Boulevard Theatre’s 32nd season opens with Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor’s gracefully written and insightfully performed Small Things. The setting is modern and the piece is staged in Plymouth Church’s intimate Graham Chapel with minimal set and lighting and plenty of room for audience imagination. The plot is a slice of life: Mrs. Branch, an elderly widow, has moved from the city to a small town where she hires a housekeeper, the spirited, middle-aged Birdy, who is herself a widow also contending with the fact that her adult daughter Dell’s young son is now insisting he be called “Alice.”
The three women—inescapably the ancient archetypes of maiden, mother and crone—are believable and compelling as regular 21st-century folk driving a plot based on discussion and a journey toward acceptance. MacIvor’s writing is notable, not just for its realism, but for its unassuming humor (in a moment of frustration with her mother’s nosiness, Dell asks “If we didn’t have other people to talk about, what would we talk about?”) and its focus on ideas. Together, these three very different personalities plumb everything from the difference in definition between “person” and “human” to tentativeness as a form of passive aggression.
Donna L. Lobacz’s Birdy is a tour de force for her simultaneous consistency (Birdy will always be opinionated, talkative and deeply in need of a listening ear) and dynamism; her character arc is perhaps the most dramatic of the three. The actress does an especially impressive job in her vocal work, delivering a pronounced northern dialect that avoids stereotype while still precisely conveying the character’s location and social class. Christine Horgen’s Patricia Branch is elegant, snobbish, mutable and ultimately quite complex. Horgen is a master of silence; watching this character think is one of the most riveting aspects of the play.
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Finally, as Dell, Nicole Gorski is stately and powerful. Although her very precise elocution occasionally sounds odd when applied to informal dialogue, her commanding presence serves the story well. She is the youngest and also, in many ways, the most open-minded and compassionate of the three, and Gorski’s delivery certainly serves this end. The greatest joy in this play is in realizing that none of these characters are what they first appear to be, that all are multifaceted and that, in the end, their differences might be considered simply “small things.”
Under Mark Bucher’s direction and Jessica Principali’s stage management, Small Things is a smashing success. The 90-minute, no-intermission piece flies by in a whirlwind of perfectly executed transitions and captivating conversations. MacIvor’s humane and often hilarious exploration of forgiveness, intergenerational dialogue and the human condition itself is in very good hands.
Through Oct. 8 at Plymouth Church, 2717 E. Hampshire St. For tickets, call 414-744-5757 or visit boulevardtheatre.com.
