The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre hosted it's first staged reading of the season last night as it presented Kimberly Megna Yarnall's Waiting as a part of its Montgomery Davis Play Development Series. Yarnall's work concerns a thirty something couple some 10 - 20 years ago trying to conceive a baby.
The reading was presented at the Skylight Bar and Bistro on the second floor of the Broadway Theatre Center. It's a pleasant and comfortable environment with a great deal of warmth to it--a casually classy event on an off night for theatre. It's a very welcoming space. A great ambience for storytelling.
Kelly Coffey read the part of corporate event planer Crystal. She has been trying to get pregnant with her husband John (read by Michael Kroeker) for quite some time. A sort of desperation has set-in. The story of Crystal and John is told by an older couple who were read by Michael Herold and Sarah Day. The format of the plot is very clever--an older couple tries to conceive a story about a younger couple trying to conceive a baby. The parallels between a human life and a story are played on in an interesting way. Just as the younger couple have tried to conceive a child many times, the older couple has tried to conceive a story of that couple many times. There's a clever interplay between the two couples without being a direct interaction between them.
Crystal and John are seen in their causal and work lives as they climb through the series of events that eventually lead into in vitro fertilization. As present in the script in its current state, some of the finer points of the science aren't precise, but the overall feel of the play is charming and tender.
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Part of what Yarnall herself was excited about with respect to this reading was the opportunity to hear a second audience react to the script as it is presented. (There had been a previous reading elsewhere.) So the script is very much a work in progress. Some of the material was being presented here for the first time.
The script as presented last night needs work. Someone in the audience had mentioned that Crystal seemed mostly miserable throughout the play. He suggested that, just as we have John with a friend of his in conversation at one point in the play, we also needed a scene between Crystal and her friends that gave her an opportunity for something lighter. Personally, I thought that there was way too much going on outside the central struggle of the play.
It's nice to get some context on the struggle, but you don't have to reach out as much as Yarnall is trying to do in order to engage an audience unfamiliar with infertility. It's a very universal struggle in and of itself. Audiences can relate to that. They are, after all, coming to see a play about infertility. They may be expecting to see a play that details the strange and wonderful process of dealing with it. I guess that might have been my expectation . . . more of a direct exploration of the struggle.
The character of Crystal could stand a bit more cheeriness, though. I think it would be better served coming out of the substance of the mystery itself. When you're dealing with longterm emotional pain, your psyche has a natural tendency to find humor in even the darkest things. My favorite dramatized presentations of this kind of struggle have humor coming out of the strangest places. Waiting could be well-served by this kind of humor.
The script has some really clever bits about it. For one thing--John's stress is shown in some detail. All too often the focus of any story of infertility is on the woman who has difficulty getting pregnant. The struggle is every bit as stressful for the man, who is going to be dealing with it in different ways and it was good to see that present here.
It's also interesting to me that the script is as solidly grounded in the '90s/millennial period as it is. Husband and wife sit on laptops on their couch engaging in a chat site support group for couples dealing with infertility. I loved how the script delivered the feel of a chat site. Probably one of the more clever internet dramatizations I've seen onstage. There's also a remarkably clever scene between the couple and a young pregnant woman at an REI that works on a few different levels. Those two scenes show the kind of potential in Yarnall's Waiting. Given the right kind of work, it could be a really interesting exploration into infertility.
The Montgomery Davis Play Development Series returns in March with a staged reading of Silent by Gwendolyn Rice. The reading takes place at 7:30 pm on March 10th.
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's next show is Things Being What They Are November 20th through December 15th. For more information, visit Milwaukee Chamber Theatre online.
