Rebecca Gilman and Theresa Rebeck use plants as metaphors for human flourishing in their latest works.
Technically, there are only four characters in Rebecca Gilman’s “Swing State,” a melancholy new drama, now at the Minetta Lane. There’s a retired guidance counsellor, Peg ; her troubled young neighbor, Ryan ; the local sheriff, Kris ; and Kris’s niece and deferential new deputy, Dani . They all cause problems for one another, even as they try their clumsy best to offer help. But the fifth character—and the one we should really be worrying about—is Wisconsin.
Prairies, though they appear simple, are miraculous beneath the soil—thanks to complex root masses that descend as deep as fifteen feet, they can survive grazing, fires, and drought. Peg, as played by the graceful Fisher, possesses that quality, too: her selfhood goes beyond what we see.
Among an experienced troupe, Weiler, as Ryan, is still settling into his part; he seems so bent on conveying “troubled youth” that he attacks the soup Peg makes for him as if he’s never held a spoon. Fortunately, Fitzgerald and Thompson both do precise, naturalistic work with Gilman’s delicately shaded dialogue, and manage to make the community just offstage seem populous and real.
But the characters in “Dig” run so counter to recognizable human behavior that they’ll say and do anything. The play’s title refers to the name of a plant shop, which some people onstage inexplicably seem to find confusing. “You don’t actually know what kind of store that might be,” a customer says, even though she has, clearly, managed to figure it out. The shop’s owner, Roger , claims at one point that he hadn’t been selling flowering plants because he found them “too eager to please.
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