A visibly and audibly moved and appreciative audience greeted the opening night of Lauren Gunderson’s I and Youin the intimate NextStage of Rochester’s Geva Theater Center just a week after Ms. Gunderson received the American Theater Critics Association/Steinberg Award for Best New Play of 2013 for this lovely, intimate drama. What made this occasion unusual, but is, I hope, an increasing phenomenon is that it was, technically, still a “world premiere,” yet the fourth production of this significant new play in the “rolling world premiere” of the National New Play Network’s Continued Life Program. A play this excellent is not so hard to find a premiere staging for, but the next few might take a while.
I and You premiered at the Marin Theater Company in California, then Olney Theater in Maryland, then the Phoenix Theater in Indiana before Geva in New York State six months later. Geva agreed to present the splendid Olney production, and the advantages of such extended, cooperative productions should be obvious.
The play’s two characters are teenagers in the same high school class -- an awkward boy who plays basketball and loves jazz and intrudes on a defensive shut-in, a girl with a very serious kidney ailment, who has not been able to attend classes. At the last moment, in effect, Anthony, who has tried to contact Caroline, comes to her house and is sent up to her bedroom to try to get her to work with him partnering on a report, due the next day, that analyzes Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” The situation sounds awkward, if not contrived. They do not know one another. And both have inner conflicts that they do not want to share.
How they find points of contact, do open up to one another, guardedly, and are led by Whitman’s writing to question and learn about larger matters of life is the magic of this funny, moving drama with a potent surprise ending. Unspoken but pervasive is their strangeness and openness to their differences --cultural, sexual and racial. The script indicates that they may be any race but must be of different races.
Dan Conway’s set designs for Caroline’s room characterize a distinctive young girl’s personal idiosyncrasies while also providing gaudy amusement and, yes, a magical place of safety. The production values and direction are very effective if somewhat unreal, as if to compensate for the unchanging situation with some questionably lively action for a seriously ill young woman.
Thaddeus Fitzpatrick is entirely believable as a teenager but is also mesmerizing and powerfully empathetic. Rachel Tice, too, seems persuasive as a young girl, has just enough charm to soften Caroline’s abrasive defensiveness, and has knockout strength in her emotional ending. I’ve read other plays by the very bright and talented Lauren Gunderson, but I really think that this one is an experience worth revisiting.
