In Performance | McElwee and Mendes
David McElwee and Ismenia Mendes in scene from the revival of A.R. Gurney’s 1977 play “The Wayside Motor Inn,” about travelers at a motel. The show continues through Oct. 5 at the Signature Center.
Video Credit By Erik Piepenburg and Erik Braund on Publish Date September 8, 2014.The lives of people in transit intersect without actually touching in “The Wayside Motor Inn,” a minor-key but cleverly constructed play by the veteran A. R. Gurney, being revived by the Signature Theater Company. From our point of view, the characters seem to share the same space, a tidy but soul-crushingly generic room in a motel on the outskirts of Boston. But we soon gather that each of the play’s five pairs of characters occupy different rooms. Their stories — of broken marriages, sexual ambivalence, late-life malaise, father-son conflict — are merely superimposed upon one another so that they seem to be taking place simultaneously.
The concept is more complicated and more avant-garde in theory than in practice. (Mr. Gurney has said he was inspired by the work of the British playwright Alan Ayckbourn, who has played nifty tricks on theatergoers’ perceptions throughout his own long career.) The stories slide in and out of focus quite naturally, with one set of characters hitting a higher pitch of drama, while the others are either in another part of the room — on the balcony, in the bathroom — or merely sitting idle on a bed, brooding over their own travails.
Thanks to the nicely choreographed direction of Lila Neugebauer — and a fine cast — nobody steps on anyone’s toes, metaphorically or otherwise. With the dialogue sometimes overlapping, the play unfolds with a loose-jointed but natural vibe, in the manner of a Robert Altman movie from his heyday, in the late 1970s, when the play is set. (It was first produced off Broadway by Manhattan Theater Club in 1977.)
The play, which is basically five short dramas spliced together, catches its characters in moments of small or not-so-small crisis, with their presence in the motel symbolizing their removal from the natural flow of their lives. Ray (Quincy Dunn-Baker), the first to arrive, is a traveling salesman whose marriage has been coming apart. Spending long stretches on the road, he’s lonely and looking for companionship. A casual conversation with Sharon (Jenn Lyon), the room service waitress who delivers his food and then tells him it’s practically toxic, eventually leads to discussion of a date.
Jessie (Lizbeth Mackay) and Frank (Jon DeVries) are an older couple stopping to rest at the motel on the way to visit their daughter and grandchildren. She’s eager to get there — and gently suggests that maybe they could avoid all this traveling if they moved closer to the family — but Frank’s got a bum ticker, and spends much of the play in a state of mild anxiety and physical discomfort.
The story of Andy (Kelly AuCoin) and Ruth (Rebecca Henderson) is a fairly typical fracas between husband and wife in the throes of a divorce. He’s come to Boston to sort out their separation agreement; a doctor who felt stifled in his practice, he upped and moved to Pittsburgh to head a hospital, leaving behind Ruth and the children when she refused to uproot the family.
The most date-stamped of the five subplots concerns the young college couple, Phil (David McElwee) and Sally (Ismenia Mendes), who have come to the motel, at Phil’s horny instigation, for a tryst away from the prying eyes of roommates. But Sally’s more interested in reading “Jane Eyre” than she is in Phil’s neatly rolled joints, or his newly acquired copy of “The Joy of Sex.” (When she expresses mild shock at this prurient volume, he shrugs and says: “It was right on the counter. Next to Julia Child.”)
The lone story line not involving a male-female couple concerns Vince (Mark Kudisch), a businessman who’s obsessed with the idea of having his son, Mark (Will Pullen), go to Harvard. They’ve come to the area to meet with a connection of Vince’s, who can smooth the way. But Mark has other ideas about his future, and implores his father to let him take a year off before college — a year he’d like to spend working at a garage, which is what he really yearns to do.
Excerpt: ‘The Wayside Motor Inn’
Kelly AuCoin and Quincy Dunn-Baker in a scene from the A.R. Gurney play, at the Signature Center.
Video Credit By Signature Theater on Publish Date September 4, 2014.Mr. Gurney’s writing, as ever, is humane, well observed and sometimes wryly funny, although none of the story lines are particularly stirring, or, for that matter, original. In the era in which the play takes place, the fracturing of middle-class marriages was a much bigger story than it is today. So, for that matter, were the sexual freedoms being casually taken for granted by the younger generation.
But the incisive acting helps paper over the banalities. (And, speaking of paper, Andrew Lieberman’s terrific set, with its plaid wallpaper, worn chenille bedspreads and mass-produced fake Colonial furniture, is so expert that I can imagine some enthusiastic hotelier’s wanting to copy its every detail for a hip, nostalgia-drenched hotel.)
All the performers deserve individual commendation, both for the ease with which they bring their characters to life in short spurts of conversation, and for their ability to remain present (in a sense) even when their characters retire to the fringes of the action.
Among the more affecting performances is Mr. Pullen’s, as the guilt-plagued young Mark, whose pain at his inability to live up to his father’s dreams is finely rendered. So, too, is the gradual softening of Vince’s hard-line stance toward Mark’s resistance, nicely etched by Mr. Kudisch.
Ms. Lyon provides some tasty comic relief as Sharon, an ex-hippie whose subversive instincts are now aimed at undermining the small-fry motels she hops among — all of which, like much of the rest of the world, she believes, are owned by big, bad corporations.
Ms. Mackay and Mr. DeVries have an easygoing rapport as the older couple, Jessie and Frank. His increasing discomfort provides a smidgen of suspense, when he calls the desk to see if there’s a doctor in the motel. But when Jessie becomes anxious, Frank insists that he doesn’t want to be rushed off to the hospital. “I just want someone to listen to my heart,” he says a little grumpily.
That line rather tidily sums up the frustrations felt by many of the play’s characters. (In case we didn’t register it the first time, Mr. Gurney helpfully has Frank repeat it.) But their virtual intimacy in this nondescript motor lodge lends a certain resonant ache to the play: Taken together, the small crises in these ordinary lives underscore how hard it can be for us to hear — and to heed — the yearnings of even the people closest to us.