THE HANGOVER REPORT – Craig Lucas’s messy, shattering I WAS MOST ALIVE WITH YOU nakedly acknowledges the bravery of living

The company of Craig Lucas's "I Was Most Alive With You" at Playwrights Horizons.

The company of Craig Lucas’s “I Was Most Alive With You” at Playwrights Horizons.

Last night, Craig Lucas’s latest play I Was Most Alive With You opened Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Mr. Lucas’s most famous works – which include the 1988 play Prelude to a Kiss (which introduced many theatergoers to the sensational actress, the ageless Mary Louise Parker) and the 1983 play Reckless (the 2004 revival also starred Ms. Parker) – are noted for being modern-day fairytales with wise but unexpected twists. Not surprisingly, I Was Most Alive With You takes on the same mold. A messy, thematically tangled, and emotionally wrenching family drama, Mr. Lucas here had perhaps bitten off more than he could chew. But without risk taking comes limited glory, and I walked away from the theater thinking I had just witnessed a gloriously profound, albeit chaotic, ode to being human in this day and age. By nearly all accounts, it’s theater at its richest and most shattering.

There’s no getting around the fact that I Was Most Alive With You is a difficult play to sit through. It takes its inspiration from The Book of Job, the biblical story of a man who is beset by troubles to prove his love of and loyalty to God. In Mr. Lucas’s play, he seems to suggest that we are all Job, but he takes God out of the equation. On the surface, the play presents a successful, well-adjusted family going about its usual business. But as the play unfolds, you become aware of the intense disfunction just beneath the veneer, which is only exacerbated by the unfortunate series of events that befall members of the tribe. Each of them attempt, mostly unsuccessfully, to make sense of their respective hardships in a world of senselessness. It’s this exisitential element – and the accompanying, pleading need to wrap narratives around our experiences – that for me triggered a strong response.  Indeed, the play itself is framed in a similar manner; the emotional extremities and melodramatic tendencies on display could have well come across distastefully on their own, but as contextualized around the story of Job, it’s a risk that pays off handsomely.

The production, ambitiously directed with fluidly and stone-cold precision by Tyne Rafaeli, coolly faces the substantial challenges presented by Mr. Lucas’s play (for example, the play frequently travels back and forth across time and space, in various modes of communication). This objective frankness actually works well in conjunction with the work’s rollercoaster series of blows, effectively highlighting the brutal realities of life. The performances are truthful across the board, and some of them are incredibly potent. In particular, the handsome deaf actor Russell Harvard, who makes a welcome return to the New York stage after captivating in Nina Raine’s Tribes a number of seasons back, gives a performance of great courage that’s among the most powerful you’ll find currently onstage. But really, the entire cast (who reflect a wide spread of characters across the social spectrum, hence operating like a sort of microcosm), which includes the like of the great Lois Smith, is pretty much on his level. And although I found the use of a shadow cast – which signs the show on the set’s mezzanine level – only marginally successful, it’s a testament to the fullness and naked bravery on display, in Mr. Lucas’s writing and the performances, that I nonetheless wholeheartedly applaud the endeavor.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

 

I WAS MOST ALIVE WITH YOU
Off-Broadway, Play
Playwrights Horizons
2 hours, 15 minutes (with one intermission)
Through October 14

Categories: Off-Broadway, Theater

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