Times-Picayune Entertainment Section Friday, January 26, 2007

MULTI-LEVELED DRAMA Home alone with troubled teens at Southern Rep: Review by David Cuthbert
David Caudle's new play, "The Sunken Living Room," at Southern Rep, is a rarity: a realistic, linear comedy-drama that holds and entertains its audience with an authentic slice of dysfunctional family life.
The storyline takes its time getting started but proves involving on any number of levels. It is funny, touching and disturbing, one character threatening to tip the scales toward tragedy.
Caudle is a promising playwright with a sound sense of theatrical proportion. His humor is caustic and provocative, the drama a bit schematic but valid, building to compelling scenes of emotional and physical violence.
In 1978, three Miami teenagers go through their own suburban Walpurgisnacht. Brothers Wade and Chip are home alone because Dad's a pilot who's absent a lot and Mom is leaving for an all-important bridge game. Chip, 17, is "high-strung," a euphemism for druggie and liar, but a seductive charmer when it suits his purposes. He even uses his cool-dude wiles on his mother. Although Dad has already paid for one abortion on his behalf, Chip is a good-looking jock and still the golden boy, if slightly tarnished.
There was an older sister, Allison, who fled with a boyfriend to join a cult and is now spoken of as if dead. An illuminated family portrait and the immaculate, shag-carpeted, unused living room represent the face the family shows to the world. The burden of sustaining this illusion falls to 16-year-old Wade, the obedient, studious overachiever. Yet no one seems to value him, and when Wade tries to open his mother's eyes to his brother's duplicitousness, she coolly tells him his behavior is "not very attractive."
Gawky, geeky Wade is bright, compassionate and fighting the notion -- and his brother's taunts -- that he might be gay. He retreats into his books, his sister's Joni Mitchell records and -- ever so carefully -- the perfect living room, which is "his," by right of being the perfect son. Being gay, he's sure, would negate that achievement.
When Chip's foxy, flirtatious girlfriend Tammy shows up, she hits it off with Wade, and blithely offers herself as sexual driver's ed, with the embarrassed Wade awkwardly at the wheel, in one of the play's friskiest, best played scenes.
Drugs enter the picture and things gradually turn accusatory and confessional as Wade's illusions about his family are destroyed, along with the living room. In the end, things seem about to return to the status quo, but not for Wade. The last line of the play is his, and it is as rueful and wised-up as a Dorothy Parker punch line.
Wade is played by John Magaro, a remarkable actor in his early 20s, who is slight of build, pencil-thin and looks 16. More importantly, he acts 16 in subtle ways. He pitches his voice in a higher register. Wade's emotions are always close at hand, easily tapped. When he finds someone he can talk with, such as Tammy, words and feelings pour out, along with perceptive assessments. Chip, he tells her, "knows it feels good to be liked, but he doesn't know it feels better to like people back." Magaro suggests Wade's incipient sexual orientation in gestures and stance -- resting his weight on one foot and crossing it with the other, as if modeling. It's a layered portrait of a meticulous person trying to control himself and everything around him.
Rudy Mungary is no less complex as the self-destructive Chip, who knows the power of his own sexuality. In his shag haircut, Mungary evokes Freddie Prinze in "Chico and the Man," had Chico been a rebellious thug. Chip's "bad boy" acting out masks an anger deeper than Wade's. Only a year older than his brother, he's been through more and sees his parents' hypocrisy with outrage, as Mungary makes clear in impassioned speeches that seem torn from him.
Arianne Ellison's Tammy has a fresh beauty at odds with the tough "ambassador from Slutland" ready to jump anything in pants. "What is this supposed to be, like, the '50s?" she yells at one point. The teen trio is reminiscent of James Dean, Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood in "Rebel Without a Cause." Late in the play, Wade sees them that way. "Let's go find Allison and just all take care of each other," he says. "Like we're all each other's kids." The cast is ably completed by Staci Robbins, as the willfully oblivious mother.
Ryan Rilette's direction follows the play's trajectory, with an initially casual pace. But he builds a nice head of steam and the penultimate scenes crackle.
Jesse Dreikosen's '70s set reminds me of the old Beverly Dinner Playhouse's unit sets for sex comedies about swinging bachelors, so it's era-appropriate and cheesy, along with Rayna Middleton's costumes, or lack thereof.
"The Sunken Living Room" is dramatically buoyant theater. --DAVID CUTHBERT. Theatre Writer