(Above: Reviewer Kelly Oristano praises “Wonder of the World,” a dark but thought-provoking comedy onstage through March 31 at the Very Little Theatre; photo by John Bauguess)
By Kelly Oristano
One thing’s clear in VLT’s new staging of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Wonder of the World: Women run the world of this play. Men are little more than means to an end, or just as often means away from an end. What’s much less clear is whether anyone is left better off by this inversion of old roles.
It’s a well-executed ensemble comedy, with its roots in one woman’s story. Cass (Clare McDonald) has discovered that her husband Kip (Cody Mendonca) has been hiding a dreadful secret. She is packing her bags and she is quickly gone. From the very first moments of the play McDonald’s Cass is physically motivated. We often say someone can’t sit still; Cass can’t seem to sit at all. She stands on a moving bus. She stands during medieval dinner theater. At one point, she stands in an airborne helicopter. The point is, Cass is on the move.
On a bus from Brooklyn to Buffalo, Cass meets Lois (Marla Norton). Both are heading to Niagara for reasons stemming from marital discord, but while Cass travels with a to-do list of several hundred things Kip had always kept her from doing, Lois has a single task on her agenda. Eventually Lois puts her quest on hold to formally become Cass’ sidekick. (Item #78 on Cass’ list is “have a sidekick.”)
When Cass and Lois arrive in Niagara, they meet locals Karla and Glen (Sharon Sless and T. Sean Prescott) an older and seemingly happily married couple, and Captain Mike (Alex Miller) who pilots the Maiden of The Mist, the boat that putters around the bottom of the falls. When you’ve just left a husband like Kip — plus his secret — a glorified tour guide like Captain Mike looks like a pretty good port in a storm. I don’t think it spoils the play to say that Cass uses Mike to check a big item off her list.
But Kip’s not the sort of guy to sit at home and be miserable (He actually does for a bit. In one of the show’s funniest and shortest scenes, Mendonca revels in Kip’s sad-sackery), and eventually he tracks Cass down. For most of the second act, all the characters are in the same spot, so we can finally start sorting things out with a group therapy session in the form of The Newlywed Game. And a gun.
The core of what makes this odd tale stick with the audience is the gradual realization that Cass’ crisis wasn’t the weirdness of Kip’s secret (it is plenty weird, though,) it was simply that he had a secret, and she never had. It was learning that he had done things and had created a secret space for himself that set her on a journey to individuate. Cass may never check off every item on her list, but she will finally be Cass. And she will always be in motion.
Michael Walker’s direction is praiseworthy. Most notably, he makes several large set pieces on the VLT stage — a bus, a car, two helicopters, three restaurants, and more — move smoothly and silently, which is no small technical feat. He also worked just as diligently to help the ensemble create characters and relationships that move the story forward along a razor’s edge between despair and courage, comedy and tragedy. The other design work is lovely and fun, sometimes stark and sometimes quite specific. The reveal of his main set drew scattered oohs and ahhs from the audience.
Your reviewer appreciated that the play itself did not devolve into broad door-slamming farce in the second act, nor did it get suddenly serious. Keeping all the characters in one space led to tighter storytelling and sharper comedy than a moving farce might have.
The ensemble is good from top to bottom. McDonald and Norton develop shades of Thelma and Louise over the course of the evening; their strangers-to-friends evolution is utterly convincing; Sless is sharp and foul-mouthed and honest and you can’t not love her Karla.
By the nature of the play, the men are supposed to just kind of be there, more than eye candy but less than main characters. Nonetheless Mendonca is funny and true, Prescott is captivating as the second or even third banana to Sless, and Miller is charming as the sweater-collecting, Costco-loving Captain.
Jennifer Appleby is a delight as “Barbara, Pilot, Waitresses, Janie” according to the program, but there’s much more to it than that. There are secrets and stories about all her characters that made me want to see a companion play centered on them, starring her. Her versatile voice and dry comic sensibility are very well suited to this sextuple role. Appleby drives the second act forward as the therapist/host of The Newlywed Game with a quiet manic verve.
Once all is sorted, we return to the question: is anyone better off? It’s safe to say no one would have wanted the men in this play to be the ones in the driver’s seat; and if it’s hard to say anyone’s better off for the women having taken the lead, at least we can say now everyone knows the truth. It’s Niagara, so of course we hear the word “honeymoon” about 15 times over the course of the evening, but it’s always in the context of the honeymoon being a lie. We weren’t really married but we said honeymoon. We’ve been married 38 years but we’re saying honeymoon. We’re private detectives and our cover story is honeymoon.
That’s what the play wants to tell us, in the end. The honeymoon is a lie. The honeymoon is over. The honeymoon has always been over. Now you know.
