Review: Shrewd Summer Nights presents Low Hanging Stars at the Eponymous Garden [Theater]
New play development in Austin tends to be restricted to a handful of forums—Austin Scriptworks, FronteraFest (in an unofficial capacity), and the University of Texas. This made the Shrewd Summer Nights staged reading series especially interesting. If new play development is limited, the encouragement of new plays exclusively by women is even less common. The series, which features three plays by three local women, concludes tonight with Jenny Connell's There Be Dragons (8pm, The Blue Theater, tickets here). And, if last week's offering of Sarah Saltwick's Low-Hanging Stars is any indication, the performance ought to be more accomplished and fully-formed than the "staged reading" development status would normally indicate.
Low-Hanging Stars concerns itself with three characters:Gillian Rose (Wallis Currie-Wood) a child star struggling through adolescence—think Miley Cyrus, maybe, or Dakota Fanning circa The Runaways; Lita Rose (Anne Hulsman), her mother; and a Young Man (Jacob Trussell) who died years earlier, yet remains to wanders the mountainside of the small New England town Lita has taken her daughter to for "vacation".
Those scare quotes are there because all's not as it seems behind Lita and Gillian's getaway. It does the play, which unfolds its layers beautifully, a disservice to summarize it so harshly, but Gillian's attempt to grow her career may have had her growing up on-screen much too quickly. In the Perez Hilton Age, a young teenager is fair game, and Lita rushes her daughter off to the small town in which she grew up to help her avoid the (presumed) onslaught of photos flooding the Internet of her with MS-Painted dicks all over her face or whatever exactly it is that people are saying about her. There, they can disconnect, and Gillian can take some time to be a child again.
Saltwick and Currie-Wood manage to capture this aspect of Gillian perfectly, a collaboration of script and performer that's incredibly effective. Currie-Wood's giddiness at simple things, like being the one who gets to call to order the pizza, is tangible, and the play shines at its brightest when she struggles with the conflicting desires of adolescence: to be seen as a grown-up, and to still enjoy the security of being a child.
The theme of how and when to grow up wisely explored through three disparate characters: the child star, the mother who was once a teen beauty, and the ghost of a young man who never got the chance to do it himself. While it could have come off as gimmicky, the treatment of the ghost is instead relatively subtle, and allows for that theme to be explored much more deeply. Gillian, like most people, can see the Young Man, but can't hear him speak (making him the perfect companion for a teenage narcissist), while Lita can't see him, but is the only person who can hear him. This creates a clever dynamic—Lita, as the mother of a child star, is clearly not often the object of fascination.
All of this is handled really effectively, and it's a rare treat to watch a play that reveals its themes with so little effort. All three of the characters have an interesting relationship with one another, and those relationships are central to what makes Low-Hanging Stars work.
The play's missteps, then, come when it breaks from what we've been treated to, and focuses on things external to the relationships. Both the Young Man's ghostly status and Gillian's career are effective MacGuffins, of no importance to the audience, but vital to the characters on stage. Saltwick is able to deftly swing Gillian's role as a child star into something that colors her understanding of herself in such a way that it's central to how she relates to both her mother and the ghost, but the second half of the play is bogged down in some metaphysics and philosophy that are a drag. While it's understandable that Lita would want to know how the Young Man died, in the audience, there's no answer that will be truly satisfying, and when it's revealed, the characters break into an argument on a subject that we have no interest in.
The problem's further exacerbated by the fact that the ending breezes through the relationships of the characters, and the questions we've been asking throughout the play: Primarily, are Lita and Gillian going to stay in New England or go back to L.A.? The answer isn't settled via a true climax, and the dramatic tension further fizzles out in the final scenes, which focus exclusively on the Young Man's difficulties in the afterlife. It's not a satisfying way for a play that focused on fully realized, touching relationships, to end.
There's an adage about dramatic writing that says, if your third act falls flat, the problem is the first two acts. That's clearly not the case here—there's a ton of meat on these bones, and the problems Low-Hanging Stars encounters at the end are more a result of trying to shoehorn an extra idea into a script that succeeds brilliantly on the strengths of what's already there. Having the opportunity spend an hour and a half with Gillian Rose, Lita, and the Young Man is a pleasure; if we got the chance to see them off properly, it'd be pretty close to perfect.
