Children of All Ages
The understated charms of The Underlying Chris.
many theater lovers will tell you that theater is a church. We gather. We worship. We hope there will be cookies after the service. And of all our thousand playwrights, Will Eno seems most like an actual country pastor—he has that twinkling gravity and “my other outfit is a cassock” vibe. More important, his plays have the quality of a sermon, in that they seem like time set aside to do serious thinking about existence. They have weight. Even in his strangest, most absurd works, there’s typically a message about the duty of care.
The last production Eno had in New York was the wry and metaphysical revival of his Beckettian Thom Pain (based on nothing). Before that, it was the wry and metaphysical production of his Sartre-insuburbia meditation Wakey, Wakey. It will not surprise you, then, that The Underlying
Chris, at Second Stage, is wry and metaphysical. Here, though, Eno has backed well away from those previous
plays’ normcore otherworldliness and made something deliberately mild: He’s looking long and lightly at a life, rather as Thornton Wilder would.
We first meet Chris as a tiny baby, not quite 3 months old. His mother (Hannah Cabell) looks lovingly over the edge of his bassinet and worries about the “click” his back started making after his dad flew him around the room. His father (Howard Overshown) reassures her: “Things just don’t start out of nowhere.” Well, they do. Abruptly, a new set slides into view, and Chris (Nicholas Hutchinson) is now 10 years old. The boy talks matterof-factly about his love of diving (it feels like flying) and how he doesn’t remember his father’s death since it happened when he was a baby.
Another new room glides onstage, and we’re in a hospital. But now Chris— still with a tricky back, still with a love of diving—is Christine, a girl of roughly 13 (Isabella Russo). Chris hasn’t transitioned; we are at the next part of Chris’s story, and certain … details have simply changed. Cabell now plays Chris’s aunt, and Overshown is a doctor, tired but charmed by Chris’s pert humor. He asks if she knows what the philtrum, that groove between our nose and lips, does. Nothing, it turns out—it’s just where the two halves of our face grew together in the womb. Why has he told her this? “I don’t know, you’re a smart kid,” he says. “Insert a helpful metaphor. ‘It all comes together in the end.’ ”
Chris proceeds through existence in these little hops. In deft, small scenes that are usually about the chance begin
ning or end of a relationship, the entire company plays Chris at some point. Gender doesn’t define Chris, nor does race. Chronology does, though, so each iteration of the character gets older and older. We see Chris as a mother (Nidra Sous la Terre) setting up a therapy practice, then later on as a grandfather (Charles Turner) hoping for a treat on a walk. Yet the biography stays steady. Losses sustained are losses forever; betrayals must be mended; a painful back is always there, and it’s only ever going to get worse. Everything causes ripples of effect: The early bereavements cut Chris loose, so many paths are tried and abandoned, from medical school to psychiatry to acting. Clearly, both Chris and the play are interested in a progress of investigation from the body through the mind and finally into the pretended self. The play never so much as winks at the supernatural, yet there’s still a sensation of … lifting up and off.
The new-Chris-every-scene setup is quickly absorbed, but The Underlying Chris is still immensely delicate. A few things in Kenny Leon’s production treat it roughly: The choreography of Arnulfo Maldonado’s sets sliding back and forth was still a little herky-jerky when I saw it, so performers occasionally seemed nervy as the show rattled around them. Once inside a scene, though, Leon’s company works handsomely and is able to create convincing portraits in only a few strokes. Everyone does a lovely job, but Overshown’s weary, slightly punchy approach is particularly effective, as is Sous la Terre’s laughing warmth.
In a time gone by, a drama that dealt with a person’s life from cradle to grave would have been a morality play with choices guiding the soul closer or farther from God. The Underlying Chris is an anxious parent’s play, not a religious one, concerned as it is with the way our Everyperson Chris is buffeted and changed by every accident and careless gesture. Why, oh why, did that father ever fly that little baby around the room? But there’s still a certain spiritual organization to the play, the faintest echo of the pulpit. When death inevitably comes (spoiler! It comes for us all), we see the funeral. Characters, played by all the many physical bodies we have known as Chris, stand around in mourning. We, though, remember that Chris is in all of them. Eno, in a clever exchange, has used the specific way that theater asks us to suspend belief to create belief. Something is everlasting after all.
Here endeth the lesson.
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