Theater Review: Maple & Vine

Just How Far Will People Go to Be Happy? Maybe Back to the Past
By Lauren Yarger
Not happy with your life? Get rid of it and start an ideal one back in 1955 where things are simpler and everyone knows his or her place.

That's the solution for which one couple opts following the loss of their baby and a growing dissatisfaction with life in general in Jordan Harrison's new play, Maple and Vine, getting an Off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons.

Katha (Marin Ireland) isn't able to sleep following the loss or plug back into her management job at a publishing company or life in general. Her husband, Ryu (Peter Kim), doesn't seem to be able to help her through her depression -- he's struggling himself with a lack of satisfaction in his career as a plastic surgeon.

Enter Dean and Ellen (Trent Dawson and Jeanine Serralles), spokespersons for the Society of Dynamic Obsolescence, a sort of alter-reality housing development where it's always 1955. Housewives tend to their homes, husbands and children and husbands bring home the bacon. Boundaries are set and provide a vacation from reality and freedom the modern world doesn't offer.

Katha becomes increasingly intrigued and finally convinces Ryu to try living in the SDO for six months. This might be a way for the couple to resume sexual relations and produces a baby -- both things considered wifely duties and which Katha has avoided for the last six months. Transitioning to the Eisenhower era isn't as simple as it might seem, however. Katha needs to become Kathy and learn how to cook. Ryu, a Japanese-American, is given a menial job in a box-making plant. The couple's mixed-race marriage is tolerated because 1955 Americans felt guilty about the forced interment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, but it certainly isn't embraced. Even Kathy, sewing her own '50s frocks (IIlona Somogyl, design) and becoming increasingly involved in the life of the community, asks her neighbors to stop being so tolerant and make their experience of 1955 more realistic by directing some prejudice at them.

Will the couple adapt to the picture-perfect world of the past (depicted nicely by designer Alexander Dodge on movable metallic-framed sets and original music by Bray Poor), especially when reality keeps exposing the negative? Not is all as it seems, especially when Ryu spies Dean in a homosexual relationship with his prejudiced box-plant boss Roger (Redro Pascal).

The play poses some interesting questions, most looming perhaps, are how we choose to cope with unhappiness and why people choose to stay in a situation where they aren't happy, especially when leaving is an option. Folks in 1955, after all, didn't have a lot of freedom to choose whether or not they wanted to be a housewife or to live an openly gay lifestyle.

Director Anne Kauffman smoothly sets up some strong performances, especially from a nicely layered Ireland and from Pascal who does a very different second role as Katha's publishing colleague Omar, but there are a couple of flaws. It's not clear for a while who Dean and Ellen are -- are they Katha's fantasy? Are they a dream induced by sleeping pills? These answers seem more likely than the bizarre reality that they represent a community locked in the 1950s.

In addition, Kauffman takes a sexual encounter between Dean and Roger too far (a mistake made in 95 percent of scenes involving nudity and sex on stage these days). We really just need to know from the dialogue and perhaps a quick fastening of a belt that the characters have just had sex. We don't need to be there during the act itself. Frankly, if we need some sex on stage  here (and we don't), a better choice would have been to let us see how Kathy and Ryu relate in their new circumstances or how gay Dean manages to get intimate with his wife and whether she finds it as satisfying as 1955 housewives are supposed to.

Maple and Vine runs through Dec. 23 at Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd St., NYC. For information and tickets to tonight's performance, call  212) 279-4200 or visit http://www.playwrightshorizons.org.

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