Playwright: Tracy Letts
At: Steppenwolf Theatre Company
Phone: (312) 335-1650; $42-$52
Runs through: Jan. 18
Those who liked Tracy Letts' Killer Joe and Bug because of their noir comic
essence and rich veins of violence and sex will be disappointed with Man from
Nebraska. But those who liked Letts' strong theatricality and pithy writing will find
their judgment confirmed by this contemplative and understated—but possibly
unfinished—world premiere.
Sixty-ish Ken Carpenter is from Lincoln, Nebraska; a successful husband, father,
and businessman married almost 40 years to Nancy. Set and content in his
ways—he and Nancy have a nearly wordless routine—Ken is buoyed by deeply
rooted Baptist faith (the play is not about religion). Without warning he undergoes a
crisis of faith; an ecstatic crisis one might say, for Letts reveals so little about Ken
beyond superficial routine that we cannot detect underlying causes, if any. Weeping
in the night, Ken says to Nancy, 'I don't understand the stars! Can you explain the
stars? Then there's nothing you can do!'
Ken, Nancy, their adult daughter Ashley, even their pastor are marvelously unable to
verbalize feelings and fears. Dependent on rock-solid Ken, the others don't wish to
know about his crisis, and grow petulant when his despair challenges their life
routines and rote assumptions. Ken tells Ashley she didn't earn her faith, but merely
inherited it from him. 'How do you earn it?' she asks. 'I don't know,' Ken replies.
And so Ken's journey—and the audience's—is engaged.
Both the writing and direction (by Anna D. Shapiro) are less-is-more. Ken is
revealed in highly evocative brief glimpses played against designer Todd
Rosenthal's towering backdrop of 20 shadowboxes, each of which lights up—a
kitchen, a bedroom, a church—like a snapshot capturing a particular moment. With
small actions and images far more potent than spoken words, Letts and Shapiro
require the audience to live in the moments of Ken's life and listen to the silences.
It's easy to do, gazing upon the craggy brow and square jaw of Rick Snyder as Ken,
who seems to brood even when at ease, and the matronly carriage of Rondi Reed
as caring but unperceptive Nancy. They exude sincerity, even warmth, beneath their
stolid bearings. There's well-etched supporting work all around, too, particularly
from Barbara Ann Grimes as Ken's invalid mother, Thomas White as Ken's comical
pastor and lithe and sharp Shannon Cochran as a would-be femme fatale.
The wonderful Act I is tight, moody and intriguing. It invokes the mystery of faith and
leaves you caring about what happens. However, Letts doesn't—or can't—sustain
the tone in Act II, a rather standard picaresque in which Ken sojourns to London and
rediscovers long-suppressed senses through alcohol, drugs, art therapy and
improbable much-younger friends. Letts returns to his pithy and deeply subtextual
form only as Ken comes home for his mother's funeral; her death having sparked
an ecstatic renewal of faith as unaccountable as Ken's earlier moment of loss. The
London friends disappear as they, the pastor and even daughter Ashley prove to be
ciphers in the play, which rather negates the excellent supporting work.
Only wife Nancy parallels Ken's journey, although not as deeply, and is there to face
the future with him in a final moment as conservative as it is uncertain for them.
Man from Nebraska wants to kick into a more profound gear when Ken goes to
London, but does not. The parallel stories—Nancy, maybe Ashley—want to be more
fully told, but are not. Letts reveals welcome new facets of his writing talent, yet may
have whittled away too much in rehearsals or written too little. Perhaps he doesn't
have the intellectual chops of a Stoppard or Kushner to explore cosmic ideas and
intensely personalize them, or doesn't have the chops yet. It would be splendid if he
put this play aside for 20 years while he gathers additional life experience, and then
took another swing at it. As it stands, Man from Nebraska is concrete at either end
but sand in the middle.
