It’s the most timeworn story in melodrama: A wealthy patrician falls
in love with a working-class girl about half his age. He is a smart,
cold-blooded opportunist; she is beautiful, starry-eyed, and full of
ideals. He is her sugar daddy; she is his spiritual guide. They begin a
six-year adulterous relationship that inevitably ends badly, after his
wife sniffs out the scandal. She packs up and moves off to a cold
ramshackle apartment on the other side of town; he pursues her three
years later, after his wife dies of cancer. In the traditional version
they would fall in love anew.
No so in Skylight, the domestic drama by British playwright
David Hare which opens Shotgun Players 2009 season. In Hare’s play,
neither Tom, the well-heeled restaurant owner (played by John Mercer),
nor Kyra, his former mistress (Emily Jordan), seems wholly sympathetic.
Nor are they able to paper over their differences. The play takes place
over the course of a single night in Kyra’s flat, which has all the
tell-tale signs of a single woman living on a budget: the space heater,
the cactus on the counter, the place under the sink where she stows
plastic bags. During that night, Kyra receives two surprise visitors.
First, Tom’s eighteen-year-old son Edward (Carl Holvick-Thomas), who
complains about his dad’s detachment and says he misses having a
maternal figure about the house. Then the old man himself, who arrives
in a chauffeured limousine to say, “Baby, I want you back” — with
reservations.
In the hours that follow, Tom and Kyra try to iron out the
difficulties in their relationship. Kyra chides Tom for his arrogance
and his dissolute lifestyle; Tom upbraids Kyra for refusing to leave
her teaching job and run away with him. Through brittle, naturalistic
dialogue, Hare brings to light all the dicey social issues that prevent
them from getting back together: the generation gap, the disparity in
social class, Tom’s elitism verses Kyra’s populist sensibility. (Hare
couldn’t resist making her a mouthpiece for the underclass.) Of the two
of them, Tom comes off as more of the ogre and he’s ultimately beyond
recall (he’s also a better character). Nonetheless, Kyra seems
reluctant to let him go. Perhaps old passions die hard, perhaps Kyra
gets seduced by the idea of being useful to someone. In any case, the
line between good girl and bad guy seems perilously thin.
Skylight requires great stamina on behalf of its actors, who
have to carry two hours of straight dialogue with no scene breaks
except for a single intermission. Considering the gravity of its
social-class subtext, it’s a play of relative inaction: A father and
son both visit the father’s ex-mistress in the course of an evening.
The father’s visit results in a long, protracted argument. At the end,
a decision is made. The father leaves, forlornly, in a cab, asking the
ex-mistress to stop by one of his restaurants some time. The son comes
back with a lavish breakfast, presumably from the dad’s restaurant.
It’s a combination of deft writing, forceful acting, and astute
directing — by Shotgun Players’ artistic director Patrick Dooley
— that makes the play seem like a taut drama rather than a
rambling conversation. Jordan and Mercer are saddled with enormous
responsibility. They have to tell the whole story of their affair in
flashback, and still make the dialogue crackle. They have to oscillate
from relationship mode to social commentary mode without breaking
character or making the play seem too much like a class diatribe.
Most importantly, they have to reveal the emotional lives of their
characters in small ways. For Jordan, this amounts to the harried way
that she chops an onion or grinds pepper into a sauce pan; for Mercer,
it’s the punctilious act of picking an onion skin from an already grimy
floor and throwing it in the waste basket. In one of the most freighted
moments of the play, the veteran restaurateur picks up his mistress’
cheese grater and tries to figure out how to use it. He’s been enlisted
to grind a hard gray lump of cheese that would never pass muster in his
own restaurant.
Named for the glass ceiling that hung over Tom’s wife when she died,
Skylight is rife with symbols. There’s the reading material on
Kyra’s bookshelf — classic novels and Internet manuals —
that substitutes for real-world stuff (she doesn’t read newspapers or
own a television). There’s Frank, the chauffeur parked outside, waiting
to whisk Tom back to his own upper-class bubble. There are the hip-hop
records that Edward listens to, showing that his own class pretensions
are the opposite of his father.
Skylight is the type of drama that goes over well in
Berkeley. Tom’s relationship with Kyra is more paternal than romantic,
and most parents around here could relate to the problem of giving a
child all the trappings of your aristocratic lifestyle, only to have
her move off to some inner-city neighborhood, opt for a low-paying
teaching job, and acquire high-minded ideas about socioeconomics and
education reform. It’s natural to empathize with Tom but easier to side
with Kyra, and the poetic justice in the end — when Edward and
Kyra feast on the spoils of Tom’s restaurant enterprise — could
never be lost on a Berkeley audience. In her most endearing moment,
Kyra delivers a blunt summation of the play: “You fuck me first.
Then you criticize my lifestyle. … Doing it the other way
’round, of course, would be a terrible tactical mistake.”
