Three-Sister Harmony in Find Me Here

When a play is about three sisters, there’s almost never the question of whether it’s in conversation with Chekhov, just of whether the conversation is conscious or unconscious, and of how much that ancestral DNA molds its actual bone structure. In Crystal Finn’s Find Me Here, the gesture of filial homage is made right away: Two sisters hover in a neutral sitting room, waiting for the third to join them so that they can open their father’s will on the first anniversary of his death. “There were apple buds on the trees then. Just like today,” says Nancy, played by Lizbeth Mackay; though she’s the youngest, Nancy is, like Chekhov’s Olga, the family organizer and worrier. As a playwright’s tip of the hat, the moment is both unmistakable and sly — as if Finn wants us to know that she’s well aware of her play’s antecedent and that, as prodigious as the lineage is, she’ll sometimes just need to get it out of the way.

An elegant, heartsore, and often very funny play, Find Me Here thus creates a kind of three-part harmony: Finn’s characters carry the tune, the shades of Chekhov’s are interwoven with them, and, at the same time, Finn deals with her own looming dead ancestor while Nancy, Dee-Dee (Constance Shulman, with an irresistible Dolly Parton affect and impeccable timing), and Deborah (the mesmerizing Kathleen Tolan) deal with theirs. (Want another layer? Five years ago, Finn and one of her cast members, Miriam Silverman, did brilliant work on stage in Will Arbery’s surreal three-sisters play Plano.) But unlike the Prozorov sisters, who despite their desperation and despair never see the far side of 35 during their play, Finn’s siblings are intimately acquainted with their own mortality. Their father lived to be 100. Deborah, the oldest, is 72 and subsists on a diet of raw vegetables mashed and mixed with a variety of mysterious powders. “Why don’t you think of switching to some more traditional medication, Deborah?” frets Nancy. Dee-Dee, never one to mince words, tells her ethereal older sister, “You’re disappearing!”

We never learn exactly what’s happening to Deborah—Finn’s play is full of intentional lacunae, like the shadowy mouths of caves that emit echoes even without being explored—but it’s clear she’s preparing to depart. “I want to tell you something…” she says to her little grandniece, Claire, the child of Nancy’s daughter, Kristen (Silverman, always so precise and moving). “Very soon I’m going to disappear. I already have begun the process … You may have to look harder for me, or in different places. But you will find me … Will you do that for me?” Claire and the other children in Find Me Here are invisible — yet more empty spaces that sometimes make you doubt the existence of their referents, and sometimes give you the sense that the very young and the very old are somehow translucent, not yet or no longer all there, while it’s only the poor, harried adults who are solid and stuck.

Finn is concerned with the way those we love and have lost—literally or figuratively—tend to hang around, and how their continued presence-in-absence can be a source of solace or of tremendous harm. Or, to flip the perspective, she’s engrossed by the human struggle to let go of things that have no more true substance, no reality beyond our own refusal to loosen our tenacious grip on them. What if we were to open our white-knuckled hands and realize that they’ve long been empty? Would that, Find Me Here asks, be so bad? Or do we hold on because our deeper, weirder instincts are right, and there really is something there?

No knock-down-drag-out drama unfolds over the roughly 24 hours Nancy, Dee-Dee, and Deborah spend together with family, and none needs to. Though Dad was “a tyrant” who “was awful to his daughters,” this is no Appropriate, where the specific and heinous sins of the patriarch will rise up zombie-like to consume all in their path. The closest the play comes to a real altercation is a scene of rising tension between Nancy and Deborah, who’s been cut out of her father’s will — but the struggle isn’t over that fraught material reality, which Deborah faces with the equanimity of a bodhisattva, but over questions immaterial and much more fraught. Deborah’s rift with her family—and, we come to learn, with her own sons—is the result of the many years she spent “in a cult” (not her words), in whose teachings she still believes. “There are things you don’t know about,” she tells the exasperated Nancy with a mountain’s immovability. Things we don’t know about. None of us. Things that are greater than anything you are talking about.”

