“Skylight” misses clarity

Elinor Gunn and Daniel Gerroll in Skylight (Chris Bennion)

Skylight

ACT Theatre

Through September 30, 2018

Generally speaking, shows at ACT Theatre are created with care. They are well-cast, often superbly outfitted with technical support (set, lights, sound, costumes) and directed well. (Good direction, for reference, is many parts – from the rhythm and movement of the piece, to the “pictures” of the actors on stage, to melding the different parts into a whole, and encouraging the actors to engage in appropriate emotionally deep interactions. It’s a fairly complex activity!)

Many times, the productions cause the script to be elevated and to attain more resonance in meaning. Sometimes, no matter what a producer does, the script just won’t budge from its current state of “not working.” This is the case with Skylight, now on stage at ACT.

All the technical details are in place, with particularly astute and intricate support from Robertson Witmer, a veteran sound designer who has supported dozens of local plays. In this case, he’s helped shape a window opening to a winter street scene sound realistic, metal pipes creaking on and off in an old building, and many other subtleties for this play. These kind of details help the audience focus on the realism of the otherwise unreal pretending going on on stage.

The actors, Daniel Gerroll, Elinor Gunn and Michael Monicatti, provide as much actualization as they can muster. What they’re mustering, though, is a script by David Hare that may have resonated when Hare wrote it in 1995 a little better, but has lost steam and meaning in 2018. While it had revivals in London and New York in 2015, and apparently then garnered acting Tony awards at that time, it’s hard to imagine even the Tony winners doing a better job to make the play “work.”

Kyra (Gunn) is a young woman on her own, now, but we learn that when she was just 18, she moved in with Tom (Gerroll) and his wife Alice and son Edward (Monicatti) and while she lived with them, she had a torrid affair with Tom for six years! In exposition, we learn that she told Tom many times that if Alice ever found out, Kyra would have to leave. Kyra apparently loved Alice.

The play takes place in “real time” roughly for the first 2/3s of this long play – as in the time in the play goes by about like the time in our real lives. Edward shows up at Kyra’s cheap apartment of at least a year and tells Kyra that Alice has died and that Tom is not doing well after a year of mourning. Then Tom shows up immediately after, not knowing that Edward had just been there.

Tom seems to want to be back in relationship with Kyra. Kyra is unsure. Kyra has become a teacher, after leaving to carve out a new life she respects and is dedicated to. Tom denigrates her new life and its poverty. There are many class-conflict issues presented as he makes fun of where she lives and the fact that she teaches low income children.

One might guess that those class issues and aspects of conversation regarding “what is a life?” – debates about what is fulfilling or useful to do with a life – were part of the reason the play was chosen. The bigger problem is that Tom is a boor and a bully, that Kyra may have been groomed by him to be in relationship to begin with, and neither of them acknowledges any of that, really.

It feels more like a play that men might not “get” in terms of women wondering why Kyra was ever attracted to Tom – again, see “grooming” – and certainly now that she’s gotten free of him, what possible reason would she have to accept his attentions, now. But then, see “grooming” again. If that focus is not solved, there really is no reason to pay attention to the class warfare Tom wages, or the discussions about what is worthwhile to do with your life, either.

As a woman attuned to the general #metoo atmosphere (and obsessed by the goings on of the current Kava-NO situation), I am perhaps hyper-sensitive to the power imbalances in male-female relationships. Presented with such an imbalance on stage, now I am looking for it to make sense and/or be resolved somehow. So, plays that ignore it altogether, like Skylight, fail to engage me on whatever other levels they think the play is talking about. I simply can’t care about their speechifying, since they’re ignoring the elephant in the room.

For more information, go to www.acttheatre.org or call 206-292-7676.