Theatre in Review: Dig (Primary Stages 59E59)

	Triney Sandoval, Andrea Syglowski. Photo: James Leynse

Is there something in the air? Our playwrights -- some of them, anyway - are suddenly focusing on the deep unease underlining life in the American heartland. The just-opened Swing State, set in rural Wisconsin, takes on climate change along with addiction, poverty, and law enforcement run amok. Now comes Dig, which unfolds in a decaying Ohio neighborhood and features characters struggling with liquor, drugs, and abusive relationships. In contrast to the elegiac Swing State, Dig -- about the aftermath of a crime, compounded by lies and self-punishment -- combines sharp-edged comedy with an aching sadness, sparked by hair-trigger confrontations and the threat of violence. And, in its own oddball way, it's a surprisingly spiritual piece of work.

Theresa Rebeck, who has a penchant for quirky, sometimes marginal, characters, introduces one of her oddest couples. Middle-aged Roger, proprietor of an urban nursery, is a lifelong devotee of greenery. (Flowers, he notes dismissively, are presumptuous; all those colors are vulgar.) A prime fussbudget and control freak, he doesn't like anyone else to touch his stock, which helps explain why sales are so bad. A former mama's boy, he is an object of speculation among his friends, who wonder if he is gay, straight, a virgin, or some combination of these. Still, if business is poor, at least he owns the building, allowing him to live alone above the shop, and, as long as he and his plants can commune in peace, he's happy enough.

It's his bad luck that there's a mob of troubled, fractious, self-destructive souls constantly at his front door. Chief among them is Megan, the daughter of his friend (and occasional bookkeeper) Lou. Megan, wrapped in a leather jacket and an outsized T-shirt designed to conceal her body, her head averted to avoid anything like eye contact, is more than a handful. Out of jail and regularly attending AA, she is struggling to put her life back together following a suicide attempt. Adding to this trifecta of sorrow -- really, the cause of it -- is the death of her young son, who, she says, she left in an overheated car. Because the tragedy became a viral media sensation, she cannot properly mourn; indeed, she can barely go out in public without someone denouncing her.

Megan, chafing under her father's watchful eye and desperate for something to do, installs herself as Roger's assistant, totally against his will. Then again, she takes to the work like a natural, sprucing up the place and getting Roger to offer a more customer-friendly inventory (including some honest-to-God flowers). A wary, grudging affection grows between them, to the point that Megan, rather improbably makes a pass at him. Roger even begins to relax into this new arrangement, for the first time easily accommodating the presence of another person. But Lou, who regards Megan with a mixture of frustrated love and fierce resentment, objects, angrily, to the arrangement. Everett, a former employee (and major stoner) who was fired after trying to convert Roger's back room into an "herbaceous wonderland," wants Megan gone. And then there's Adam, Megan's abusive ex-husband, whose unwelcome arrival reveals the ugly and complex reality behind the little boy's death.

Almost everyone in Dig is on the skids: Roger's business is dying. Megan is mired in guilt and self-loathing. Lou has bankrupted himself trying to save Megan. Everett can't hold a job. And one look at tense, sweaty Adam and you know that his plans for a new life won't last ten minutes. Under such emotional headwinds, the fragile alliance forged by Roger and Megan has all the chances of a fern in a cyclone, especially given her self-destructive ways. "The truth is the truth and if you try to get around it, it will come after you and take you down," Megan says. It's a lesson she has yet to learn; if she doesn't, Roger adds, the truth will eat her alive.

Rebeck's plotting can be a little shaky; Roger really should learn to lock the shop's front door, and it would be nice if somebody had mentioned Adam before he appears out of nowhere to shake things up -- but her direction keeps the action taut and close to the boiling point. She also has a gift for casting. Jeffrey Bean captures Roger's nerdy, neurotic qualities, especially the faint of note of fear that creeps in when something, anything, is ever so slightly out of place. He also nails Roger's steelier aspects, not least when informing Everett that he is very happy to no longer employ him. He nimbly engages in a tentative, wary dance of intimacy with Andrea Syglowski, whose Megan, despite her cutting sarcasm and occasional bursts of warmth, is always a heartbeat away from melting down. Their climactic confrontation is a kind of savage disrobing, with him stripping away her defenses to get at the secret that is killing her.

The rest of the cast provides excellent support. Triney Sandoval bristles with fury as Lou, choking on grievance and determined to punish Megan by micromanaging every second of her life. Having perfected his nasal whine, Greg Keller is ideal as Everett, a skeevy loser imperturbably convinced of his charm. (Praising himself, he says, "I say everything with humility." "I guess we understand the word 'humility' in a different way," Roger replies. "That's probably true of every word," Everett agrees.) David Mason is tense, sneaky, and faintly panicky as Adam; his showdown with Megan is packed with menace. Mary Bacon makes the most of her few scenes as Molly, a Catholic matron who befriends Megan, providing her with a measure of healing.

This is a play in which the specificity of the environment really matters -- the shop, known as Dig, is a battleground -- and the designers Christopher Swader and Justin Swader have realized it vividly, combining brick and blond wood with piles of flora, topping it all off with a raked skylight; it's a stunning piece of work, lit with enormous sensitivity and attention to detail by Mary Ellen Stebbins, who invests each scene with a richly dimensional look and emotional tone. Fabian Fidel Aguilar's costumes are highly character-specific, especially when contrasting Megan's sad, bulky leisurewear with Molly's carefully curated twinsets. Fitz Patton's original music dovetails nicely with his preshow list of cuts by Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry.

Interestingly, Dig, more than most of Rebeck's plays, is deeply concerned with spiritual matters. Roger, flawed and eccentric as he is, is also a profoundly good person of the sort we don't often see onstage. Megan's life won't improve until she learns to treat herself with honesty and charity. And if Molly is a figure of fun at times, her faith is given all due respect. As the play ends, Megan's troubles are just beginning, but at least she has experienced a moment of grace. Dig is an uncommonly gripping and affecting drama. --David Barbour