Worlds on the Brink: Walden and A Woman Among Women

Emmy Rossum and Zoë Winters in Amy Berryman’s Walden, at Second Stage. Photo: Joan Marcus

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads,” wrote Henry David Thoreau more than a century and a half ago in the journals that became Walden. How much would it have shocked the philosopher to catch a glimpse of our ravaged earth or our monstrous leader? Could he have imagined a future in which human myopia and greed have done such irreparable damage to what’s under our feet that many have begun to look to the stars, not simply for beauty and transcendence but for a literal escape plan? Such is the world in which Amy Berryman’s intelligent and compassionate climate-disaster drama — named for Thoreau’s treatise (though not, as the title might suggest, an adaptation of it) and now receiving its New York premiere under Whitney White’s graceful direction at Second Stage — takes place. Berryman’s characters, NASA-trained twin sisters and the partner to one of them, come together in an environment not so different from the one Emerson’s disciple sought out in order to “live deliberately” — but their cabin in the American wilderness is one of the few places left where the air remains breathable without a mask. Casualties from “a mega-tsunami that hit the East Coast” have just topped 1 million, and while the government pours its resources into off-world survival schemes, a growing contingent of the population lives in protest (with varying degrees of fanaticism) to the idea of using advanced technology to jump ship. Thoreau would have recognized these “Earth Advocates”: They eschew tech, grow their own food, and attempt to “give back” to the land they live on. They believe “the government should be spending all that money on saving this planet, instead of looking for somewhere else to go.”

So says Stella (Emmy Rossum) to her twin sister, Cassie (Zoë Winters), but the words are hardly out of her mouth when Cassie hits back: “And you know it’s way too late for that.” In this Walden, two siblings embody opposing pulls — toward the dear, devastated earth and toward the infinite, uncertain cosmos — and part of the elegance of Berryman’s construction is that the binary is neither the one we expect nor fixed and stable. Though Cassie, an ace astronaut and botanist who’s just returned from a yearlong moon mission, might at first seem far less trad than her sister, who’s homesteading in the hinterlands with her Earth Advocate partner, Bryan (Motell Foster), Berryman has crafted a web of characters delicate enough that one pluck of a strand sends vibrations through the whole structure. Does either sister truly want the thing she’s dedicated her life to? Have both deceived themselves about their ambitions, their desires, their essential natures? When Cassie shows up to visit Stella after her year in space — entering her sister’s rustic compound masked up and jumpsuited, still armed for a place without viable atmosphere — what old wounds and new chaos will she bring with her?

A woman named Stella living simply, even roughly, with a traditionalist, masculine partner; a visit from a sister who seems more bound to air than earth — Thoreau isn’t Berryman’s only primary source. But one of the smart pleasures of Walden is to watch its author gently frustrate the dramatic assumptions that filter in from A Streetcar Named Desire. By playing her characters off Tennessee Williams’s, Berryman turns their inherent generosity into a consistent, subtly bracing surprise. These people aren’t out to destroy; in fact, they all aspire to be makers and caretakers, stubbornly saving and creating as much as they can in the face of what might be the end times. If a brutal destiny awaits them, it’s because they live in brutal circumstances, not because they come to each other looking to wage psychological war.

For plenty of reasons — including the fact that, despite years of training and brilliant work, Stella has left NASA after tests proved her physically unfit for space travel — it’s not easy for the sisters to be around each other. But Walden isn’t a play made up of claws-out shouting and shattering, melodramatic reveals. Rather, it’s about people struggling to love each other as the doomsday clock ticks toward midnight. It’s also about that impossible choice: Bravely stay or boldly go? Even Cassie, who believes that the planet is past saving, admits to Bryan that she didn’t “feel human” on the moon. “I felt purposeful,” she says, sipping a homemade beer and staring out into the deep black, pine-scented night. “I felt sharp. I felt strong. But … I didn’t feel like this.” Winters — who was so terrifying in Heroes of the Fourth Turning and who revealed a messy vulnerability behind Kerry Castellabate’s hard bangs and structured suits on Succession — is a pro at tough, slick surfaces with tangles of insecurity underneath. While her Cassie marches in full of seemingly combative opinions (“He’s an EA?” she gasps at Stella upon learning Bryan’s politics), she’s actually at her own crucial turning point, more full of uncertainty than she’s ever been. “I mean, I’ve always loved space because Stella loves space,” she tells Bryan, sounding suddenly childlike. “I followed Stella to space camp, I followed her everywhere … Botany is kind of my own thing, but NASA and science and ambition … That’s not really me. It is me, but it’s me because of Stella.”

Bryan listens, a little guarded but rapt. He’s learning things about his soon-to-be wife that their relationship — thus far shaped by his own convictions and by Stella’s desire to get as far away from NASA as possible — has never allowed to surface. Foster is a robust, open presence, not unfrustratable but very tender, readily channeling the kind of man for whom patience is a great part of love. “She doesn’t talk,” he bursts out at Cassie in a moment of crisis, lamenting Stella’s tendency to shut down when things get rough. “I’m not … I don’t know, I’m not like that. I need to talk when I’m upset. I need to throw shit.” As an intimacy grows between Cassie and Bryan, Berryman again dances with shadows of Blanche and Stanley, but with all the hatred removed, the poisons of class and time and gender drained away. What’s left isn’t nothing; instead it’s a very different something, poignant in its sincerity and befuddlement. Stella isn’t being betrayed — if anything, she’s being reached out to, desperately, like her light-years-away namesake, by two yearning humans with their feet, at least for now, stuck on the ground.

