Review: IN PLAIN SIGHT at Penguin Rep

Michael McKeever’s In Plain Sight arrives at Penguin Rep with a premise that is undeniably offbeat: on the morning of their wedding, two men discover that the past has not merely come back to haunt them—it has apparently obtained their address, read the newspaper, and decided to interrupt the catering arrangements. 

An unexpectedly baroque wedding-day comedy-drama, Mr. McKeever’s characters keep finding newer and bigger secrets to bring to the altar.  In Plain Sight is a wildly imaginative work that turns matrimonial jitters into a high-wire exercise in identity, history, and unexpected surprises.

The play, receiving its world premiere under Joe Brancato’s direction, begins as a domestic comedy of incompatibility. Elliot and Alan—partners of eleven years and hours away from their wedding—cannot agree on much of anything. They disagree over the speeches, the number of guests, if the caterer is cute, the presence of Elliot’s ex-wife, and even the nomenclature of the occasion. Is this a wedding, or specifically a gay wedding? Is the distinction meaningful, unnecessary, political, personal, or all four? The dialogue in these moments is crisp and compelling.  McKeever is clearly interested in the ways private happiness can become entangled with history, language, and social expectation.

It’s a very rich subject, and In Plain Sight approaches it with considerable verve.  Russell Saylor, as Elliot, gives the more fretful half of the couple a likable anxiousness: a man who wants the day to be perfect partly because he suspects it cannot be. Derek Smith’s Alan supplies a useful counterweight—cooler, more defensive, and visibly less eager to have every question settled before the guests arrive. The two actors brought remarkable nuance, intelligence, and emotional force to their roles, and gave the bickering an easy, practiced rhythm. These are men who know exactly which old grievances will provoke the other, and who have refined the art of arguing over the color of a suit as though civilization itself depended upon it.

Actually, the entire production was distinguished by uniformly superb performances, the cast delivered richly textured, emotionally resonant interpretations.   The couple’s conflict is observed by Elliot’s daughter, Maggie, played by Remidy Dixon with eager warmth and tact. She is asked to be peacemaker, emissary, and emotional grown-up all at once, a role Dixon makes immediately likeable and believable. Her relationship to both men suggests a potentially moving portrait of a blended family negotiating the lingering complexities of an earlier marriage. Lana Gordon, as Elliot’s former wife Charlotte, also brings poise and theatrical command when she arrives with new and a dark secret that could change the emotional weather of the room (but never does).

Brancato keeps the early scenes moving briskly and draws appealing work from his accomplished cast. The production has the polished, accessible atmosphere Penguin audiences have come to expect: the dialogue lands cleanly, the interpersonal skirmishes are given room to register, and the performers remain taunt and committed even when the text begins asking them to carry increasingly formidable loads of exposition.

For In Plain Sight is not content to be merely a wedding-day relationship comedy; after nearly an hour spent on quarrels about menus, family boundaries, and the proper terminology for a same-sex marriage, McKeever pivots sharply into a drama of long-suppressed identity, 9/11 trauma, assumed names, and a mysterious stranger who arrives with a grievance of extraordinary magnitude. The surprise is, to put it mildly, substantial.

Few plays, let alone wedding plays, are willing to take such an audacious detour through buried lives and reinvention.

McKeever’s willingness to make the past literal and literally disruptive is, in itself, gutsy and  admirable. There is dramatic potential in the notion at the center of the revelation and the rationale for it (no spoilers here).   The play wants to ask whether anyone can create a new life without first reckoning with the people left behind, when disappearance, grief, and reinvention could acquire unsettling new meanings.

The revelations arrive fairly late, and in such concentrated volume, that they change not only the stakes but even the play’s genre, a tectonic shift.  What might have been a haunting, complicated moral dilemma is delivered in a sequence of events and explanations that asks the audience to accept an increasingly elaborate chain of coincidences.

The result is a play with many subjects—gay marriage, assimilation, parenthood, illness, betrayal, 9/11, secrecy, chosen family, and the ethics of self-invention—but not quite enough dramatic space to do justice to them all.

Still, In Plain Sight has a bold premise and the extreme virtue of never being timid.  In an era of carefully calibrated plays, McKeever has written one that is eager to surprise, willing to risk excess, and determined to make a wedding day mean far more than a wedding day usually does.

Penguin Rep’s world premiere of Joe Brancato directs a cast that includes Stephen Dexter as David, Remidy Dixon as Maggie, Lana Gordon as Charlotte, Russell Saylor as Elliot, and Derek Smith as Alan.

Peter Danish

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