Jordan Harrison's new play is very high concept, a sort of Pleasantville for real. You've heard of Civil War reenactments and maybe been to one of those tourist sites where actors pretend to be Pilgrims and answer questions about their daily routine.
In this comic drama, Harrison imagines a group of people who take this one step further: they create a gated community where everyone is committed to living back in 1955. Wives mostly stay at home and prepare meals, husbands go to work and have a few drinks after, the TV shows I Love Lucy on one of its three channels, racism and other prejudices are subtly back in style and so on. Why?
Why indeed. It doesn't take much thinking to realize that only very damaged people would want to escape to a "better" time in the past. Mind you, there is something to be said for repression and limits - primetime comedies are sometimes more sophisticated than cable versions because they can't simply show sex or curse freely and therefore must be more creative. The idea bubbling under Maple and Vine is that the repressions of the 1950s might serve a similar freeing purpose for our heros.
We begin in the present -- wait, the whole show takes place in the present. We begin in the City where Katha (Marin Ireland) is sunk into a depression over a miscarriage and her husband Ryu (Peter Kim) finds his career as a plastic surgeon unsatisfying. The play spends ten or so tiresome minutes trying to convince us that these two would be open to uprooting their lives and joining a cult -- as Ryu puts it -- where they'd lose all contact with the outside world and be living in 1955.
Maple And Vine would have been much better off beginning right away with the sales pitch by Dean (Trent Dawson) and Ellen (Jeanine Serralles). They have a lot of fun embodying 50s cliches with passion, from the right clothes to the right lingo (but not too much; don't overdo it, they caution). Besides, we never really buy the central conceit that our heroes would actually do this, especially since they're a mixed race couple and that raises all sorts of complicating issues.
The show develops a little interest when Katha -- now Kathy, no funky offbeat names in 1955, thank you very much -- blossoms as a housewife, Ryu finds the lowered expectations at his job a relief, and they encourage some subtle prejudice in order to spice up their experience. Further complications arise when we discover Dean is a homosexual. The Commies are presumably just around the corner though at Maple and Vine they're mostly present as a scare tactic rather than a real internal threat (just like in 1950s America)!
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