"Blackouts" by J. Anthony Roman - Two Generations in the Heart of Darkness

"Blackouts", J. Anthony Roman's new play about one New York City apartment on the verge of two historic blackouts, isn't actually about the titular events; indeed, the lights remain on for a good three-quarters of the show. The playwright's insight into human nature, fortunately, retains a similar penchant for illumination. It's not a document of the 'where were you when the lights went out' variety but a portrait of where two generations of a flailing family were in their lives. We look in on one generation in the sweltering summer of 1977 and the second in a calmer 2003, and the message is, the more things change, the more one thing can stay the same.

In 1977, Eddy (Max Woertendyke) spends his nights punching a clock at a bakery and his days painting up a storm while minding his infant son James; his wife Sarah (Jamie Klassel) has made the sacrifices every artist's wife in these sorts of tales must make. When hard times give way to abject failure, Eddy's solution is to ramp up his drug use and alienate everyone around him. Twenty-six years later, James (Woertendyke again; each of the four cast members plays a role apiece in both acts), a parent himself now, owns that same apartment, but his absent father's legacy is more visible in his scarred psyche than in bricks and paint. The first act is about the crimes of the father; the second, about the son, and about crimes, though not arranged in such a one-to-one correlation this time. Both men are passionate, both are sick of trading their artistic freedoms for forty pieces of silver. Both want to be more for their families than they know how to be even for themselves. Both happen to confront, or at least raise, the darkest demons around them just as their greater metropolitan area is about to lose power.

Roman's ability to create drama with a bare minimum of elements is impressive. Although all the action is confined to one apartment with a perpetually open window, it never feels stagebound; we are given everything we need, and never once catch the playwright trying to cheat and stage something in this room that wouldn't have actually gone on there. This world is insular; Roman not only confines himself to just eight characters in two worlds, but sticks to one unhappy family, as in a Russian novel. Each act begins so simply, with a tense but stable stasis, and the dramatic moments creep up subtly; we only realize how dark it's gotten when we can no longer turn around to glimpse the light. The energy just builds as each act progresses, like a pressure cooker; the combustibility is palpable.

New York's problems in 1977 are well-documented, but aside from musical shout-outs and, of course, cocaine, Roman is not terribly concerned with history; the blackout is merely a rack to hang his hat on, not a lens to view a world. Sarah has a more frightening monster in her house than Son of Sam, and Eddy is chasing a prize more tempting to him than a baseball championship. When 2003 rolls around, James reaps the fruits of a more gentrified lifestyle; he gets to be an artist without starving, and someone may well be waiting to decree the Hell's Kitchen apartment a Clinton apartment at any time. The substance of choice to be abused is the more domestically acceptable alcohol. In the modern world, the attendant demons are shifting, slippery, more frustrating, tougher to put your finger on. Eddy plays out a cycle lived by a thousand artists faced with mounting debt and lines of coke; it was the seventies and he had the problems of the seventies to weigh him down. He drowns in history. James, by contrast, is afloat, drifting; somewhere in the intervening twenty-six years he lost his anchor. He idolizes the specter of a father he never really knew. Maybe there isn't any history this decade worth attaching oneself to.

Swandive Studio's commendable choice to premiere this difficult play at Center Stage NY represents severe risk, as the piece by choice lives or dies on the strength of its performers. Fortunately, director Jill DeArmon ably shepherds a clutch of unfailingly strong performers to Hell's Kitchen and back. It's almost sadistic to make any actor put himself through this sort of wringer twice a night as Eddy and James, but Max Woertendyke carries the show with a seemingly endless reserve of emotion; Roman, like artistic Eddy, paints with a big brush and asks the thespian for a draining set of gymnastics, but Woertendyke is up to the twin challenges, even making Eddy and James, even inasmuch as they are intended to mirror each other, into two distinct people. Well, if every actor dreams of tackling a dramatic lead, maybe landing two for the price of one comes with its advantages.

Zachary Fletcher gets the 'best friend' role, albeit in blood relation form, in both generations; in 1977 he's the reasonable adult getting his life together, and in 2003 he's the suburban guy who's grown-up enough for a serious relationship and young enough to avoid serious talks about it, somewhere just around the age where it is no longer hip to throw up the horns for photographs. Fletcher's transformation between acts is so effective as to somewhat subvert Roman's intentions in comparing generations, all it takes is a shift in attitude and the removal of a mustache (reminding us a bit of Ron Howard in "More American Graffiti"), and it's like it was a different actor entirely; we cannot detect the DNA of the irate bakery manager, raging at Eddy in 1977 with explosive force, in the playful frat-boyish chap hangin' out with James in 2003.

The women, by contrast, trade places (not to mention men) between generations. In 1977, Jamie Klassel is a powerhouse as Sarah, a woman married to a man who is not the man she married. "You can't be this weak," she pleads with James, even as his non-career in the arts spirals and the family paychecks disappear up his nose. When it turns out-many times over-that such a scenario indeed plays out, Klassel portrays such intense hurt and such fiercely brewing fury with a strength to remind the audience why they say that the essence of drama is conflict. We don't see Sarah again in the second act, but we do run into Klassel, as another character, and between one thing and another, we're glad to find out she's doing okay.

In 2003, the wife in the apartment is Evy, and this time she's the self-destructive one. Lisa Snyder is brilliant in a role requiring both a simultaneous self-concealment (an accent, a murky backstory) and self-exposure in a series of painful moments. Not only is Snyder fearless, but we know that she's not powerless, burgeoning alcoholism aside; her supporting role in 1977 comes with an outburst of fear and anger so earthshaking and so memorable that we wonder if some of that spark made its way to Evy somehow. She paces like a caged lion by way of the outer boroughs, dodging the hard questions, letting herself lose a fight that no one wins. It takes a strong actor to win your heart; it takes a bolder one to push it away.

But then, as a producer of this piece, Snyder isn't afraid to plunge down the path of most resistance. "Blackouts" will market itself well enough on the strength of its historical gimmick, but the true power in the piece is in the electric charge between damaged people. When the lights go out the second time we know enough to know we don't need a third blackout to figure out what James' son has in store for him. We've seen what life was about for his father, his grandfather; we've seen how things fall apart. He's going to need all the illumination he can get.