Slowgirl – 2014
Image © Katie Falkenberg
Review: ‘Slowgirl’ peels back the layers of hidden feelings by Margaret Gray, LA Times
In Greg Pierce’s “Slowgirl” at the Geffen Playhouse, 17-year-old Becky (Rae Gray) comes to visit her Uncle Sterling (William Petersen), who left the U.S. years earlier for Costa Rica.
She’s freaked out by his primitive jungle lifestyle, which is charmingly evoked by Richard Woodbury’s sound design and the tropical leaves that hang above Takeshi Kata’s delicate, bare-bones set, configured tennis-court style with the audience on either side (an approach that heightens naturalism but also impedes sightlines).
“Where are your doors?” Becky demands. He takes them off during the dry season, Sterling explains. So there’s nothing to stop parrots, iguanas, monkeys and even deadly coral snakes from coming in, but “they’re not really interested.”
Sterling is far less comfortable with human visitors, though. As he replies with a shrug when the bumptious Becky asks if he’s a loner, “Well, you don’t move to the jungle unless. …”
Unlike the animals, Becky is very interested in her uncle, whom she hasn’t seen in nine years. She wants to know why his marriage failed, why he left the States, and why her father, his brother-in-law, doesn’t like him.
Sterling, though more reluctantly, is also curious about Becky, who is herself fleeing trouble at home. She has been suspended from school. Another student, cruelly called “Slowgirl,” was catastrophically injured at a party, and Becky may be responsible.
During their time together, the two engage in a kind of psychological striptease, peeling away one another’s defenses layer by layer. The dramatic approach may not be groundbreaking, but the skillful pace of the revelations keeps the action engrossing and thought-provoking as it moves from the initial awkwardness into increasingly tense, emotional terrain, exploring questions of character and fate, the many ways tragedy can unmoor a life and the power of family to both wound and heal.
Although not technically a comedy, this two-hander, beautifully directed by Geffen artistic director Randall Arney, mines considerable humor from the contrast between its two characters: Sterling is withdrawn and fearful, Becky uninhibited and pushy. The well-crafted performances — the actors are members of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, which co-produced this show and where it ran last summer — make the tried-and-true odd-couple setup unusually fresh.
Petersen, making his L.A. theatrical debut though familiar to “CSI” fans as Gil Grissom, the character he played for nine seasons, delivers a restrained, thoughtful Sterling. His every gesture — wringing his hands, fidgeting with his glasses, starting, blushing — conveys trepidation and hesitancy; his every statement trails off uncertainly.
“Dude, would it kill you to finish a sentence?” Becky snaps at him. Petersen’s Sterling is a scrupulously decent man whose current isolation is just the latest manifestation of a lifelong terror of engagement. Still, although the role is written a bit monolithically — even his eyesight, which has “convergence problems,” conforms to character — there are hints in the text of a more disreputable side that Petersen, rather disappointingly, doesn’t explore. A little more Grissom couldn’t hurt.
Meanwhile, motor-mouthed Becky blurts out questions, observations and confessions without heed for the sensibilities she might offend or wounds she might open. Her bluntness and insensitivity occasionally make her seem slightly deranged rather than lovably free-spirited.
But Pierce has caught the rhythms of teenage girl-speak, and Gray, a credentialed actress and University of Chicago student (no relation to this reviewer) revels in them. Her wonderfully gravelly voice and quirky delivery make Becky thoroughly entertaining. And the characters’ developing bond despite their differences is touching and persuasive.
‘Slowgirl’
Where: Geffen Playhouse, Audrey Skirball Kenis Theater, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Los Angeles
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 3 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ends April 27.
Tickets: $57-$72
Contact: (310) 208-5454 or http://www.geffenplayhouse.com
Running time: 90 minutes
Slowgirl: Theater Review by by Myron Meisel, Hollywood Reporter
An uncle and niece get to know each other in Costa Rica in Greg Pierce’s drama at the Geffen Playhouse.
Sterling (William Petersen), a former lawyer turned recluse in the Costa Rican jungle is surprised by the arrival of the 17-year-old niece he barely knows, Becky (Rae Gray), a loquacious high-schooler apparently hot-footing it out of town for a week’s obscurity in the wilderness. Unaccustomed to being communicative, Sterling slowly acquires a sense of Becky’s travail, disconcertingly analogous to his own retreat from the hurly burly of the censorious opinions of others, and their individual remorse over each’s moral negligences.
This character study of some delicacy commits no sins of its own in its careful delineation of souls so wounded by the careless injuries they have perpetrated, however unintentionally, upon others. Regret and remorse, however justified, exact a destructive toll on each of them, as they gradually begin to discern — past their respective protective shells — a commonality that permits them tentatively to reach for some nascent compassion, if not forgiveness, for themselves. (Incidentally, it also explores a common relationship not so often considered in dramatic literature: that of the uncle to niece, which can be exceptionally interesting because it has so little in common with the role of the parent.)
This template of a theme tends to toe-dance about the borders of the precious, the rather calculated storyline often compensated by the writer’s tuning fork calibration of speech patterns that makes the contrivance of the ethical and psychological issues easygoing to partake. It is the sort of not quite poetic naturalism that is the heritage of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where Slowgirl developed (it premiered at Lincoln Center). Not, however, to be confused with anything that could possibly be dubbed as “realism.” The premise shares a lot of parallels with The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams, though with considerably less ambition, heft or complexity.
Playwright Greg Pierce, new to Los Angeles stages, has an impressive resume of collaborations with important theaters and talents, and on the evidence here he conforms expertly within confines of a fairly narrow view of what might be regarded as today’s standard of a Tradition of Quality — a little over-familiar, a tad academic in its beats and structure, well-made in the craftsman mode. Again, one thinks of antecedents, such as Horton Foote relocated to the tropics.
Director Randall Arney, also the artistic director at the Geffen, shares the Steppenwolf patrimony and knows his way around this kind of material, so everything is impeccably sure-footed, tastefully suggestive, and so polished the effort required is rarely noticeable. What feels lacking is urgency, originality and the sense of something too essential to ignore. To be implicated in the mistakes the characters make, maybe the audience needs to share the compulsion that these messy people are some inescapable expressions of ourselves.
Nevertheless, all creative elements are quite impeccable. The performers expertly establish their surfaces and reveal in layers their secret torments.
Petersen, for a dozen years Gil Grissom of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, has always been marked by his emotion-forward aggressive power, notably in earlier film work such as To Live and Die in L.A.and Manhunter (both directed by fellow Chicagoans). Here he is radically constrained by his introverted hermit character, listening and reacting eloquently with milder means. It’s a restorative assertion of range, particularly when one learns that his Broadway debut was as the bombastically tortured Reverend Shannon in a revival of Iguana.
For her part, current University of Chicago undergraduate Gray (Boardwalk Empire) already has the chops to make her more difficult role appear to be little else than her character onstage playing herself.
Venue: The Geffen Playhouse, Westwood (runs through April 27)
Cast: William Petersen, Rae Gray
Director: Randall Arney
Playwright: Greg Pierce
Set designer: Takeshi Kata
Lighting designer: Daniel Ionazzi
Music & sound designer: Richard Woodbury
A Steppenwolf Theatre Production
