Keegan Theatre is offering a cautionary tale about how fraught [the long process of healing and forgiveness] is, with a quietly powerful offering of Chelsea Marcantel’s Everything Is Wonderful at their Church Street theater through October 5. The play had been previously staged five years earlier at Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, but this is the DC premiere.
The power of Marcantel’s script lies between the lines in the tense silences. Under the family’s placidity and platitudes lie roiling seas, and when the facades crack, the play finds its most memorable moments. A harrowing scene involving Esther and a basket of eggs will linger long after the final bows, and the simultaneous climactic catharses evoke the heightened emotional crests of the great 20th-century dramas of O’Neill, Miller, et al.
Director Josh Sticklin keeps the steady, measured pace, letting the play find its own rhythm without feeling overlong [and] the ensemble of six distinguishes itself in handling the challenging emotional material. Keegan co-founder Susan Marie Rhea and Michael McGovern, as the grieving mother and father, stand out, though Leah Packer’s Miri carries the show as the black sheep of the family, struggling to find herself outside the community she grew up in.
Ben Clark is deceptively winsome as Abram, giving hints of his dark undercurrents. As Ruth, Sasha Rosenbaum creates a tragic portrait of a naive young woman wrestling with her duty to God and the community, and the dawning recognition that she might not want to marry Abram, or anyone for that matter. Max Johnson, as the outsider, Eric creates a very effective portrait of a lost young man whose need for atonement might be a little too self-obsessed.
Sticklin also designed the set, rich and vibrant in detail and color, down to the quilt pattern coloring on the floor, dressed by Cindy Landrum Jacobs’ props and set dressing and warmed and cooled by Hailey LaRoe’s lighting and projections. Paris Francesca’s costuming effectively recreates the simple, unadorned Amish clothing, which contrasts sharply with Eric and Miri’s contemporary garb.
What getting back to some sense of normalcy will require from us may vary, but the potentials and pitfalls of radical forgiveness and the strengths and challenges of moving forward are on display on Church Street, and give us all a great deal to consider. Everything Is Wonderful will linger in your mind days after seeing it.
