Realistically portraying the world around us is one of the most difficult tasks for a modern playwright, with so many writers today trying to get in touch with “the now”, and only creating caricatures of the people who walk the streets. Somehow, Annie Baker, with her play Body Awareness, is able to create a play so current it seems like it could have been written yesterday, and yet, at the same time, giving us characters and a plot we can actually care about. It tackles heavy issues such as lesbianism and Asperger’s syndrome, but doesn’t just play them for laughs, and doesn’t pussyfoot around them either, handling them with sensitivity and honesty. The laughs one finds in Baker’s play don’t stem from contrived sit-com tribulation, but from the real comedy of life.
Director Ken Webster, leading Hyde Park’s production of the play, strives to keep this devotion to realism all throughout the work, and everyone from the set and lighting designers to the ensemble try to create as realistic a world as possible. Mark Pickell’s sets transform the stage into a home, using a straightforward, but informed approach, putting good use to nearly every inch of space available. Don Day’s lighting also helps to add to the honesty of the scene, creating a lighting scheme so brilliant that you forget you’re watching something under stage lights.
B. Iden Payne award winner Katherine Catmull leads the ensemble as Joyce, a lesbian mother and high school teacher, raising a child along with her partner, Phyllis, a philosophy professor at a nearby college, played by Emily Erington. Catmull brings a light and playfulness to the role that is refreshing from an actress of her age, retaining a gleam in her eye even through the darkest parts of the play, helping us to see a ray of hope in even the most tense passages. Her chemistry with Erington and her son, played by Sick’s Stephen Mercantel, is rich and believable, the devotion she shows to her family seeming to come from honest experience. Erington acts as a polar opposite, stern and academic, living by logic and her own sets of laws. As she stands before the audience to begin each scene, however, we begin to see the serious and strict veneer begin to crack, and Erington allows some true vulnerability to peek through, showing us an entirely different side to her complex character.
The odd man out in this production would seem to be Mercantel. When we first meet his character, Jared, a twenty-something struggling with the idea that he may have Asperger’s, he seems a bit over 
the top, a Jerry Lewis in the world of otherwise serious performances, but as the play progresses, he begins to find his groove. His portrayal of a boy with Asperger’s is worthy of applause, and is at times very moving, but the role doesn’t stray too far from his performance in last season’s Sick, and we hope that he will be given the chance to branch out into different kind of roles in the future.
It’s difficult to comment on Ken Webster’s acting here, since he will not be performing in future productions, but there was something magical about his performance. Watching he and Catmull, his real life wife, on stage was a revelation, as they showed a sublime connection that simply cannot be faked. Kenneth Wayne Bradley, known for his roles in Pillowman and Killer Joe, will surely bring something very different to role of Frank, a famous photographer known throughout the country for his startling portraits for naked women of all sorts. The power and passion that Bradley brings to each of his performances will be a nice contrast for those of us who were lucky enough to see the charismatic and sensitive performance Webster brought to the table.
Ken Webster and Hyde Park Theatre seem be on a roll, churning out hit after hit, selling out houses and receiving standing ovations every night, and they don’t show any sign of slowing . Body Awareness is an important play, brimming with just as many heartfelt moments as hilarious ones, and Webster and his team over at Hyde Park are able to balance this difficult dichotomy with gusto. They create a piece that lets audiences examine the climate of the world today, without ever feeling like they’re being preached at or reprimanded, which is itself quite an accomplishment, and also lets them have a few laughs all the while.
Body Awareness is playing at Hyde Park Theatre through May 8th. To purchase tickets, and find out more about the show, visit Hyde Park Theatre’s website at hydeparktheatre.org.
Photos courtesy of Bret Brookshire.
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