'Sunken Living Room' an engaging play about family angst
BY CHRISTINE DOLEN
cdolen@MiamiHerald.com

Remember the sunken living room? In its architectural heyday, it promised gracious living in an elegant pit sunk a few steps lower than all the other rooms in the house. David Caudle remembers. And in The Sunken Living Room, which has just opened at New Theatre, the Miami native recalls a specific era while exploring timeless family dynamics. His engaging new play combines a sweet adolescent awkwardness with deeper fissures in a family that is itself sinking. Working under the mentorship of playwright Arthur Kopit, Caudle developed The Sunken Living Room in part thanks to Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs' Downstage Miami program. The play was to have had its world premiere last fall at New Orleans' Southern Repertory Theater, but Hurricane Katrina upended drama along with the rest of life there. Now Caudle's unsettling, funny, poignant play is finally getting that premiere, as a coproduction of New Theatre and Southern Repertory.

It was worth the wait.

Staged by Southern Rep producing artistic director Ryan Rilette, the play focuses on an eventful night in the life of Wade (John Magaro), a 16-year-old brainiac who is both a sexual innocent and the only one in his family with even a sliver of common sense.

Wade's 17-year-old brother, Chip (Rudy Mungaray), has managed to impregnate Tammy (Arianne Ellison), his girlfriend of the moment. The boys' mother, Lynette (Pamela Roza), tunes out the chaos of roiling adolescence by devoting herself to bridge with the same passion Chip brings to the consumption of illegal drugs. Two other family members are discussed but not seen: sister Allison, who is apparently as good as dead as she's off living ''in sin'' with her boyfriend; and nameless Dad, a pilot who (as Chip puts it) probably is ''banging stewardesses'' during his many nights away from Miami.

On this particular night in 1978, after Lynette has been conned out of ''movie'' money by Chip and gone off to play bridge, Wade gets treated to a sob story about Tammy's pregnancy. Reluctantly, he hands over money from his job at Burger King to help pay for an abortion. Chip soon reappears with Tammy, stashing her in the room he shares with Wade to wait while he heads out to Overtown to buy drugs.

Interacting with Tammy in the family's neat-as-a-pin sunken living room, Wade discovers many things about her bruised self-image, his volatile brother's cruelty and emotional extremes, and his own nascent sexuality. Many scenes could stand a bit of judicious trimming, allowing removal of the intermission and thus a more intense immersion in Wade's world. But Caudle's writing is full of humor, compassion, keen observation and period-perfect language, so even with a bit of fat here or a few extra sentences there, The Sunken Living Room sustains our interest.

Working on Jesse Dreikosen's what-were-we-thinking set, with its now-ugly '70s furniture and brown shag carpeting, the four talented actors bring Caudle's characters vividly to life. Magaro's Wade -- who is, we'd guess, some version of the playwright's adolescent self -- is a kid who swings from intellectual confidence to emotional/social awkwardness. And he is, in the end, adorable. As he did in New Theatre's Paradise earlier this season, Mungaray gives a performance that exudes both intensity and complexity, finding the wounded boy inside the violent bully. Ellison, with her feathered Farrah Fawcett hair and her flaired decorated jeans (K. Blair Brown did the terrific '70s costumes), also communicates her character's duality, her tough exterior and vulnerable interior. Roza, who appears all-too-briefly, suggests a self-absorbed mother who has had it up to here (and then some) with her sons' endless crises.

The Sunken Living Room is the final production in New Theatre's Laguna Street space in Coral Gables, its home for nearly five years. As the company gets ready to move to Coconut Grove this summer, leaving the place where Nilo Cruz created his Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics in 2002, The Sunken Living Room is an artistically impressive way to say farewell.

Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.