UWM Theatre presents the premiere of Platonic: a new musical drama this weekend. Solana Ramirez-Garcia’s Platonic is a romantic drama set amongst college students on the east side of Milwaukee. It’s a contemporary drama about a couple of women who had been romantically involved in high school. No relationship they’ve ever had since has quite worked out and now they’re trying to figure out why.
Junior BFA student Grace Yeager plays a theatre student named Sam. As the play opens, she meets a stranger working as a janitor (Senior BFA student Indalecio De Jesus Valentin.) They’re just meeting for the first time, but he’s seen her rehearse a million times onstage so he’s already got a connection with her that she doesn’t know about. The imperfect connection there when the two first meet is echoed and reflected through every other relationship in the story.
The narrative shoots ahead some time later and we have Kate arriving at Sam’s place. Kate (sophomore vocal performance student Keri Marie Salscheider) is the girl Sam had been romantically involved with in high school. She walks in just as Sam’s boyfriend has left to visit family abroad. Sam and Kate try to work things out while keeping a respectful distance from each other. An old boyfriend of Kate’s shows-up (played by sophomore Angelo Rome Villarreal) and things get even more complicated.
Ramirez-Garcia shows quite a talent for framing drama in the musical. Too often with theater (and musical theatre in particular) romance is framed in neat, little narrative boxes. We see people meet and fall in love and then experience conflicts and remain in love or fall out of love or somebody dies or something. It can be messy, but it’s always very tightly-delivered to the stage. What’s beautiful about what Ramirez-Garcia has done here is the fact that it’s not neat and tidy. It’s messy and ambiguous and sometimes it’s ugly. Just like love. It’s a romance, but we’re not actually seeing anyone meet. Every character has met before. There’s a lot of baggage. It isn’t easy to define. People are trying to understand what other people mean to them even as they’re trying to understand themselves. (I remember a lot of that in romance on the east side of Milwaukee when I was in my twenties. It’s kind of cool to see that play out in a musical on an intimate stage.)
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The central dynamic between Yeager and Salscheider is remarkably vivid. The two maneuver through engrossing rendering all those little subtle hints at familiarity that two former lovers have when they’re trying to be friends. It’s really touching to see that on a small stage with all of the action in such close proximity. Yeager is magnetic as an actress trying to keep her life together. Salscheider’s fluctuations as someone who is trying to bring her life together has a gravity all its own as well.
The musical end of the musical tends to work quite well in Platonic. Nearly every song springs quite organically from the interpersonal action onstage. Nearly everything that’s performed feels like it’s coming directly from the emotional end of the story. That’s very rare in musical theatre, which so often rushes off to various distractions from the central emotion of the plot. There’s a delightfully messy purity about everything springing right out of the hearts of the characters. Easily the best song in the whole show has Kate and Sam trying to keep a distance from each other even as they both long to be intimate in casual moments. (That’s the song I woke-up with in my head this morning.) Also of note is a song Sam sings right after intermission. There’s anger that Yeager brings to the piece. The character knows she’s got something to sing, so she tells the band to start-up so that she can get into it. It’s a very stylishly clever moment.
Platonic runs through Apr. 24 at UWMs Theatre 508 on 1925 E. Kenilworth Pl. For ticket reservations and more, visit UWM online.
