Review: I AND YOU Connects Us All at Capital Stage

At a time when many are feeling a fractured sense of community, Capital Stage has brought Lauren Gunderson’s story about human connection to the stage. Under Imani Mitchell’s direction, I AND YOU becomes an anthem for friendship, trust, and embracing vulnerability.

When Anthony (Braeden Harris) unexpectedly shows up at Caroline’s (McKenna Sennett) house, she’s understandably cautious. She’s been sick since birth and is now stuck in her room waiting for a liver transplant. Anthony brings with him a dog-eared copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. He’s volunteered to pair up with Caroline for a class assignment on “Song of Myself.” Initially reluctant, she warms up to the idea after seeing the disaster he has made of the poster for the project. What happens in the next ninety minutes is a playwright who remembers what it was like to be a teenager. The angst, the self-consciousness, and the thirst for belonging are all present, along with a maturity that comes from knowing hardship and uncertainty.

Sennett and Harris do a solid job with their roles, analyzing Whitman with gusto and dancing a pas de deux filled with burgeoning questions that we only get answers to in the show’s shocking finale. Harris’s Anthony is the teenage boy we’d all like our daughter to date. He’s kind, attentive, athletic, and conscientious. Harris sends mixed signals with the best of them, and Sennett expertly inhabits a girl who has been isolated for much of her life and is trying to decipher these confusing cues. What they do share is an innate ability to extract deep meaning from sophisticated text; Sennett’s character from her lived experience and Harris’s from a much more recent epiphany. The actors wear tragedy well and are convincing in sharing Whitman’s thoughts that we are all connected. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, and Whitman’s words are particularly poignant in the context of this story. “…I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air…” So go, loaf and watch and make art and enjoy the simple pleasure of seeing a blade of grass. Sometimes we need a reminder that we’re more alike than not, and “for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

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