Do you know the Joneses, the ones everyone seems eager to keep up with? Thanks to playwright Will Eno, we finally get the chance to meet them, with all their different faces and quirks. In The Realistic Joneses, Bob and Jennifer Jones are an old couple who meet their new neighbors, young John and Pony Jones. The two families share more than just a last name. Bob’s congenital disease seems to resonate strangely with the new neighbors, and both couples struggle to communicate.
The play isn’t quite a comedy or a drama. It is uncomfortably toeing the line, presenting a mundane—and admittedly bleak—reality while peppering it with wit and smart quips that make the audience giggle or even laugh outwardly. When Pony explains they moved there because of the good school system, and Jennifer asks if they have kids, Pony just says, “No, but John doesn’t like stupid children.”
Matt Specht and Ericka Wade
Boulevard Theatre presents a “concert reading” of the script with four actors. If Sandra Hollander and David Ferrie are more stoic and rooted in their routine as Bob and Jennifer, Matt Specht and Ericka Wade’s John and Pony truly shine as a mess of a young couple. Specht barely seems like he’s acting as a happy-go-lucky and whimsical—if scatterbrained—young man, while Wade fully embraces her role as a woman who got married too young to a man she doesn’t understand. Although they’re reading the script, all four act the part and instill life to it.
The Realistic Joneses is a play about loneliness even we are surrounded by people; it is a play about the inability to express ourselves and about the masks we wear every day and the issues that keep us struggling. The play pushes us to look at the negative spaces between what is being presented as words are spoken but the important things are left unsaid.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
The characters, like the script, are meandering through daily life, and we catch glimpses of their discussions. There is no neat resolution, or even a plot to speak of, but we are shown the mosaic of the Joneses’ lives in a regular, semi-rural town not far from some mountains.
Through May 18 at Plymouth Church, 2717 E. Hampshire St. For more information, visit milwaukeeboulevardtheatre.com.
