Tallgrass Gothic: A Tragedy in the Plains

By Johanna Schoenfeld

A small town in the Great Plains, the present: A man and a woman fall in love. The problem: Laura, the woman, is married, and divorce is not an option here. All the young couple has are afternoons in the country, watching clouds and dreaming of a future together that will probably never come true.

“Tallgrass Gothic” premiered last Thursday at the New Workshop Theater at Brooklyn College to a sold-out house. The MFA students of the theater department put on an impressive show – there was love, loss, violence and even some sex; all of it culminated in a spooky fantasy sequence that left the audience terrified and satisfied at once. Directed by Justin Ball, an MFA Directing student at Brooklyn College, this was a re-imagining of the work by distinguished playwright Melanie Marnich. “Tallgrass Gothic,” a fantastical tale inspired by the classic Jacobean tragedy “The Changeling,” was first staged in 1999 in Minneapolis and has since been shown in theaters around the country.

Adrianna Riolo-Mason starred as Laura, a beautiful woman trapped in a loveless marriage, whose only wish is to escape from her life. She seems to have all the best prerequisites in life – everyone who meets her is captivated by her and falls for her. But somewhere, probably at the altar, her life took a wrong turn; and now, running away has become her only option. But it isn’t that easy – at times, she herself doesn’t really seem to know what she wants, and in the end, everything she dreamt of slips away. The problem here is that over the course of the play, it becomes harder and harder to sympathize with her, and when another character calls her the biggest bitch he knows, it is hard to disagree with him. In the end, it almost feels as if she is getting what she had coming to her, but not even that is truly satisfying: Too pathetic is her character in the final scenes.

Arthur Kriklivy as Daniel, the love interest, is given a couple of interesting scenes, especially when he expresses his ambivalent feelings about the fact that Laura doesn’t seem to feel all that guilty about her infidelity. But overall, his character feels unfinished, either because the playwright intentionally made him more dreamlike than real, or because she simply failed to fully realize him. What remains is a man that seems more like a little boy fantasizing about being in love than anything else.

The real standouts of the evening were supporting actors Cristina Pitter as Mary, Laura’s best friend, and Django Palty as Filene, the town creep (admittedly, an alluring creep) who helps Laura to get rid of her husband. Pitter gave a truly inspired performance, taking Marnichs beautifully crafted dialogue to the next level and nailing the comic tones of her role just as well as the underlying longing for her best friend to acknowledge and love her. In the end, she becomes the tragic character we truly sympathize with; while Palty’s delivery and indifference in the final scene make our skin crawl and eventually shows us the true nature of the protagonist and what might be called the morale of the story – even if the morale is that there is no such thing.

The intimate setting of the New Workshop Theater was a suitable backdrop for this intimate story that revealed secrets, longings and sins of seemingly regular characters. A minimalist set design by Tatsuki Nakamura transformed the small space into a grassy outdoor area, a porch and a bedroom all at once and underlined the cramped feeling of the small town as well as the implied plains in which it is set. The lighting, designed by Diana Bane, is appropriately muted and almost dusky in most scenes, mirroring the grassy but dusty set. Like the entire play, the lighting concept has its climax in the finale, a spooky and shadowy, nightmarish scene.

The final scene, while having a significantly different tone than the rest of the play – some might even say a different genre – is ghost story and allegory all in one, and expresses the desperation and hopelessness of the situation that everyone, and Laura in particular, ends up in. This is where the play finally does the “gothic” part of its title justice – and dramatically, it’s a definite high note.