23.5 Hours at the Park Theatre – review

There’s only a brief glimpse of paradise before the fall in 23.5 Hours: harmony between two families, the dads both high school teachers, before the worst phone call imaginable comes through. Carey Crim’s play takes for its subject the awful mess afterwards: Leigh (Lisa Dwan), a nice midwestern nurse, welcomes her husband Tom (David Sturzaker) back into their house after he’s not only arrested and charged but convicted of sexual relations with a teenage girl in one of his student productions. Both Leigh and Tom maintain his innocence, but doing so costs them socially, domestically, and personally.

Though director Katharine Farmer and Crim have worked together extensively in the past, including on past productions of 23.5 Hours, it fails to catch light here at the Park Theatre, struggling with a neatness, without much purchase, to both the writing and direction.

Against Carla Goodman’s construction of a warm, modern minimalist family home, the cast are sometimes blocked awkwardly in conflict or intimacy. They enter and leave incuriously quickly, at the mercy of the near soaplike reveal of information in the writing, while some quieter moments are unfortunately sped through. There’s some oddly restive, pastoral composition by Julian Starr, which feels much more suited to television than stage, and an ultra-emphatic moment of lighting and sound, with over-the-top spots and thudding heartbeat and piano, which throws a terrible moment into pure goofiness.

There’s plenty to pull apart in Leigh’s frantic, hypocritical rage at the “moral imperative to believe the victim” which she agrees with, of course, in principle. She’s a good liberal who says you call the police when something bad happens, like when a brick is thrown through your window, “Because it’s what you do.” Dwan’s performance as Leigh finds her wheedling, shouting, straining, she’d like to fall apart quicker but she’s so frustrated at everyone else doing so: she finds majesty in her stillness. Sturzaker’s Nick Cave-loving Tom is very crisp, almost unfailingly personable, even laconic and indignant. Both are prone to a good old yell at wayward son Nicholas (an excellently bratty Jem Matthews). Theirs is a home fortune should shine out of, and its brightness, in Jamie Platt’s lighting design, comes to count for less and less, blinking out to blue and red in moody transitions.

The script glances at so much, but there’s somehow barely time (in its over two hours and ten minutes running time on press night) to feel that Crim digs her teeth into the play’s identification of Tom’s love for theatre with whatever’s between him and young girls, that both are expressed together. It’s no History Boys; its concerns are broader and more sensitive, in some ways, but it accomplishes less. What the play has to say about punishment and reform, adolescence and consent, and power and loyalty is all stated quite baldly: not much is left for us to put together.

Scenes often feel long, the plot increasingly effortful, despite the very able cast. Allyson Ava-Brown and Jonathan Nyati do their best with little look in. Ava-Brown is very funny and smooth at first, then seething, and Nyati is an appealing straight man, with a slight edge to his hapless support of his colleague and friend. We know exactly where they stand with regards to all this; each character’s turn, the others’ reactions, are extremely promptly conveyed. There’s tension aplenty, but it goes nowhere when the tone varies so little. Difficult subject matter, yes, but it’s possible for it to sing more than this.