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Regional Reviews: St. Louis Red Jasper
If you've gone through the ordeal of breast cancer yourself, you may find Red Jasper a thoughtful and emotionally evocative experience. There's a wealth of real-life anecdotes about how disease forces changes in a patient in this two hour play with intermission. Playwright/producer Michael Madden culled trenchant little stories from more than 40 interviews he conducted with breast cancer survivors, which gives the play its ring of truth. And he and actress Nancy Nigh deftly weave these personal stories from different women into one character, in Nigh's role as Izzy, who faces a chilling recurrence of the disease. Perhaps inevitably, it often plays like anecdotal theater. Izzy's lack of introspection, and apparent lack of a broader understanding of the men in her life are mysteries without clues for the persevering director Suki Peters and her actors to solve. If there are any repellant characteristics in Izzy or in her love-interest Tom (the excellent Ben Ritchie) that have isolated them from ungrateful children, when we meet them in a world of IV drips, those personal impediments are only half cleared up by the final light cue. Till then, heartwarming, Hallmark-style moments in a treatment clinic blossom at the end of many a short scene. But when it counts, under Peters' direction, Madden's life-or-death romcom (mostly set in a medical "infusion center") delivers a well-timed jolt of drama. And a portion of the ticket sales goes to the Siteman Cancer Center here in St. Louis. The acting is top notch, but there's a second "buzzy" disease in the mix–Alzheimer's. And owing to the steady drip of reassurances in most of the short clinic scenes, we are held numbly in the grip of these two modern gods towering over us, for the most part. The steady infusion of cheerfulness makes the characters seem small and quaint and unaware. Though I must admit the hushed tone of the dialog is every bit as personal and authentic as you'd hear in the waiting area of a hospital emergency room. The other disease adds synergy: the playwright's mother lived a long life with Alzheimer's, and somewhere along the way that family experience gave the play a memorable subplot. But overall, in the broad theatrical sense, the poetic structure of "end game" storytelling is scarcely heard, as a bunch of Americans default again and again to a reflexive, anti-dramatic hopefulness on stage. Ms. Nigh fulfills the arc of the play through her winning nature. And her unexpected stage make-up is by Samantha Hayes. Also on stage, Carmen Garcia is perfectly naturalistic as the infusion nurse who develops a friendship with Izzy. Drama comes from Izzy and Tom's fraught family life. Rhiannon Creighton is once again an acting knockout as the angry daughter of Tom. And delightful Caleb D. Long, who designed and built the intricate, Advent-calendar of a set on a tiny stage, also does very well as Scott, the son of Izzy. He heightens the way we push death and dying out of our lives. Tom and his daughter clash satisfyingly a couple of times, but for Izzy and her son, open conflict (the cure-all of theatre) is never released from its medicine locker. Red Jasper runs through October 13, 2024, at Gaslight Theater, 358 N. Boyle, St. Louis MO. For tickets and information, please visit www.gaslighttheater.net Cast: Production Staff: |