Rossum gives Stella both a willowy-ness and a sparking current of anxiety that separate her from her sister. At times she feels like a creature caged — something fleet and alert, a gazelle or a wild horse — but Berryman continues to paint in subtle tints and shades. “When I first moved out here,” Stella tells her sister, meaning every word, “like, I love Bryan, but I was like, ‘Why does he live out here? What do people do out here?’ You know? And I guess I’ve started to see how nice it is to just live a quiet life. Garden. Love someone.” When Stella was a NASA architect, her great achievement was designing a bio-regenerative Mars habitat that she called Walden. “I feel like she named it Walden just to annoy me,” snarks Cassie, who thinks Thoreau’s book “reads like a whiny hipster’s blog from 19-whatever.” But both sisters know in their bones that the book that obsessed their famous astronaut father — whose influence shaped their lives — is more than one dead white guy’s diary. It represents what both of them, and Bryan, too, have, in their different ways, aspired to and worked for, and what they fear may no longer be possible: A life in symbiosis with its surroundings, a life of both intention and attention, that creates and preserves more than it destroys.

From Julia May Jonas’s A Woman Among Women, at the Bushwick Starr. Photo: Valerie Terranova

Berryman’s conversation with Tennessee Williams exists in the penumbra of her play, but at the Bushwick Starr’s recently opened new space (for which, hip, hip hooray!), the playwright Julia May Jonas is riffing more directly on Arthur Miller. Jonas is at work on a five-play cycle she calls All Long True American Stories, in which she responds to the Big Boys of the American canon — Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Sam Shepard, etc. — with plays of her own, not straight adaptations but new works that put non-male experience at the center. A Woman Among Women, directed with a light, almost whimsical touch by Sarah Hughes at the new Starr, represents the “All” in the cycle: Miller’s All My Sons, with its backyard setting and its strains of Greek tragedy and buried moral transgression, is rattling around in Jonas’s hopper, and she’s made a fascinating new meal out of it — playful, idiosyncratic, and ultimately wrenching.

Hughes has a great ensemble to work with, and at the center of it is Dee Pelletier’s wry matriarch, Cleo, self-assured and seemingly laid-back in cargo capris and sensible shoes for gardening. Cleo, like Miller’s tragic hero Joe Keller, has both an absent child and, it eventually becomes clear, a dark secret. While the cast and a good portion of the audience lounge in colorful lawn chairs set in a circle on the Astroturf square at the center of Brittany Vasta’s brightly domestic, in-the-round set, neighborly conversation pings back and forth: There’s the local doctor, Sarah (Hannah Heller), an intense, unsettled soul trying to find contentment with her low-key nerd of a husband (Drew Lewis) while her daughter Beatrix and the kid-next-door Rida (Annie Fang, excellent at being 8) bomb around looking for trouble. There’s Tina (Maria-Christina Oliveras, sharp and dangerous), “involved but … not involved” with Cleo, a kind of adopted platonic partner who’s lived with Cleo for years, even helping to raise her daughters after the death of her husband. There’s Tammy (Lucy Kaminsky) and Christine (Brittany K. Allen, wielding a very funny big-eyed stare), the happy-or-are-they lesbian couple with nice jobs, nice kids, and normal liberal hobbies and opinions. Then there’s Cleo’s nervy 30-something daughter, Grace — the wonderful Zoë Geltman — who’s always been the good girl but whose loins are newly afire for her brother-in-law, Roy (Gabriel Brown).

It’s Roy’s wife, Grace’s older sister Josephine, who’s the yawning maw at the center of the play, the pit everyone keeps dancing around on this pleasant suburban afternoon. Josephine’s serving 20 years for almost killing an old man with a tire iron — “she’s bipolar with IED,” says Grace, and she wasn’t taking her lithium at the time of the attack — and although Tina believes in Jo’s fundamental innocence, Cleo wants nothing to do with her older daughter. “What matters are the facts,” she says icily. In Miller’s mode, Jonas has constructed a comfortable house on its way to being blown apart by the cruelties and complacencies hidden in its walls; at one point, Cleo leads the ensemble in a wacky-eerie song (the play incorporates bursts of offbeat, footlights-crossing music by Brian Cavanagh-Strong) about a local street called “Shades of Death Road.” Back in bonnet-wearing times, we learn, an extended family of farmers lived in several houses there — until one day they were all found dead in their homes from consumption. “So now they call it Shades of Death Road,” Cleo sings, not yet willing to face the disease inside her own doors.

A Woman Among Women’s chief draw is that it keeps you on your toes. Jonas shifts tones and modes like a composer switching time signatures, not quite letting us keep the beat, and Hughes’s actors are sometimes weird and hilarious (especially Geltman) and sometimes locked-in and devastating. Heller’s doctor has moments of soliloquy that bloom into some of Jonas’s finest writing — “I watch all the bad boys fade into men who don’t know what to do with themselves. Parodies of men,” she says, recalling her rebellious youth. Later, in the darkness of the play’s finale, she turns a simple observation, hardly even a lament, into a crushing blow: “It’s hard enough when everything’s good.” In this climactic movement, Hughes and Vasta also pull a potent trick with the show’s set, such that the easy community generated over the course of the first 80 minutes crashes into proscenium-framed Miller-esque moral reckoning in the final 20. Part of the power of Jonas’s conceit is that the tragedy of her “woman among women” doesn’t come down to men. In the end, the question of whether Cleo’s guilt could be circuitously traced back to any number of greater systems or prejudices or pressures makes no real difference. She’s no longer among — but damningly alone with herself.

Walden is at Second Stage Theater through November 24.
A Woman Among Women is at the Bushwick Starr through November 17.