Anyone wondering why white people are projected to become a minority in the United States need only look at the abundance of recent plays focusing on the impaired child-rearing capabilities of WASPs. Ineptitude doesn't mean that divorced parents of a suicidal runaway daughter are any less to be pitied, but for them to generate the level of sympathy that playwright William Donnelly strives to achieve in No Wake requires patience. The play begins with young Susanna "Sukie" Nolan already deceased, for reasons as unfathomable to her sire and dam as they are inconsequential to our author. We learn that Sukie was conceived during coupling between a hormone-crazed Rebecca and Edward, and that their subsequent marriage dissolved after its resulting encumbrance's angry flight from the nest. Reunited for the memorial service, Rebecca invades Edward's hotel room, ostensibly to vent maternal guilt while Roger, her current husband, sleeps off the alcohol offered by way of feeble comfort to the bereft father. Edward, however, travels with his own supply of whiskey and has conveniently left his current significant other at home—out of chivalrous motives, he insists—allowing him to easily grant his ex-spouse's request. Connubial dynamics are quickly resurrected, propelling them into the Jacuzzi and the sheets. Who's screwing whom here, though? Did Rebecca intentionally engineer her pregnancy in order to exercise power over a unassertive consort, or was it an accident of the kind still employed by lazy playwrights? Does kicking off her shoes and lounging on Edward's bed constitute seduction? Is it coincidental that both her former and current mates reveal a history of being bossed by women? Should we be surprised that spoiled narcissists accustomed to discarding toys after tiring of them foster kinships leading rejected intimates to orchestrate their own exits? Fortunately for Donnelley, the Midwest premiere of his play arrives under the auspices of the Route 66 Theater Company, with Kimberly Senior directing Lia Mortensen, Stef Tovar, and Raymond Fox. In a text where characters express sentiments like Edward's nostalgic fantasy—arising as he assists in cleaning out the last habitat of his maritally disruptive offspring—invoking a placid lake with "no wake" to disturb its pristine surface, before Rebecca brandishes a relic of an idyllic infancy and persuades him that turbulence is beneficial, the expertise exhibited by these artists toward sustaining our interest in the musings of adolescents posing as adults for 80 intermissionless minutes is almost enough to make us forget poor Roger, waiting at home to be abandoned once again.
