Review: A PERMANENT IMAGE at Pacific Resident Theatre

Ho, ho, ho! Who’s got the hemlock?

Samuel D. Hunter’s play A PERMANENT IMAGE may revolve around a family gathering over Christmas, but do not expect to encounter holiday cheer and good will to all men. A grimmer, darker and outright downer of an experience you will not easily find.

This should not be unexpected to those who know Hunter’s work. In such plays as A BRIGHT NEW BOISE, POCATELLO, A GREAT WILDERNESS and THE WHALE, family members are frequently in a state of conflict, disconnect or outright war. That A PERMANENT IMAGE’S siblings, Bo and Ally, should be largely estranged both from their parents and from each other is fitting in Hunter-land. They’re returning to their childhood home in Viola, Idaho, to bury their recently deceased father and deal with their mother who has painted everything in the house white – inside and out - and is now drinking herself into oblivion. God bless us everyone!

The production directed by Andy Weyman for Pacific Resident Theatre taps the bile and makes use of Hunter’s scabrous humor en route to a conclusion that is meant to be affecting. But the journey to that resolution is an uncomfortable slog in which we share the company of some pretty despicable people who, at PRT, are portrayed by actors who embrace their characters’ meanness and little else. At one point, Bo and Ally (played by Scott Jackson and Dalia Vosylius) get into a physical fight that involves punching and wrestling. One half wishes one might kill the other or - more mercifully for us audience members - that they might knock each other unconscious.

But let’s back it up. Patriarch Martin (played by Phil Cass) has died a few days before the action of the play. His widow, Carol (Terry Davis), has thrown together a funeral on the cheap and is trying to both send her husband off and enjoy the yuletide with the kids she doesn’t often see. Bo, a photographer who specializes in shooting wartime atrocities, is back from overseas. Ally, who lives only a couple of towns over, rarely visits. The owner of a personal transportation business, she’s a workaholic with a partner and a baby who Carol wishes she had more connection to.

The year is 2011, and Martin and Carol have a bunch of family memories stored on old VHS tapes. The tapes are going bad; the memories are fading. So too, therefore, are Martin and Carol. A series of taped messages from Martin to his kids explains what was going through his head during his final days. Martin is lucid and depressingly insightful. His tapes are intact. But as long as we're talking about images, the same is true for Bo’s photographs of dead babies which this production never permits us to see. So thank heaven for the small mercies.

The color white is intended to be a blank slate. Carol has done her best to quite literally whitewash the past and start anew. But - through Lando Piastri’s evocative set design -she has rather botched things. There’s paint on the walls, on the TV, on the furniture, on everything! As she plays her favorite holiday music and hands out snack packs from Costco, Carol has her kids (particularly Bo) convinced she is depressed, mentally unstable or both. We come to learn this is not the case.

As bleak as Hunter allows things to get, the playwright is able to sneak in bits of dark humor, mostly while the family is at each other’s respective throats. When they finally get on the same page, the misery kicks in. Trouble is, we’ve spent a lot of time with this clan of selfish grotesques to ultimately accept and sympathize with their pain. Of the three performers, Davis proves the most adept at achieving a balance between monster and human. Via his video performance, Cass infuses Martin with a nice dollop of dignity. Projection designer Jim Morris works an interesting effect in the play’s final minutes.

PRT’s performance space is small, confined and all the more cramped when you have to spend it in the company of so much bitterness and misery. Hunter is always a playwright worth watching, but this one requires a resolve more steely than most.  

A PERMANENT IMAGE plays through January 14, 2024 at 707 Venice Blvd., Venice. 

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