"The Good Hours: A Play About Life, Love, and Spirits," The Found Theatre, Long Beach, CA
Wow!
That’s my first impression of the world premiere of Todd Cunningham’s drama The Good Hours: A Play About Life, Love, and Spirits, directed by Virginia DeMoss for The Found Theatre.
It’s the story of Todd (John Sturgeon) and Patty (Kay Richey). You think, how cute, how innocent, a couple meet as they work at a concession stand at a baseball game, He’s smitten with her, woos (poetry, flattery, attention) and wins her. He develops a relationship of mutual trust with her daughter from a prior relationship, and they live happy ever after.
Well, except for the happy ever after part.
Cunningham slams home an explosive, wrenching story of how the perpetuation of family dysfunctionality must be encoded in certain DNAs.
Todd’s not really the Woody Allen-debonair guy we think he is at first. His mother Catherine (Barbara Duncan Brown) is an addled alcoholic, very funny but not very nurturing. Patty’s not about to ride off Brett Butler-like into the sunset with her white knight because of the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse her father Sam (Michael Dale Brown) and mother Estella (Joyce Hackett) heaped upon her.
Though Todd drinks a biblical deluge of apricot brandy he’s a good guy. He cares for Patty and Samantha and wants to establish a stable family. When he moves to Santa Barbara to take a job, he gives Patty his apartment so she can escape the second of two abusive relationships that plague her.
Normalcy descends on the scene...for about five minutes.
Why? Because diabetic, alcoholic Patty weaves in and out of sanity, in and out of being able to function as a girlfriend, mother, employee and, later, a fiancée. The story ends sadly. You can’t really say it ends tragically because it was obvious that the spirits of her past were going to hound her until she succumbed.
It’s a well-conceived, well-enacted story. The stage is minimal, the better to focus on how little the two actors really had, save each other, as well as to focus on the taut drama that unfolded before us. Original barstool music by Kerry Getz and Drayfus Grayson contributed to the whirligig atmosphere, especially “I’ll Drink to That.”
In a particularly nice touch (a nice pun, too), the booze-swigging spirits of their dead parents would be just off to their side, commenting like armchair quarterbacks on the cycle of horror and recrimination that they saw repeating before their soused eyes. It took a while to figure out that was how the play was structured but it lent a powerful touch to an already powerful story.
DeMoss made this a nervy story, which she set up as purposefully bland: two non-descript characters, an innocuous beginning. The two leads were as normal as, well, as you or I. You felt (read hoped) they would get their act together. And then things nosedived.
Performances are 8:30PM Fri & Sat. The play runs until June 7. Tickets are $12. The Theatre is located at 599 Long Beach Blvd. For more info call 433-3363 or visit www.foundtheatre.org.