That haze of cosmic uncertainty—which Deborah floats through at her ease, Nancy denies, and Dee-Dee avoids entirely by concentrating on things like “chocolate, orgasms, horses”—suffuses Finn’s play. Both in the writing and in director Caitlin Sullivan’s softly enigmatic staging, there often seems to be vaseline on the lens, a fuzzy, shimmering halo where what we know for sure quickly dissipates. Though Finn glides smoothly around them, even basic questions don’t have answers: Where are we? When are we? Whose house are we in? Nancy’s? Gabriel and Esme’s? (That’s Dee-Dee’s son and daughter-in-law, played by Kyle Beltran and the glowing Shannon Tyo — both making the most of parts that feel less finely honed than the play’s older generation, which is rounded out with wonderful supporting turns by Frank Wood as Nancy’s motorcycle-riding ex—her Vershinin—and Keith Reddin as her mousy current boyfriend, her Kulygin.)

The set, by the dots collective, pointedly eschews homey detail, its circle of benches in front of a bay window as suggestive of a place like Deborah’s ashram as of a middle-class home. And the characters rarely fill in the gaps. They talk about mountains and lakes without ever naming them: Dee-Dee describes a desire to wander out into “the back forest below the peak … when the snow pack is high” when it’s her time to go; Kristen remembers a “religious moment” in the “ice turquoise” waters of a lake, when she realized that she “wanted [her] ashes scattered in this exact spot.” In my mind’s eye, I saw Colorado (later, I learned from Finn’s author’s note that she grew up, and wrote her play, in the Sierra Nevadas). And I wondered about the year — when the sisters mention their father, they often try to extenuate his behavior as that of a “traumatized” soldier. “I was one month old when he left for the war…” recalls Deborah. “He came back when I was four and he was completely changed.”

Is “the war” World War II? Does that mean the play is set in 2011 or so? One can ask these things, but really—as Chekhov might have it—what difference does it make? Part of the delicacy of Finn’s work has to do with how nimbly she avoids more stultifying feelings of vagueness, even while crafting such a fine, loosely-woven cloth. As with Deborah, there’s a straight spine beneath the play’s gauzy exterior. And as with any ghost, Find Me Here proves both wondrous and hard to shake not in spite of its incorporeality but precisely because of it.

On the subject of the recently departed: It is not the usual practice around here to review productions that have already closed. But summer is a funny time. It’s stupid hot, brains are melty, and those of us not in or teaching school not-so-secretly wish that life still came with an annual three-month break. Amidst the heat and the Escape From New York shuffle, lots of plays pop up quickly, opening and closing in a matter of days like so many wildflowers. As ever, it’s impossible to catch them all (theater is not Pokémon), but here are a few good-but-already-gone shows I’ve been lucky enough to see lately. Should any of these come back around, you could do much worse than to grab a ticket.

Kayfabe.
Photo: Kat Kuo

In Kayfabe—the juiced-up and joyful collision of director Josh Rice’s obsessions—puppets and pro wrestling turn out to be a match made in some kind of wacko theatrical heaven. The title term is wrestling slang for the suspension of disbelief practiced by the sport’s true devotees, who are honor-bound never to acknowledge its staged performances as anything other than authentic — and, following suit, Rice’s show inducts us into a world of glorious, hilarious, and ultimately deeply moving artifice. We become fans of the “babyface” wrestler Dr. Kiss, a puppet whose “big Leo energy,” fabulous purple get-up, and sick finishing move (the Kiss of Death) are enough to make us forget the fact that he’s just so much wood and wire, manipulated by three top-notch puppeteers, all sporting lucha libre masks and given plenty of their own very funny opportunities to take the spotlight. With Rice as an emcee who knows every crowd-pumping turn of phrase, Dr. Kiss’s bid for stardom is an enthusiasm-fueled lesson in imagination: We learn the vocabularies of puppetry and of wrestling, and we see all the strings — but that doesn’t stop us from hollering along, gasping and booing and longing, through all the fakery, for a real victory. A love letter to a 1990s childhood, a virtuosic bout of object manipulation, and a celebration of the strange magic of performance, Kayfabe has a big, authentic soul inside its little wooden body.

