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Minutes from the Blue Route
In many ways Tom Donaghy Minutes From the Blue Route is a continuation of
Northeast Central which marked his Broadway debut at Lincoln Center's Mitzie
Newhouse Theater. The new play is once again noteworthy for incisive dialogue, a well-directed
production and forceful acting. It also retrains its lens on an ordinary family whose members
are pieces in the larger
patchwork of contemporary American life, particularly as lived by those falling into the lower
middle class. Northeast Central moved through some three decades,
leaving an image of time
galloping past a group of people with gridlocked dreams. In Minutes from the Blue
Route everything is compressed into one long weekend--specifically Labor Day with its
picnics and
weddings and talk of the next election. The focus is not so much on how time races by but on
how it stretches before even the fifty-ish older generation, fearful about a government unlikely
to offer an economic safety net no matter who's in charge. Their fears about money, loss and
aging are partly circumstantial and partly the result of their inability to communicate
with each other or their children who are immobilized by their own insecurities
The play's dramatic momentum flows from immediate decisions facing Donaghy's nameless
family, known only as father, mother, oldest, youngest. Father is being downsized into early
retirement. Mother is working at an apparently fun-less job which does little to assuage her
terror of aging in an age when the golden years are forged more from brass than gold. The
homosexual
son is stalled in his career as a magician and his personal connections, the latter painfully evident
when he exclaims that he's almost thirty and still doen't know how to talk. And
the youngest and brightest, is too mixed up to decide between using her college scholarship or
living with her boyfriend. It is the sister's floundering after an accident (or
what is vaguely referred to as an accident), that has led to the
son's recall home to help get her back on track.
As the play opens the home, a typical tract house close to the Blue Route that leads to the nearby
city in one direction and a nebulous unknown in the other, is close to being sold after a fruitless
"for sale" period. The son has arrived but seems bent on leaving almost immediately. He tells the
mother he can't stay long and she responds "no, no, we know." The pattern of cryptic
communication, laden with hidden subtext, is set. It doesn't take long to realize that the
connecting link in this family is anxiety which attacks each differently but with equal
force. As they continue to talk at and around each other, almost as if they were in separate
rooms, it becomes clear that whatever is said signals something that is left unsaid. If this
sounds a bit theater of the absurd-ish, well so it is. It's also sporadically funny, and for all its
enigmatic tone,
not particularly difficult to fathom. Much of this is attributable the excellence of the cast and
the direction. The
rest stems from the fact that this family's problems are familiar to millions of other lower
middle and middle-middle people for whom the American Dream has taken on a somewhat
nightmarish tinge of
economic insecurity, and worries particular to an age where having a Gay son also means having
to worry about his illness and possible death.
The play which unfolds as one long act performed with an intermission is probably best described
as a slice of life drama--four slices, to be exact, dished up without fireworks but with a number of
wonderfully
moving moments between mother and son, brother and sister, father and daughter. The
most dramatic incident, a car accident, is like everything else, not earth shattering. It leaves both
parents in neck braces but without traumatic injury. And therein lies the message, if you're
determined to take a message away from this evening: These are people who have been battered
by fate, but not so badly that they won't survive. And so, while this is hardly a comedy as we
saw it listed somewhere, it's also not a Greek tragedy.
While Northeast Central told its story in much more detail, the more
compressed and less specific action in Minutes From the Blue Route
leaves a sharper impression. The playwright's decision to leave the pawns on this dramatic
chessboard nameless is a major misstep. This namelessness tends to keep these ordinary people
from
imprinting themselves on the audience's memory as extraordinary characters, giving them instead
the aura of models for the flesh-and-blood real thing.
The actors as
already stated admirably back up Donaghy's script. Elizabeth Franz brings the right combination
of manic tension and irony to
her role as the mother. Matt McGrath is properly nervous and befuddled as the son and
Catherine Kellner is fine as the daughter and sister. Stephen Mendillo the father aptly portrays the
most laid-back but no less troubled member of this foursome.
Derek McLane also warrants praise for his spare set with its living room facing another
look-alike tract home and its front
door leading to the Blue Route to anywhere U.S.A.
.
©right January 1997, Elyse Sommer, CurtainUp. Information
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