With the excellently produced world premiere of Zayd Dohrn's haunting play Reborning (which opened the 2009 Summer Play Festival at the Public Theatre in New York), SF Playhouse once again demonstrates that it is a national player of significance in the theatrical world, and certainly the up-and-coming company to watch in San Francisco.
Coping with grief is a mysterious and highly personal process, a truth that Mr. Dohrn movingly explores with insight and humor. The Reborning of the title refers to the creation of dolls designed (with stunning effect) to look like real infants sometimes based on actual portraits of babies who have died. But it also refers metaphorically to the process of psychological rebirth that must follow a deep grief if one is to go on living and loving.
Kelly (Lauren English), an academically trained young artist, has found a lucrative calling in creating the infant dolls out of latex. She learned to work with this material from her husband, Daizy (Alexander Alioto) who makes his living creating latex dildos to order. They are young, hip and successful.
We quickly realize, though, that all is not well. Kelly is attentive to the point of obsession to her latex babies, but resists the advances of Daizy, who wants them to have a child of their own.
It is fascinating and disturbing to watch the actors interact with the latex dolls. They are so realistic, and handled so convincingly, that they could pass for real infants. A moment later, the doll might be tossed into the air like a sack of potatoes (or a plastic dildo). We begin to wonder, what is truth and what is fantasy? And how do the two become blurred under the pressures of grief and fading memory?
When Emily (Lorri Holt) hires Kelly to recreate her deceased baby, an emotional tornado is generated. To Daizy's confusion and distress, Kelly becomes unusually engaged with this new assignment. Surprising details of her past gradually emerge to explain why, and we are drawn into a complex history of grief and recovery and rebirth as the three characters try, in their various ways, to deal with the pain of loss, and help and understand one another in the process.
Dohrn's script skillfully combines humor and pathos to ensure that the audience is engaged and thinking throughout. The juxtaposition of the lifelike plastic dildoes and the lifelike plastic babies is irresistibly amusing, for example, as are the dead-on characterizations of young New York hipster artists and professionals.
All three actors deliver convincing and engaging performances.
As is usual at SF Playhouse, the set design is outstanding, here created by Nina Ball, who seems to leave no detail unexploited.
Zayd Dorhn is a playwright to watch, having been widely produced at such prestigious institutions as the Manhattan Theatre Club, The Public, South Coast Rep and the Alliance Theatre, among others. He has also won numerous awards such as Lincoln Center's Lecomte du Nouy Prize and has had residencies and commissions at Ars Nova, Dallas Theatre Center, Chautauqua and the Royal Court Theatre of London.
Followers of San Francisco theatre will not want to miss this outstanding premiere. For further information, click here.
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