Theatre in Review: This Flat Earth (Playwrights Horizons)

	Lynda Gravatt, Lucas Papaelias, Ella Kennedy Davis. Photo: Joan Marcus.

In This Flat Earth, playwright Lindsey Ferrentino clearly wants to say something about the spate of school shootings that has plagued this country -- but exactly what she has in mind never becomes clear. The play is a series of feints and trial balloons, with nothing developed enough to claim our interest or engage our emotions. It's a brief play, but it doesn't really feel like one.

Buried inside Ferrentino's script is an acute commentary on violence and class in America, but it needs further teasing out if it is going to have the impact the subject deserves. Set in a New England seaside town, where a shooter has invaded a middle school and taken out nine students, the playwright focuses her attention on the father-daughter team of Dan and Julie -- and what an intriguing pair they are, showing off the playwright's skill at creating highly specific characters. A former standup comic (of apparently small renown) and a widower, Dan jettisoned show business following his wife's death; he now works for the water department, and, clearly, is just getting by. Julie, thirteen, a survivor of the shooting, keeps insisting, categorically, that she has no feelings about the incident, but it is difficult to coax her out of her bedroom and she is terrified of loud noises. (That he can amuse her, in moments of stress, with odd bits of shtick is a lovely touch that tells you much about their relationship.)

When we meet Julie, she is watching a film on a laptop with her friend Zander, who is, in the awkward manner of all thirteen-year-olds, trying to put the moves on her. (He even tries the old stretching-his-arms, grab-her-shoulder routine; apparently, some things never change.) He doesn't get very far, in part because the last time they held hands was when they were being guided out of the school after the murders; any intimacies between them are now tinged with calamity. The combination of trauma and hormones has made them extremely volatile: One minute they are drawing close, only to land in a fierce argument a minute later -- and the sound of a table being knocked over in the apartment upstairs is enough to leave them shaking. Both are on edge, as they are set to return on the following day; in an especially eerie passage, we learn that their classroom has been set up exactly as they left it, with their backpacks restored to the desks where they usually sit.

Dan gets paired off with Lisa, whose daughter, Noelle, is among the dead. Because Dan is a working-class guy and Lisa is part of the town's elite, Ferrentino has to work overtime getting them together, inventing a situation having to do with boxes of gourmet popcorn sold to raise money for the school's orchestra; it's a frank contrivance and it feels like one. Having lost her daughter in this ghastly event, Lisa is little better than a basket case; she says that after the incident she and husband refused to leave their house for a month, unaware that a year's worth of Omaha steaks, sent by friends, were decaying on their stoop. (Really? They never opened their door? Where did their food and other necessities come from? Did the postman not notice anything strange about pounds of rotten meat sitting in the sun?) Lisa is making a halting attempt at coming back to life, even inviting Dan and Julie for a backyard barbecue. Julie wasn't friends with Noelle, but she wants nothing to do with her family -- not least because she owns a pile of Noelle's clothes, purchased at the local Goodwill Store -- a point she makes too bluntly for her own good, angering Dan and causing Lisa to flee in tears.

Having established a landscape of the grief-stricken and fear-scarred, Ferrentino is boxed in, trying to find a way out with a series of developments that are, to put it mildly, unconvincing. Julie, upon hearing that the shooting is only one of many such incidents in recent years, refuses to return to school; to maintain such innocence, she must be the only adolescent in America unplugged from television, social media, and the comments of friends. And Lisa, who, only a day earlier, was trying to befriend Dan and Julie, returns to announce that, while volunteering at the school, she has discovered a discrepancy in Julie's records that will get her kicked out. (I'll skip the details, but it explains why the borderline-poor Julie attends a school full of rich kids.) Then, as if throwing her hands up, the playwright takes the play on a mystical turn, having Cloris, the grumpy retired cellist who lives upstairs, present a vision of Julie's adult life, the main point of which is, "In your life, this is not the most important moment."

It's a hodgepodge of situations and ideas, and there is little that the director, Rebecca Taichman, can do to bring clarity to it. Several scenes, which are meant to be awkward, feel awkwardly staged instead, although Ella Kennedy Davis, as Julie -- an enormous role for a young actress -- expertly conveys her character's panic and denial. Among the others, Ian Saint-Germain is touching as the hapless, confused Zander and Lynda Gravátt has a nicely oracular presence as Cloris. If Lucas Papaelias and Cassie Beck seem a little hamstrung as Dan and Lisa, the fault is surely not theirs.

Dane Laffrey's two-level set, depicting two apartments, is an ambitious one, and I'm not sure why each of them is so underdressed; also, the drop, depicting a partly cloudy blue sky, looks distinctly out of place in the nighttime scenes. Nevertheless, some fine time-of-day looks -- including a gorgeous sunset -- are delivered by the lighting designer, Christopher Akerlind. Paloma Young's costumes feel accurate and Mikhail Fiksel's sound design includes a series of artfully layered effects -- thunder, rain, and traffic, among others -- for a scene in which Dan tries to calm Julie by identifying the sounds that are keeping her up at night.

Ferrentino is also the author of Ugly Lies the Bone and the currently running Amy and the Orphans, both of which have been bright points in their respective seasons, so This Flat Earth is clearly just one of those things. It has the feel of an early draft, and one wonders if, given the timeliness of its theme, it wasn't rushed into production. For the moment, Stephen Karam and PJ Paparelli's Columbinus and Martin Zimmerman's On the Exhale remain the most powerful dramas about such incidents. That there are enough such plays to constitute a genre is a discussion for another day. -- David Barbour