There are some very nice moments and provocative debate in JM Dinson’s The Ape on the Church Steps, the latest entry in the 2009 Baltimore Playwrights Festival, but they are overwhelmed by the surges of emotion that crash unchecked through the tiny Copeland Theatre. From the closing moments of Act I through the final blackout, Dinson piles climax upon climax, and his obliging actors (who at times seem to have been given only one note from director Barry Feinstein: more) holler and beat their chests and bare their scars until at last they look absolutely exhausted. It’s the only time I could really empathize.
The play is set in the inpatient wing of a psychiatric hospital run by Dr. Luvitz, whose socially awkward ways and insistence on scientific rigor have kept him generally aloof to the outside world. His most frustrating patient—a meek yet occasionally charming man named Arthur Easy, Sr.—is more obviously in hiding. Eight years earlier, in the wake of a terrible tragedy, Arthur Sr. abandoned his wife Rose and their young son and lost himself in the psych ward. Now fully grown and living in another city, Arthur Jr. has returned home in the hopes of salvaging something from the wreckage his father left behind.
The play’s program and publicity materials deliberately conceal the exact nature of Arthur Sr.’s problem (it is referred to only as his “Special Friend”), so all I will add is that it may or may not be an hallucination. Either way, it gives Dinson plenty of occasion to ponder the “big questions” of theology: Is there a God? Why do bad things happen to good people? What is man’s relationship to the divine?
The first problem is that whatever insights Dinson has to offer can barely be heard over the furious sound of actors Acting. The second problem is that Dinson’s script does little to shape or encourage subtler performances. Crucial scenes tend to begin at their crest—characters enter trembling with impossible-to-suppress rage, or they simply come on shouting, and the result is less a dramatic arc than a flatline.
This is especially true of scenes featuring Michael Zemarel, who plays Arthur Jr. One might admire the actor’s total commitment to his character, who is already halfway to madness when he first enters, were it not that Zemarel throws himself so recklessly around the stage we begin to fear for his safety—not to mention that of his scene partners.
We also lose much of what he has to say. The second act begins with a long speech in which Arthur Jr. explains what has caused him to snap. As written, the speech is highly intellectualized—in light of the play’s resolution, it sounds more like a rationalization of madness than madness itself. Yet Feinstein and Zemarel constantly push in the latter direction, so that a man rolling and writhing on the floor nevertheless finds the mental wherewithal to articulate some very dense thoughts. We focus on the rolling and writhing and so lose sight of the argument.
If the other actors are not guilty of such extremes, they still have a tendency to miss quieter opportunities for connection as they prepare for noisier solos. Steve Lichtenstein makes a heartbreaking Arthur Sr.—and flashes a quirky wit—when he stops trying to hard to seem tormented. Similarly, Kate McKenna plays a sympathetic art therapist, Faith, who becomes romantically involved with Will Amland’s shy Dr. Luvitz; their scenes together seem at first to be the understated exceptions that prove the overstated rule, until Faith makes a crucial error in judgment that inexplicably sets her and the doctor at each other’s throats.
As though to justify a shouting match between these otherwise infallibly polite people, Dinson has Dr. Luvitz suggest that Faith’s interest in her patients is something more than professional. The scene is false from start to finish, and neither Amland nor McKenna seem to know what to do in it besides raise their voices louder.
