When Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius first opened on Broadway, a critic friend scoffed -- before she'd even seen it -- at how ridiculous it was to base a play on a bunch of people trying to get their hands on a rare postage stamp. What did it say about the state of theater that the ancient Greeks mustered elemental conflicts between gods and mortals; Shakespeare's tragedies covered kingdoms, dynasties, wars and the intricate components of human nature; and in 2007, people squabble over postage?
I countered her argument by paraphrasing playwright Jeffrey Sweet, who learned from his years studying improvisation that negotiating over an object is one of the oldest tricks in the dramatist's toolkit. When done right, it isn't about the object at all but about the people fighting over it, why they want it, how they go about getting it, and whether the outcome will leave them better or worse off than before. A piano may figure prominently in the familial tug of war August Wilson offers in The Piano Lesson, but the chords he strikes don't come from those 88 keys. And nobody ever came away from A Moon for the Misbegotten thinking it was about a land sale.
So if a vibrant writer like Rebeck wants to use postage stamps as her point of departure for a family drama, with elements of a thriller added in to keep the audience tense, more power to her. What she neglected to do, alas, was build a human drama worth caring about, while in her haste to get to the creepy-scary set ups, she pretty much throws logic out the window from the first moments on.
A second viewing of the play, courtesy of the current production at the Pasadena Playhouse, only confirmed my assessment two years ago that when you begin a play with preposterous choices, no matter how much structure you build in, you're still working on a quicksand foundation. Is it believable that two half-sisters would come into conflict over an inheritance? Absolutely. Is it possible that an old pair of Mauritius Island one and two-cent stamps could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? Sure, check Wiki. Do we buy that one sister, Jackie, who looked after her dying mother for months, would resent her sibling flying in just for the funeral? And that Jackie would be both desperate enough for money and angry enough at her sister, Mary, to sell the stamps as quickly as possible, even if they aren't quite hers to sell (the collection belonged to Mary's grandfather, not Jackie's)? Perfectly plausible all.
What we don't buy is that this physically unimposing young woman (Kirsten Kollender) would wander into the scummiest looking shop this side of American Buffalo, stand there and tolerate impossibly rude behavior by the owner (John Billingsley), and allow herself to be half-cajoled, half-bullied by Dennis (Chris L. McKenna), a hanger-on at the store. Then, when Dennis comes by the sisters' house to find out more about the stamps, Mary lets him in without so much as a "who's there?" to this stranger before opening the door.
Though often tense, and entertainingly so, the drama is relentlessly undercut by the characters' inexplicable behavior. And whenever Rebeck puts the thriller angle aside to explore the sisters' acrimony, results are usually repetitive and not that interesting.
Set desiger Tom Buderwitz and lighting designer Jaymi Lee Smith do add interest by augmenting the grungy, subterranean stamp shop with gloomy background clouds and hellish oranges and reds for the sky. John Zalewski's astringent, between-scene music is fine, but I resented his thumping, subliminal underscoring as sequences were going on. For all its flaws, the play, under Jessica Kubzansky's direction, ratchets up a nice level of anxiety without having to resort to ominous muzak.
As for comparing this production to the New York original, actingwise it's fairly even. As self-righteous Mary, Monette Magrath does what she can with a fairly thankless role that wasn't memorable for Katie Finneran, either. John Billingsley gets more nebbishy empathy out of the shop owner than prickly Dylan Baker. Kirsten Kollender finds a nice arc in making Jackie ballsier as she gets more desperate (I recall Alison Pill being harsher but also more specifically blue collar). She would do well, though, to seek vocal coaching for her noticeable lisp.
Though F. Murray Abraham turned the thuggishness and comic-erotic obsessions of rich stamp collector Sterling into a star turn, Ray Abruzzo acquits himself just as well on both counts. And if Chris L. McKenna feels a tad smarmier than Bobby Cannavale as Dennis, the choice is certainly legitimate and only enhances the character's shift into good-guy mode at the finale.
Oddly enough, for a play that's so grim, hopeless and violent, the surprise happy ending feels like Rebeck's most honest choice. With all Mauritius' built-in implausibiities, and with a center so essentially hollow, leaving the audience with an upbeat twist at least pulls the work towards the realm of fairy tale, where logic is less necessary. An unarmed, unaccompanied girl wandering, twice, into a seedy den of thieves while gripping a stamp album worth millions feels a bit closer to Red Riding Hood facing the Big Bad Wolf than Antigone defying Creon. But that's just my one and two cents.
