Driving Each Other Crazy

Many a short play revue are organized around a theme. Love, for instance, or the number ten. In Neil LaBute’s Autobahn, the unifying characteristic is the automobile, that symbol and begetter of American sprawl and freedom. The car is not a thematic interest, though, only the setting. Big Intimacy Group’s recent production of the short play cycle, directed by Rob Mueller, doesn’t belabor this point, with Colin McIlvaine’s straightforward and unfussy set, a couple elevated car seats with a steering wheel in front of a scene-setting scrim, being all that it needs to be without feeling just so. The plays showcase what kind of scenes can be staged within a vehicle, but cars in themselves do not figure much into the plays’ inquiries—that would be word games and Labute’s somewhat alarming gender politics. The production is, barring a few missteps, the best treatment the material could receive.

The proceedings start strong with “Bench Seat.” Two young lovers (Emma Thorne, Logan Sutherland) are up on a secluded hillside overlooking town to make out, or, maybe, to break up, as it becomes clear that the young lady has serious, serious issues. The piece is a neat study in contrasts, with Sutherland’s smooth jocularity (which eventually shades into a passive resignation) juxtaposed with Thorne’s jagged, twitchy paranoia. Like several of the pieces it goes on for too long, circling back to the same topics and comic devices, but the performers’ energy never flags and it entertains and unnerves in equal measure.

Said energy carries over to the next playlet, the best of them, “All Apologies.” It is a comic monologue, given by a man (Jonathan Berenson) to his wife (Jill Durso), in which he apologizes in his own fashion for being an abusive sack of shit. It flips the dynamic of the previous scene, with the woman now reacting, this time silently but so intently, to the increasingly unhinged man. His rambling is a tour-de-force performance in bullshit-spinning peppered with digressions on the origin and meaning of words like “awesome” and “golf,” in the end punctured simply and devastatingly by the wife’s incredulous laughter. The laugh is not in fact in LaBute’s script--she merely stares instead--but it’s a welcome addition that opens the storytelling perspective beyond the captivating and entertaining monster at the piece’s center and keeps it from letting him off the hook.

The same, alas, cannot be said for “Merge,” in which a husband (Anthony Taylor), having picking his wife (Haley Palmaer) up from a convention, tries to parse her ambiguous testimony about having been raped in her hotel room. She wasn’t raped, we learn, for she drunkenly invited all those/both those (the use of the word ‘all’ is a detail the husband clamps onto with the tenacity of a pit bull) men to join her. The script’s one-sidedness--we never get an explanation for or exploration of her nymphomania--makes the play problematic to begin with. Coupled with Anthony Taylor’s furious, accusatory take on his character, it makes the play an ugly exercise in slut-shaming which reaches its terminal conclusion in a nihilistic ending, a murder-suicide traffic swerve that is merely hinted at in the title and stage directions. Of the night’s proceedings, it’s a considerable bump in the road.

The show gets stuck in second gear for the the next piece, “Road Trip.” We’re presented a man (Todd Litzinger) and a young girl (Caroline Jordan) on a seemingly innocuous excursion. We learn that he’s a predator, and like most predators he’s family or something like it, probably her step-father, and this trip, for the girl at least, is decidedly one-way. The relationship between the two characters and the reveal of its true horrible nature is drawn delicately, but the tension of the play exists only between the audience's omniscience, and the limited perspective of the girl. Between the girl and the man there isn’t so much friction, and the piece never quite takes off because of it.

Though it shares similar subject matter, this is not true of the final and most intriguing piece, the show’s namesake, “Autobahn.” Like “All Apologies” it’s a monologue, this time given by the woman (Annie Grier) ruminating while her husband (Jonathan West) drives, about their troubled foster son’s accusations of sexual abuse. The play rightly doesn’t belabor the reveal of what it’s about and so spends its time exploring the two characters’ responses to this situation and, accordingly, forcing us to wonder what exactly the situation is. The wife’s chatter, her rationalizations and can-do optimism, increasingly feel like an evasion of a horrible truth. Meanwhile Jonathan West wears a mask of the most profound sadness--but is it a mask? Is it guilt? Self-pity? Manipulation? The play never tips its hand in either direction. This can be frustrating, playing up an ambiguity for which, as Dylan Farrow’s recently renewed allegations against Woody Allen have shown, there is no luxury in real life. As a work of drama, though, the did-he-or-didn’t-he question works, especially as a contrast to the other the earlier plays, whose creeps we were allowed to feel much more certain about.

The production, it should be noted, eliminates two of the seven vignettes, "Funny" and "Long Division." They are missed not for the plays in themselves, though "Funny" is quite good, but for their casts, two women and two men; the one man-one woman dynamic of the other plays, especially given Neil LaBute’s fixation on abusive sexual relationships, could use some variety. What we are given, however, is a solid offering, directed and performed with energy and attention, in service of an at-times uneven collection of plays. As a vehicle for drama, the engine occasionally threatens to stall, but the body is ever polished.