Before I Leave You: A Boomer Pens A Bittersweet Boomer Comedy

BEFORE I LEAVE YOU

Written by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro

Director: Jonathan Silverstein

Credits:
Sets, Allen Moyer, Lights, David Lander, Costumes, Michael Krass, Original music and sound, David Remedios

Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company
At the Calderwood Pavilion’s Wimberly Theater
Through Nov. 13

Ticket price: Starting at $25

Whether you think this play is a boom or a bust may depend on your age. For the boomers in the audience, the shadow of advancing age and the certainty of tomorrows, once taken for granted, take on an eerie edge. What is the latest medical scare? How have friendships endured? What is the cost of roads not taken?  If you’re a boomer, you are familiar with this kind of terrain.

The play crackles with a sense of urgency.  Playwright Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro wanted to write a play “about four friends on the cusp of old age,” she knows what makes them tick, what consumes them, and the secrets they keep from one another and from themselves. The play is funny, dark, mordant, and sweet. Yamagiwa has lived this stuff.

Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro has resided within walking distance of Harvard Square for forty years. She graduated from Radcliffe around the time JFK was elected and has been writing short stories and poems since then. Harvard Square is as good a place you’ll find to witness human condition and the playwright has been paying attention.

The play opens with four friends – Emily (Kippy Goldfarb), a 61 year-old painter, Koji (Glenn Kubota), her 62 year-old writer/professor Japanese husband of forty years, Jeremy (Ross Bicknell), a 64 year old professor and novelist, and Trish (Karen MacDonald), his 58 year-old out-of-work sister who’s moved in with Jeremy - sharing dinner in the Chinese restaurant they’ve met at for decades. Their conversation centers on a medical problem Jeremy has just experienced.  

“This is the first time anything like this has happened,” Jeremy says. “It’s funny – when you’re young, ‘the first time’ means something great, but when you’re our age ‘the first time’ means a heart attack or a stroke.”

Thus begins a series of life-changing events that test the bonds this quartet of friends have with one another. Some pass the test, some don’t.

Within minutes, two things become abundantly clear. Their levity as they consider Jeremy’s episode is a bridge to deal with the fact that they are now officially “old,” and that Trish is going to be the lightning rod that will charge the temper and tenor of the play.

Kippy Goldfarb, Glen Kubota, Karen MacDonald, and Ross Bickell in Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro’s “Before I Leave You’’

Trish obliviously keeps the plot careening along as she hilariously gives voice the truths about vulnerability, marriage, careers, and friendships that lurk beneath the affable veneer at dinner this night.  She may not have the academic or artistic credentials the others have but she has a Ph.D. in analyzing character and there’s no filter from her thoughts to her lips. She's the Greek chorus in a short skirt and low cut blouse.

"Before You Leave Me"’s stew of ideas- race, class, love, fidelity, and mortality - can bounce around like ping pong balls but it’s riveting nonetheless. The introduction of Koji and Emily’s 22 year-old son Peter (Alexis Camins) and his relationship with a Vietnamese woman he's met as he works as a bagger in a local market adds the issue of green cards to the mix. Oy.

The play is a series of vignettes that flesh out back stories - Emily’s artwork being dominated by Koji’s ego fueled sense of self, Jeremy’s honorable nature and loyalty while grappling with an ominous white spot an MRI has found in his brain, Koji’s infatuation with a young intern, Trish’s triangulated relationship with Emily and her brother Jeremy, and why son Peter is so estranged from his emotionally distant father, Koji.

Koji’s frequent pronouncements - egotistical, harsh, and judgmental - during the two-act play make you wonder what the glue is that has held the four together for decades. The series of surprises in the last act reveal the answer.

The challenges that Emily, Koji, Jeremy, and Trish navigate are not age specific but definitely time stamped. These characters realize it’s time to face them or forever keep their peace. And forever is not an abstraction anymore. Before I leave you, indeed.

Somewhere in the middle of Act 2, Emily, Koji, Jeremy, and Trish spontaneously sing “September Song” (Maxwell Anderson/Kurt Weill). The lyrics poignantly fit the scene. It has the impact of a freight train. By the play’s last heart-warming scene, we discover who will be aboard.

Photo courtesy of Huntington Theater: T. Charles Erickson 

Comments

[Ann Baker]

I saw this play tonight.In fact I'm just getting in from it. The first act was WORK. deadly dull writing. The actors were working very hard to make it interesting . I was ready to leave at intermission. Since I was treated by the person I was with, I stayed. The second act writing improved. The story was predictable. No surprises , or interesting reasons/motives. The dialogue in the first act was pedestrian. If you had been reading this off the page you would have put it down. The second act had some wit and feeling. It had a happy ending.
It is a good thing I am not a reviewer. I don't know how to say something more positive about it, except...without those actors ( because they are good) It would have been a terrible night in the theatre.
Just different eyes looking at the same thing.

[Paul Tamburello aka pt at large]

Great response, Ann!
I think the play's sentiments about mortality hit me at a vulnerable moment and that's what I responded to. I didn't mind when the first act gave us a bunch vignettes to dig up the back story and we had to figure out what was going on, sort of like feeling our way around a room in the dark.

The second act got on the rails more securely. I could not figure out how Emily and Koji could have managed to live together for forty years while occupying in such different emotional spheres, and the same with Koji and his dear friend Jeremy. I guess they were platforms for airing Yamagiwa's ideas.

As I intimated in the review, without Karen MacDonald, this play would sink. Maybe I should have made that clearer.

If Yamagiwa was looking to blend "The Big Chill" with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" she got into the same neighborhood. Yes, good acting contributed mightily to the play.

If you have any further thoughts, fire away, I loved your response, thanks again!

[Joni McGary]

"The Greek Chorus in a short skirt and a low cut blouse. "

Perfect.