Navy shipyard in 1945, sits on a bed in a Long Island hospital. He can still see, he insists — not perfectly, but at least a bit — and his hands are intact. Why does his doctor keep saying otherwise?
The exploration of the gray-matter areas between simple delusion and protective imagination after a trauma in the 2016 play “Chester Bailey,” by Emmy Award-winning writer Joseph Dougherty (“thirtysomething”), would be profound and beautiful at any time. Right now, as we emerge from the pandemic and venture back to the theater, they are also stunningly resonant.
Understanding this, Barrington Stage Company has reunited the father-son team of Reed and Ephraim Birney, who first performed the two-character “Chester Bailey” in West Virginia in 2019, with their director for that production, Ron Lagomarsino. To be in a professional theater again with appreciative fellow audience members would be welcome almost regardless of what’s on the stage. That it is “Chester Bailey” — deeply sad, richly complex, nuanced in its understanding of human frailty and resilience
— feels like a gift for everyone, on both sides of the footlights.
The younger Birney plays the title character, who as the play opens is already in the hospital. We learn that his parents arranged for the shipyard job to stop him from being drafted, believing that keeping him out of military service would keep him safe. Instead, he’s been horrifically injured, and he spends the play confined to a hospital room, designated by a simple bed, table and wheelchair at the side of a magnificent set by Beowulf Boritt. Known to BSC audiences for his eye-popping set for BSC’S “The Pirates of Penzance” five years ago, complete with a ship extending into the audience, Boritt here creates a tall, deep set that gives the illusion of a long room receding into the distance, at once evocative of a hospital, the inside of a ship’s hull and Manhattan’s old Pennsylvania Station.
While we understand instinctively why Bailey’s brain protects him from the reality of his situation, the doctor, played by the elder Birney, explains it: “Chester was creating a visible world for himself.
We all do it. We get raw information through the eyes, but it’s the brain that interprets what we see. Chester’s brain was doing that without the benefit of actual visual information.” In other words, he tricked himself into believing he could see, which prompts the doctor to wonder, “Why aren’t there intense debates about the imagination? Where does it come from, what is its purpose?”
The doctor considers such questions, and more importantly whether his obligation as a medical professional means “curing” Bailey by shattering his illusion, regardless of the further psychological damage it would cause. Meanwhile, Bailey, in his room, relates his preinjury life, of nights out dancing with a girl he liked and a chance encounter with a captivating redhead with a Southern lilt who sold him a newspaper at Pennsylvania Station.
Though the characters’ lines are interspersed, for most of the play they tell their stories independently, interacting directly only in the final quarter of the 90-minute running time. It’s a challenging conceit, but the combination of the writing, direction and cumulative power of the Birneys’ acting — they are astounding together, particularly in Ephraim’s most emotional scene — makes it work, to remarkable effect.
This is true theater: the evocation of people and the world they live in. It’s complete and, though fictional, completely real.