Playwright: Clifford Odets
At: The Artistic Home
Contact: 773/404-1100, $20, $20
Runs through: May 7
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
The Staten Island of Clifford Odets is jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive. There's just no way to live with the sadness.
This is the world of Odets's melodrama, Clash By Night. It's a sweltering place. It hasn't rained for weeks. When the sun goes down, it's not the cool of evening that sweeps over the troubled souls at the heart of the tragedy. In the night sky, they see the Tears of St. Lawrence, an annual meteor shower named for a man burned at the stake.
Directed by John Mossman for the Artistic Home, Clash By Night is thick with the fire of unbearable emotion and looming disaster. At the broken heart of the story are Jerry ( Jason Ahlstrom ) , his wife Mae ( Kate Tummelson ) and their volcanic, damaged houseguest Earl ( Tim Patrick Miller. )
With Mae and Jerry, Odets begins subtly. An attractive pair of twenty-somethings, they seem like a finely matched couple. It is initially only in hints and seemingly inconsequential newlywed bickering that we begin to glimpse Mae's deeply rooted restiveness and frustration, and the hostility that is slowly simmering up to a raging boil.
Enter Earl, a man who seems all swagger and no substance, and who proudly claims his life's motto is 'Come out punchin' and look good goin' down.' He is more prescient than he knows.
You know where all this is going, but the journey and the arrival are so finely crafted both in Odets's noirish dialogue and the cast's ability to make their characters reek of desperation without seeming laughable.
When a heavily boozed Earl bitterly declares, 'That's why I drink this varnish—to get unborn,' he's all but sweating despair. It could be an over-the-top, unintended parody of Marlon-on-method acting. Instead, Miller gives us pure, authentic anguish, the words of a man on a slow, inexorable crawl toward a bad end.
The bit comes in the middle of a wonderfully layered bar scene, as Mae, Jerry and Earl are out for the evening with their friends Peggy ( Betsy McNight ) and Joe ( Jayce Ryan ) . Ryan is a compulsively watchable actor and he doesn't disappoint here, creating a young man hammered at constantly by frustrations he gives his all to fend off.
It's also in the bar that we meet Jerry's uncle Vincent ( Mark Dillon ) , a volatile, machismo-poisoned menace whose blind, misogynistic blood loyalty makes you want to break down the fourth wall and go punch him in the gut.
Mossman keeps the tension building throughout. When the inevitable end comes ( in set designer Christopher Ash's terrific rendition of a movie projection booth ) , it's almost a relief.