By Dan Venning
I recently saw two shows at HERE—How to Break and The Best of Everything—both lacked the broad appeal of Natasha, Pierre (which I reviewed earlier) and neither was as successful. Still, they were interesting in their own ways. How to Break was also a musical work, this one in the style of hip hop. Set in a hospital, the play concerns two teenage patients, Ana (Amber Williams) and Joel (Pedro Morillo). Ana is a popper and aspiring graphic designer in treatment for leukemia. Joel is a rapper and break dancer suffering from sickle cell anemia. They’re both treated by the same pediatric hematologist, Aden (Dan Domingues), as well as the same music therapist, Maddy (Roberta Burke). Williams and Morillo are extremely talented dancers, and ably executed the complex and emotionally charged choreography by Kwikstep and Rokafella. They were aided by Adam Matta and Yakko 440’s beat-box score, which grounded the show in a concrete architecture of sound; Yakko also did double duty acting as a beat-boxing nurse. Nick Vaughan’s set design was extremely simplistic: a gurney, a few props, an IV pole, and green hospital curtains were all that adorned HERE’s downstairs black-box theatre. But Vaughan’s set proved an effective background for the play’s action, and for Dave Tennent and Kate Freer’s beautiful video designs: whenever Ana drew in her notebook, her designs would be projected in video graffiti onto the hospital curtains and walls.
Aaron Jafferis’s lyrics were effective, but his book was another matter altogether. The story was contrived: from the beginning, I could tell that How to Break would melodramatically manipulate its audience’s emotions (while tritely conveying the reality of sickness) by having one of the teenagers die at the end. While the tragic budding romance between Ana and Joel was cute and heartwarming, the parallel romance between Aden and Maddy seemed forced and was dropped, entirely unresolved, at the end. As a text, How to Break felt a bit more like therapy than theatre. There is little surprise in this: in his program note, Jafferis describes his actual work as an art and music therapist at the Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital’s Arts for Healing program. How to Break brought the vitality of hip hop into the world of musical theatre, but Jafferis failed to distill his therapeutic work into a dramatic text.
Immediately after seeing How to Break, I went to HERE’s upstairs space to see The Best of Everything, Julie Kramer’s adaptation of Rona Jaffe’s 1958 novel of the same title. Set in the typing pool and offices of a New York publishing house from 1952 to 1954, The Best of Everything follows the rise of Caroline (Sarah Wilson) from secretary to editor after she is abandoned by her fiancé Eddie (Jordan Geiger). Despite her meteoric rise, Caroline makes enduring friendships with her fellow secretaries Brenda (Sas Goldberg), Mary Agnes (Molly Lloyd), April (Alicia Sable), and Gregg (Hayley Treider). She quickly realizes that women need to stick together in a world where men wield all the power.
The Best of Everything was, for the most part, simply staged with period costumes designed by Daniel Urlie and a set (consisting of a few platforms, tables, chairs, and telephones) by Lauren Helpern. The music similarly consisted of period hits by artists such as Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney. The aesthetic similarity between The Best of Everything and Mad Men was apparent throughout—some of the songs, such as Clooney’s “Botch-A-Me (Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina)” (1952), have also appeared on the score for AMC’s television series—but here the focus was different, centered not on the philandering, self-important men, but on the women who each struggle in their own way with male authority. (Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner has acknowledged his debt to Jaffe’s novel, and at one point in the show’s second season Don Draper reads the novel and discusses the 1959 film adaptation which features Joan Crawford.)
For the most part, the performances were strong. Treider was captivating as Gregg, and Tom O’Keefe—who played all the male roles save Eddie—ably created four different characters that were readily distinguishable through his shifts vocally, physically, and emotionally. Amy Wilson, who developed the show with Kramer, was particularly fine as Miss Farrow, the editor who serves as a mentor for Caroline, and whom Caroline eventually replaces (this was the role played by Crawford in the 1959 film). Unfortunately, Sarah Wilson as Caroline, while charismatic in her bright-eyed optimism, ultimately gave a performance that was neither compelling nor memorable. Part of this problem may have been due to Kramer’s script, or perhaps the source material on which it was based. While the show presented the women as individuals struggling against monolithic male authority (and reinforced this theme by casting the women with individual actors and having only two men play all the male roles), the characters in The Best of Everything lack complexity. They are all types. Caroline is plucky and ambitious, April is innocent and flirty, Mary Agnes and Brenda are gossips focused solely on the goal of marriage, Gregg is a neurotic firebrand, Miss Farrow is a hard-as-nails taskmaster. The characters change over the course of the show due to external circumstances (marriages, affairs, an abortion), but these transformations seemed artificial and contrived to show how, in this world, it was impossible for any of these women to have “the best of everything.”
In many ways, The Best of Everything, staged in HERE’s main theatre, was more conventional than most downtown theatre. It was a text-based show with an important message: women have to band together to advance in the world. In this respect, the show perhaps has more similarities to than differences from recent popular series such as Sex and the City or Girls. In an age when Republican Presidential candidates explicitly oppose equality for women in the workplace (while claiming to have “binders full of women”), the show is also obviously still relevant. But without a fully developed script and characters the message fails to be fully conveyed.
