Next to Normal: Tracy Lynn Olivera and Sophia Early — Photo: Margot Schulman
Any and every one us in the audience for Alan Paul’s penetrating production of Next to Normal at Round House might know a woman like the show’s Diana Goodman. Maybe you’re related to her, or see her in the mirror.
You can see the truth of her embodied in the brilliant performance of Tracy Lynn Olivera, a D.C. theater treasure making her Round House debut as the suburban wife and mom struggling against grief, depression, and mental illness to find even some semblance of stability.
Soldiering by Diana’s side, and soaring alongside her through the Tony-winning score by composer Tom Kitt and lyricist Brian Yorkey, is her husband Dan, devoted yet often conflicted, portrayed by the equally esteemed Kevin S. McAllister.
So, Round House crowds are doubly blessed to see and hear such challenging roles essayed by those with the due talents, conviction, and gravity to send us scaling the raw, ragged mountains of emotion brought forth in Yorkey’s deftly plotted script.
Olivera and McAllister marry beautifully as onstage partners in Diana and Dan’s complicated, trying existence. Their bustling family dynamic, with teenage son Gabe (Lucas Hinds Babcock) and daughter Natalie (Sophia Early), is credibly set in the first number, “Just Another Day,” aided by effective intentional misdirection. They might seem like everything is “normal,” until the scene reveals Diana’s tenuous hold on reality.
Wilson Chin’s striking scenic design suggests that liminal space between reality and what’s happening in Diana’s head. In her tangible world, pill bottles spill to the floor, and doors slam with force. In “I Miss the Mountains,” she tries to toss out her meds and live with the peaks and valleys.
But in her thoughts, she’s haunted by pain she can’t process. Though Paul offers acute insight into her experience, employing a wall of video panels, featuring sometimes trippy projections designed by Nicholas Hussong.
The screens become a means of amplifying all the characters’ feelings, as well as the tension of Diana’s encounters with extreme medical intervention. The visual spectacle can distract from vital beats of song or dialogue, but the device adds a subtle tinge of horror that suits aspects of this probing portrait.
And throughout, Paul navigates the cast gracefully through delicate transitions from an average family’s quotidian rhythms into the dark, imaginary caverns of Diana’s struggles.
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, her struggles reverberate through all their lives. Yet, she maintains a sense of humor, exemplified in the charmingly sardonic “My Psychopharmacologist and I.” As said psychopharmacologist, Calvin McCullough contributes his own deft comic timing to the number.
That song pairs with Dan’s more serious “Who’s Crazy,” with him contemplating his own struggles in this marriage, and McAllister beautifully relaying a spouse’s sense of duty and exhaustion. As their daughter, spiraling into her own chaos of drugs and confusion, Early captures Natalie’s justifiable defiance, alongside her deeply felt sadness.
The whole family’s understandably exhausted, while, paradoxically, the cast — including Ben Clark, who shines as Natalie’s amorous classmate Henry, in his “Hey” duets with Early — must tap into wells of stamina to put across Kitt and Yorkey’s challenging score and emotionally taxing narrative.
Probing universal truths about grief and depression via the very specific circumstances of one loving family, this Next to Normal pierces the heart, provokes vital conversation, and brings powerhouse performance and music to our ears.
Next to Normal (★★★★☆) runs through March 3 at Round House Theatre, 4545 East-West Highway, Bethesda, Md. Tickets are $46 to $88, with discount options available, including free tickets for students ages 13 through college, and 2-For-1 Tuesdays.
Matthew López felt detached. While reading E. M. Forster's classic novel, Howard's End, in New York's Central Park several years ago, the Tony award-winning playwright was inspired to write his own version of the twentieth-century tale of three British social classes intertwining during Europe's Edwardian era.
Using the essence of Forster's famous mandate from the novel, "Only connect!" López would set his version, The Inheritance in contemporary metropolitan life, replete with themes of young love, politics, sexual escapades, friendship, substance abuse, redemption, and haunting memories of the AIDS epidemic, all of which would be discussed between various generations of gay men.
Not often (ever) do I weep at the theater, and laugh, reflect, hold my breath in suspense, laugh some more, and weep again all in the same show, with a leisurely lunch sandwiched between emotional catharses.
But Round House's exquisite production of Matthew Lopez's sweeping gay opus The Inheritance, directed by Tom Story, elicits such strong emotions. Also, the play, split into two separate parts, each over three hours, has plenty of time to work its magic.
Winner of the Tony, Olivier, Drama Desk, Critics' Circle, Evening Standard, and Drama League Awards for Best Play, The Inheritance encapsulates a rich, half-century slice of gay American history into its six-hour-plus running time.
Everyone is entitled their own opinion, but is everyone entitled to their opinion of your opinion? Furthermore, is your opinion a reflection of who you are in a greater scope as a person?
Those questions lie at the heart of Art, a starry play on Broadway that has been revived since its initial 1998 run, for which it won a Tony. Back then, it starred Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina. Now, Neil Patrick Harris, Bobby Cannavale, and James Corden step into the work from French playwright Yasmina Reza, translated from its original language by Christopher Hampton.
Even in our era of short-form entertainment, the 100-minute comedy feels much too long. It evolves around a trio of three longtime friends who debate a $300,000 painting. As Porky Pig so succinctly stated, "That's all, folks!" Much like an artist and their sycophants who believe that a pretentious artpiece is masterful, theatergoers will also delude themselves into thinking that they have witnessed a show of great import. In fairness, they aren't totally wrong. Art does have more to offer than what it offers at first blush.
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