That 4000 Miles presents a rare intergenerational story without a conflict between the leads’ generations must be the reason for its popularity. To me, it seems like a Hallmark TV film with added scatology and one woman’s revealing dress.
Into the rent-controlled New York apartment of 91-year-old Vera unexpectedly comes her grandson. Disheveled and dirty and with his bike, he’s cycled all the way from Seattle. It’s their first meeting since her husband’s death some years ago. Vera’s having trouble remembering, probably an early Alzheimers sign. Leo hasn’t been on the best terms with his parents, even before college graduation.
What Leo intended as a night’s crash becomes weeks. A bond grows between the old political and social extreme left winger and the hippie with love of the organic and disdain for work and plans. He and Vera change their relationship as she actually guides him into a reassessment of his other relationships, especially ones now cold.
Lois Markle’s Vera strongly asserts her convictions, while making us aware how she’s isolated herself and fears dementia. Benjamin Williamson surprised me by making me rather like mixed-up Leo. He’s better on stage than in Amy Herzog’s overpraised script. She never makes clear how Leo really regards his adopted sister or understands his parents’ concerns. Williamson makes pitiable Leo’s connection with his recently dead male friend, a girl he loved in college, and a Chinese-American pick-up.
Bec, Leo’s one-time girlfriend, reacts stupidly to Vera’s accounts of her two husbands, a ploy to get Bec to care enough about Leo to forgive his faults.
Maxey Whitehead lacks personality as Bec. She needs to speak out and outward, as if she’d been supplied not such banal dialogue. As for oriental Amanda, Lisa Dring flits in a manner as outlandish as her mixed-styles costume. What was director Tea Alagic thinking? She interprets females as being sarcastic to stilted to silly.
My guest at this production was my best French friend, a professor emeritus of English, especially American literature, who disliked 4000 Miles. Whom are we to follow, what’s the main point, why should we be interested? -- are questions she asked of the play. First it seems to pursue one subject, then another, then it brings in revelations with varying -- if any -- importance. I agree.
Other than casting of the lead actors, lighting is the most effective element of Asolo Rep’s production. Nick Kolin’s design not only reveals the changing of days and of times within them but also of characters’ feelings. The best feature of Tea Alagic’s direction? Making spontaneous behaviors seem to be part of a unified play.
