Dark Matters
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is a most unusual playwright and this current production,
DARK MATTERS, at The Rattlestick Theater draws on his experience as a writer
of horror films and Marvel Comics.
Michael and Bridget Cleary along with their son, Jeremy, have recently moved
from Washington DC to Bridget’s home town of Greenback, a desolate little
town in the back woods of Virginia. The first characters we meet though are
the sheriff who is trying to help Michael find Bridget. His wife has disappeared
and he doesn’t know why, nor does his teenage son. But upon Bridget’s
return toward the end of the first Act, she explains it all. She’s been
talking to aliens; the aliens don’t have phones so she couldn’t
call. Apparently they communicate telepathically. Sadly, the Cleary family
has a difficult time communicating, not only as husband and wife, but also
as Jeremy’s parents.
In this respect the Clearys are clearly mortals, just the opposite of Marvel
Comics’ superhero family, THE FANTASTIC FOUR which Aguirre-Sacasa writes.
In the comics, Reed and Sue Storm along with their teenage son and an infant
represent the ideal family, a team. They survive their wild adventures through
their ability to support one another. They have fights, but the ties of blood
and loyalty always win out.
As DARK MATTERS develops, the opposite process is at work. And whether or
not you believe in aliens or believe that they are the cause of the family’s
unraveling, what we see here is a contemporary domestic drama. But it’s
far from a soap opera, if anything it appears more like a horror film. The
Hitchcockian sound effects which signal scene changes are particularly evocative
of the eerie atmosphere. And the closeness of the bare trees, their branches
infringing on the living room window, suggest an outside world of gothic beauty
fraught with untold dimensions.
At the core of the families worries, though, is their son Jeremy who arrives
home one evening admittedly having had some beer, but perhaps he’s trying
other things, too. The sheriff suggests it might be crystal meth. In this role
Justin Chatwin is a natural. With his good lucks anyone would suspect that
trouble is on its way. As his mother Bridget, Elizabeth Marvel is remarkably
convincing. Whether or not she’s really in communication with aliens,
she is righteously motivated to protect her family. Reed Birney plays her fallible
husband; the one whose daunting task is to identify right from wrong, truth
from deception and reality from illusion.
While DARK MATTERS is not compelling at every moment, it certainly is a new
way to look at old material, be it the supernatural existence of aliens or
the natural right of children to determine their own fate. In this case, we’ll
never know which.
That’s This Week Off Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.
