Manhattan Theatre Club’s presentation of Sharr White’s The Other Place, at the Samuel Friedman Theater, is a taut, thrilling puzzle of the cruelly ironic disease of Dr. Juliana Smithton. Laurie Metcalf delivers a magnetic performance as the eminent neurological researcher who must cope with the deterioration of her own mentality.
"The first glimmer of it comes on a Friday," Juliana says. While at a medical conference in St. Thomas, giving a speech on a breakthrough drug for dementia, she is struck by a perplexing mental episode: the sudden vision of a girl in a yellow bikini. Juliana searches for where that image came from. What did the yellow bikini vision mean? Is this to a stroke, brain cancer? She refused to accept the possibility of dementia.
Three-time Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee, Metcalf (November) dives into and brilliantly inhabits the character of the feisty Dr. Smithton. Narrating the story, she never leaves the stage as she shares the harrowing turn her life has taken. The maelstrom in her mind is palpable, tenuous and ravaging. Her brash, authoritative, often funny self-confidence gives way to humiliating self-degradation and helplessness. Encounters with the past collide with the present and truth battles fiction, but most often her focus returns to her estranged daughter and “the other place” -- her family summer home in Cape Cod. Bit by bit, answers to Juliana’s convoluted behavior emerge, present more questions, and eventually expose the truth about Dr. Smithton who poignantly admits toward the end, “I’m having a hard time figuring out where I am.”
Dramatic segments point to Dr. Smithton’s painful estrangement from her daughter, Laurel (Zoe Perry), who left home at age 15, after arguing with her mother about dating Juliana’s assistant, Richard (John Schiappa). Suffering through his wife’s disintegration and her biting cruelness towards him is Juliana’s supportive husband, Ian, an oncologist played by Daniel Stern (“Diner,” “City Slickers”) in a commendable Broadway debut, with an intense, despairing portrayal.
Metcalf’s real-life daughter, Zoe Perry (“Grey’s Anatomy”) makes a laudable Broadway debut as the daughter, Laurel, as well as secondary roles as Juliana’s unruffled psychiatrist, Dr. Cindy Teller, and an unnamed woman. As this third woman, Perry is breathtaking at the end of the play, flashing a turntable of emotions as she is confronted by the bewildered, helpless Juliana. In his first Broadway play, Sharr White has written a sharp gripping account with brisk scenes reflecting the confusion in his heroine’s mind. While emotional, he eschews sentimentality and focuses on the illness and its cruel consequences.
Directed with smart discernment by Joe Mantello (Other Desert Cities, Assassins), the journey of Dr. Smithton’s illness is a crackling train ride of memories, conversations and confusion.
The elements of the set are laden with symbols. Lighting by Justin Townsend emits laser-like jolts, like Juliana's mental turbulence, on Eugene and Lee and Edward Pierce's set design of interlocking window frames that resemble windows into memories. William Cusick projects a background video of menacing dark clouds and, at the end, provides an answer to the recurring question of the yellow bikini.
Adding to the emotions raging through Juliana's mind are deafening blasts by sound designer Fitz Patton.
The Other Place had its world premiere with an extended run at off-Broadway's MCC Theater in 2011. The play was nominated for two Outer Critics Circle Awards, a Drama League Award and three Lucille Lortel Awards, with Laurie Metcalf earning OBIE and Lucille Lortel awards for her harsh, riveting portrayal. On Broadway, too, she offers a multi-layered tour-de-force.
