2004-2005 Season

Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance

In this hip, urban comedy by the author of the Off Broadway hit [sic], "Jen and Sallie," two young women who cannot finish their dissertations, refuse to let their frustrated boyfriends, Lyle and Karl, into their apartments or their lives. The foibles of procrastination take center stage as the women, glued to their desks, obsessively telephone-talk their way through fantasies and fears in a desperate attempt to fight off the inevitable — love and real life. SUITCASE was cheered by Newsday as "exquisite and thoroughly original."

SUITCASE was produced in 2004 at Soho Rep and La Jolla Playhouse. BareBones Managing Consultant Anne Lambert comments, “[sic] and Suitcase were both developed by the creative team at Soho Rep. I echo La Jolla Playhouse Artistic Director Des McAnuff's observation that, as in [sic], Suitcase charms with its 'forlorn, quirky characters navigating an imaginative urban landscape in which the poetry of deferred dreams becomes the unlikely springboard for farce.'" Director Modafferi previously directed [sic] in July 2003 and in revival for the City Stage fringe theatre festival in July 2004.

Note: The full title of the play is Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance. A script note informs us that Gibson is paying tribute to Jorge Luis Borges' essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (from his Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952), in which scholarly reference is made to a Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. It is written there that animals are divided into categories, including mermaids, those that have just broken a flower vase, and those that resemble flies from a distance.

Jen (Greta Zandstra) and Sallie (Amy Campbell) ignore their boyfriends, Lyle (Lee Thomas) and Karl (Glenn Hutchinson) in BareBones production of Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance.

Read the press release.

What They Said About It...

playwright Melissa James Gibson

'Suitcase' packs in a lot

Playwright Melissa James Gibson doesn't adhere to popular formulas of plot and action. Instead, her plays are a humor-laced study of language and theatrical space, the nature of narrative, and the nuances of articulation. Is there room in theater for productions that forsake dramatic glitz for snappy dialogue loaded with word play, similes and alliteration? If Gibson's current success is any indication, absolutely.

"Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance" will have its regional premiere at Barebones Theatre Group with Allison Modafferi in the director's chair. Modafferi also directed Gibson's Obie Award-winning play "[sic]" for Off-Tryon Theatre Company and City Stage Festival in 2004.

At the center of "Suitcase" are two struggling female doctoral candidates in their 30s and their boyfriends.

The three main characters in "[sic]" also are in their 30s. While critics seem to think Gibson has tapped into a well of truisms about a particular group, she refuses to make blanket statements about her characters. "I wouldn't at all be interested in being the spokesperson for a group," Gibson says.

Yet it is important to Gibson that the characters from both plays are understood to be in their 30s. "It is much harder to be out there struggling with your art when you are in your late 30s," Gibson says. "Parents want children to become doctors and lawyers and investment bankers. The life of the mind doesn't offer financial security."

Gibson uses language carefully. "The dialogue is very realistic," says Greta Zandstra, who plays Jen. "So realistically broken, overlapping and confusing, in fact, that it is very challenging. So all in all, it is both infuriating and appealing, as challenges tend to be."

"The characters in both these plays are very conscious of how they use language and focus on all the possible effects of words because they are constantly miscommunicating and misunderstanding one another," Gibson says.

A Vancouver, British Columbia, native, Gibson moved to the United States when she was 17 and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. "I'm interested in what urban living does to a person's experience and interactions. We all know a lot about each other without knowing each other. We are all reliant on public transportation so we are forced to interact with other people," Gibson says.

Apartments figure prominently in Gibson's work. "I am interested in the transitional spaces within them. Where public meets private. I'm interested in what happens in doorways, or rooftops," she says.

Why is Modafferi tackling this playwright again? "She's brilliant!" Modafferi says. "I love her humor and how it unfolds. I love her beautifully weaved poignant moments, her tapestry of words. ... I love the creative ways she helps us understand our own lives. In a single moment, you laugh, your heart breaks, and then you're laughing again."

Failure To Communicate

At key points in Suitcase or, those that resemble flies from a distance, the two dysfunctional couples substitute a cappella song for dialogue. Then in the signature scene of Melissa James Gibson's deconstruct of New Age living and communicating, the two men and two women do nothing but call out each others' names — for minute after minute in a dizzying medley of inflections and possible intentions.

In a useful note from the playwright in the BareBones Theatre Group playbill, Gibson sees life as "a struggle among airborne wants." Hitching rides onto Gibson's playful use of language, tracing graceful curlicues of candid _expression, coy evasion, confused interruption and guarded emotion, those wants sometimes disintegrate into the pure chaos of sound. Opera for the new millennium! Or a U-turn back toward the grunts of the Cro-Magnon Age.

The paradox of this atavism is that all four of the characters are so articulate that they can use euphemistic language to deflect intimate relationships — and the onset of adulthood — from their doorsteps. Jen stands at the vortex of all the inertia and anomie, a black hole of indifference into which all the other characters futilely toss their affections or confidences.

Jen has locked herself into her sloppo apartment, slumped amid the garbage her hapless boyfriend devotedly drops at her doorstep — for a doctoral dissertation that school officials have told her she must abandon. She's afraid to call her advisor, who might be able to jumpstart her stalled project, because this might also mean decisive closure. Similarly, admitting that Karl is her boyfriend would be an uncomfortable step forward.

While Jen is attempting to prove that people's identities can be accurately gauged by what they discard, her friend Sallie is dissertating on the different ways — besides the usual sequence of beginning, middle and end — that narrative can unfold. Because both Jen and Sallie have closed their doors indefinitely to their boyfriends, the struggle of their airborne wants becomes pictured like the physics of desire. Slowly, the guys breach the barrier of the outside door to their girlfriends' apartment building, coming in from the cold only to encounter a more stubborn barrier: the locked doors to the women's nests.

Wielding her comedic cutlass all the while, Gibson focuses our attention irresistibly on the question of whether the guys will breach that last barrier and achieve actual contact with their gals. If the baroque euphemistic language of their dialogue makes us pause occasionally and consider whether we're watching real people, so much the better.

The BareBones production, directed by Allison Modafferi, is as tight as anything in town. Greta Marie Zandstra wraps Jen in a chilling coldness as she accords equal attention to her friends, her nails and the discarded Christmas cassette tape of a family she's never met. A fascinating monster.

Amy Campbell gives Sallie a cuddly softness that humanizes her trepidation and her verbose evasions. Lee Thomas, long a fixture in the local comedy firmament, complements this sweetly whining Sallie with a winsome loneliness of his own as Lyle. As the jittery, neurotic Karl, Glenn Hutchinson rounds out the cast with his best effort ever.

Many would find Gibson's playful sublimation of courtship puzzling and repellent. Others who are more likely to venture into SPAC and SouthEnd will realize that sexual intercourse is the very essence of Gibson's abstraction. Pretty cool once you get the hang of it.

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