‘Sister Sorry’ owes audience apology
Nearly 30 years ago, The New Yorker published a story titled “The Confession” by Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer at the magazine for more than a dozen years at that point, who had become known for the style of his literary nonfiction and his wide-ranging subjects.
Published in October 1993, the story recounted conversations occurring over the preceding months between a conceptual artist who ran what he called the Apology Line, where callers were encouraged to leave recordings of their crimes, offenses and other transgressions, and a younger man who identified himself as Jumpin’ Jim and said he had killed his mother.
Unusual for a Wilkinson piece, “The Confession” is a bit of a slog. Most of its 10 pages are dedicated to transcripts of messages left by Jumpin’ Jim — one runs to a full two-thirds of a page of his ramblings — and of conversations between Jim and the artist, known in the piece only as Mr. Apology but later identified as Allan Bridge.
Almost 30 years later, Wilkinson has turned the story into a play, and it, too, is a slog. Worse, the remove of decades seems to have given Wilkinson so much time to ruminate on What It All Means that the play is pretentious in ways that the original was not.
Now receiving its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company with the title “Sister Sorry,” the two-character drama changes a few details, including the gender of the title character. (“Apology,” a 1986 HBO movie about Bridge’s project, made the same choice for the character.) But much of the original is intact, as if Wilkinson was unwilling to be ruthless in adapting himself while moving the material from page to stage.
Transcripts can be turned into theatrical dialogue, but, except in the case of those few whose extemporaneous speech is grandly eloquent or punchily poetic, the actual spoken word doesn’t usually make for engaging listening or viewing for an audience. That’s especially true in “Sister Sorry,” where windy monologues are interspersed with phone arguments, frequently angry, between Sister Sorry and Jack Flash, as he’s called in the play. Wilkinson may be able to point to Bridge’s transcripts and protest, “But that’s what they actually said,” to which a reasonable person who’s just sat through the play, which seems far longer than its 75-minute running time, would say, “Perhaps, but did you have to put so much of it in the play?”
Tacked on either side of the core of the story, as Sister Sorry tries to figure out if Jack Flash actually committed the crime, are a pair of monologues from her looking back after almost 30 years. During a combined 11 pages, Sister Sorry considers, in ways Bridge never could, having died two years after the events took place, the larger questions raised by the Apology Line and her own culpability.
She says, “As an artist I’m entitled to use the world and its thousandand-one things any way I care to, any trespass is permissible in pursuit of Art, right? But, really, on reflection, what am I an artist of ? Best case: spiritual renewal. Worse: the darker parts of the psyche, that nevertheless hold a kind of sway over me. And worser? A connoisseur of human misery, strangeness, and moral degradation. And proud of it.”
In a bewildering creation that seems wholly of Wilkinson’s doing, Sister Sorry is given a background in advanced mathematics, having pursued a PH.D. focused on the Collatz conjecture, which is relatively easy to explain, though I won’t try here, but is said to be “completely out of reach of present day mathematics.”
Well! What this has to do with whether a troubled 28-year-old really did off his mother or is just seeking attention, I don’t know. Nothing in Bridge’s biography suggests he was interested in math of this sort. Instead, it seems more likely to have come from Wilkinson’s own preoccupations: A New Yorker piece he published in March is headlined “What is mathematics?,” and its second paragraph includes 27 declarative sentences trying to answer the title question.
It’s not clear that “Sister Sorry” in its present form, with two characters who never meet in person circling the stage and shouting into the air, could have been saved. Barrington Stage deployed its considerable resources, including one of the company’s very best directors, Joe Calarco (“Ragtime,” “Breaking the Code”), and expertly effective sound and lighting by David Bundries and David Lander, respectively.
The actors, with Christopher Sears as Jack Flash and Jennifer Van Dyck as Sister Sorry, don’t fare any better. Neither seems to have figured out their character in a way that makes the person accessible or believable to the audience; she tells us she once was a professional shoplifter who spirited away a power drill by hanging it from a fishhook sewn into her coat lining and made art by throwing rocks through office windows, neither of which we believe for a second, and he seems generically unhinged and pathetic in ways we’ve seen done better multiple times a season on all of the “Law & Order” shows.
The verdict: An apology is due to anyone who sits through “Sister Sorry.”