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Many theater-lovers will tell you that theater is a church.
We hope there will be cookies after the service.
They have weight to them.
Even in his strangest and most absurd works, theres typically a message about the duty of care.
We first meet Chris as a tiny baby, not quite three months.
His father (Howard Overshown) reassures her: Things just dont start out of nowhere.
Well, they do.
Cabell now plays Chriss aunt and Overshown is a doctor, tired but charmed by Chriss pert humor.
He asks if she knows what the philtrum, that groove between our nose and lips, does.
Nothing, it turns out its just where the two halves of our face grew together in the womb.
Why has he told her this?
I dont know, youre a smart kid, he says.
Insert a helpful metaphor.
It all comes together in the end.
Chris proceeds through existence in these little hops.
Gender doesnt define Chris, nor does race.
Chronology does, though, so each iteration gets older and older.
Yet the biography stays steady.
The new-Chris-every-scene setup is quickly absorbed, butThe Underlying Chrisis still immensely delicate.
Why, oh why, did that father ever fly that little baby around the room?
But theres still a certain spiritual organization to the play, the faintest echo of the pulpit.
When death inevitably comes (spoiler!
It comes for us all), we see the funeral.
Characters, played by all the many physical bodies we have known as Chris, stand around in mourning.
We, though, remember that Chris is in all of them.
Eno, in a clever exchange, has used the specific way that theater asks us tosuspendbelief tocreatebelief.
Something is everlasting, after all.
Here endeth the lesson.
WhereThe Underlying Chrisis quiet, the Bedlam production ofThe Cruciblehas chosen to be loud.
Its okay to let him wear that.
But as a play, boy oh boy, its like a slab of muscle.
As the situation deteriorates, Tucker has people crawl across the floor like animals, or just shout.
But the play itself yanks back.
Scenes work best when theyre delivered without embroidery; otherwise, they falter.
I love a bit of directorial manhandling, but here the play just fights it all to a draw.
The other major force is Susannah Millonzi.
But Millonzi is something else altogether.
Shes giving one of those performances of total transparency that come along very rarely.
If the text is a muscle, Millonzi is its bones.
Certainly she seems to have been burned clean purer and finer than almost everything around her.
The Underlying Chrisis at Second Stage through December 15.
The Crucibleis at the Connelly Theater through December 29.
