‘Secret Hour’ premiere at The Rep almost successful
Play has smart, funny elements but feels thin at times
ALBANY — Like a good but not great actor, “Secret Hour” hits its marks most of the time.
The play, by busy lyricist and playwright Jenny Stafford, won the 2021 Next Act! New Play Summit at Capital Repertory Theatre and is receiving its world premiere this month at The Rep. Under the assured direction of the company’s associate artistic director, Margaret E. Hall, “Secret Hour” is quick, funny and smart in an engaging way, and its three actors find the humor and humanity in their respective characters.
Accomplished in many ways, the play satisfies without engrossing or enthralling as it explores the marriage of Kate (an excellent Marina Shay) and Ben (Joshua David Robinson, who’s given less to work with by the author). They live in the present day in a town around a midlevel university, where Kate is an ethics professor; her lively student lectures about Confucius and Nietzsche, delivered to the audience, give the play the sheen of accessible braininess. (This is intro to ethics, after all; Mill and Kant come later.)
Once a successful software engineer who lost his job, Ben works offering tech help to Best Buy customers, but his real focus is on the couple’s attempt to conceive a child, still unsuccessful after two years. While both speak eagerly about their future offspring early in the play, the subject is both deeper and less unanimous that it seems at first, and a central lie told about it tests their marriage.
The title comes from a game the couple plays: Each must reveal an embarrassing or difficult truth, and the other agrees to still love them
regardless. Their confessions include using a strand of hair as dental floss in a pre-meeting check in the mirror and thinking three-legged dogs are “creepy as hell” — mild stuff indeed. When Kate blurts out a profound secret, their lives are forever changed as they try to deal with its ramifications.
Helping them sort through it all is a handyman named Leaf, played with sunny ingenuousness by Whit K. Lee, last seen locally in “The Chinese Lady” at Adirondack Theatre Festival this past summer. (All three actors are making their debuts at The Rep.) The easiest character to like unreservedly, Leaf is also more of a conceit than a fully conceived human. A Mr. Fixit who’s been working on their house for months — the handsome set, by David Mcquillen Robertson, is of their stylish
contemporary living room — Leaf seems always to be around and eavesdropping on the couple’s conversations.
Stafford adds enough quirky details to Leaf ’s story, from attending Dartmouth to living in a tree house and having an escaped parrot as his best friend, that he becomes a fanciful device to amuse the audience and help the couple with their communication. (Besides being good with home repair, he’s also a certified life coach, which, he admits, means only that he has a certificate.)
A larger frame to the immediate matters of marriage and potential parenthood is a question that Kate presents to students as central to the wrangling of moral philosophers: Is your highest ethical responsibility to yourself or to other people?
In “Secret Hour,” that’s ponderable but not ponderous, addressed at only a middling level of inquiry over a fast 90 minutes. Stafford has worked out too carefully how she wants to map Confucius and Nietzsche onto a marriage: Here’s the setup, here are the laughs and the arguments, here is the resolution. Too neat by half, “Secret Hour” cries out for a few rough edges.