Das Ersatz.
Photo: Jose Miranda/Jose Miranda & Sahara Marte | www.pelenguino.com

In a serious blow to the city’s experimental theater scene, Theresa Buchheister—artistic director of the Brick and founder and artistic director of the Exponential Festival—recently announced that, after 20 years in New York, they’ll be leaving both posts and returning to their native Kansas. Buchheister’s goodbye to all that should give us pause: This city is failing its bravest artists, daily reducing the ability of scrappy, adventurous individuals and institutions to make the kind of anti-commercial work that seeks not to keep the field marketable but to keep it changing, meaningful, and alive. But, while we’re scaling that mountain, we should also give thanks for everything Buchheister and artists like them have brought to the Brick. Recently, that was Das Ersatz, a whirl of sweaty, campy, poignant yearning from collaborators Travis Amiel and Cosimo Pori, who specialize in what they call “a unique blend of misquoted pop culture and queer 😜 dance theatre.” In black bodysuits, increasingly runny makeup, and a variety of wigs, Pori and Amiel become a pair of hapless, Liza Minnelli–loving clowns. They’re just trying to get jobs and make friends and keep them, but it’s all so hard! Sometimes even dancing, and model trains, and Peggy Lee, and sideways references to Avatar: The Last Airbender, and phone calls with Mom don’t help. Physically and textually, Das Ersatz is a sweet, jittery Gen-Z pastiche, a postmodern pantomime that splatters the walls with swooning angst, along with a barrage of citations both high and low, without losing its soft belly or its warm heart.

Three Houses.
Photo: Marc J. Franklin/Marc J. Franklin

My colleague Jackson McHenry already wrote about Three Houses, the new musical from Dave Malloy, which finds the composer-lyricist expanding on modes and motifs from his gorgeous 2019 meditation on the labyrinth of the internet, Octet — but I’m here to add that I hope this witty, wounded, and wonderful riff on, of all things, the Three Little Pigs gets another stage to play on very soon. COVID has started to creep into plays in ways that finally feel rich and resonant rather than flat and forced, and in Three Houses, Malloy and his frequent collaborator, the director Anne Tippe, create a kind of lonelyhearts cabaret — a space outside of time, infused with the magic and menace of fairytale, in which a trio of misfits can tell us the stories of what happened to them “during the pandemic, when the lockdown hit.” The performances are first-rate (Ching Valdes-Aran is especially wonderful as a series of grandmothers, and Scott Stangland makes a scruffily seductive Big Bad Wolf, in the form of a laid-back bartender). The design—from dots’ musty, mystical barroom set to James Ortiz’s menagerie of puppets—is a delight, and Malloy’s lyrics are as funny and finely pointed as his music is fractal-like. It’s a series of whorls and repeating, braiding themes, a delicate Jenga tower of order rising toward an embrace of chaos.

Guys and Dolls SR.
Photo: Sarah Schneider

Okay, so this one probably won’t come back, but whether or not its director, the ingenious Isabel Perry, has plans for a revival, her production at the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House of Frank Loesser, Jo Swerling, and Abe Burrows’s Guys and Dolls—starring a cast of 23 senior citizens, aged 66 to 92, from all across New York—deserves a special round of applause. In this take on Loesser’s gloriously goofy musical about love and craps (here called Guys and Dolls SR. in its title a winking riff on the tradition of abridging musicals into their “JR.” versions for young performers), the gangster Nathan Detroit and his doll Adelaide have been engaged for 40 years. Adelaide’s club, “the Hot Box,” is now a zumba class that she runs at their senior center. Sky Masterson is a smooth-talking granddad in a Havana shirt, and Big Jule is no less intimidating for being about five feet tall and decked in a grandma-playing-bingo visor. Many of Perry’s actors performed in Guys and Dolls when they were kids, and her Nathan Detroit (the super-endearing Alan Myers, his native Bensonhurst accent as thick and spicy as deli mustard) worked as a stagehand on the 1992 Broadway revival. When theater can do this, be this, what’s not to love? The delight on stage is as contagious as Adelaide’s cold.

Find Me Here is part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks, at the Wild Project though June 29.