Theatre in Review: Lowcountry (Atlantic Theater Company)

	Babak Tafti, Jodi Balfour. Photo: Ahron R. Foster

Bad decisions are at the heart of Abby Rosebrock's new play, which depends entirely on its characters reliably acting on their worst impulses. Fortunately for the playwright, they rarely disappoint; less so for audiences who may wonder why they've signed up for the mother of all bad dates. Lowcountry is an intimate drama and a state-of-the-nation play, and in both cases, its conclusions are pretty dire. A low-stakes psychological thriller, it suffers from a low-grade depression. Rosebrock is gambling that misery loves company; I guess we'll see about that.

David, the protagonist, has, in his late thirties, achieved the trifecta of loserdom: His marriage is a ruin, he has lost his job as a high school teacher, and he is a registered sex offender, for reasons that are held back until late in the evening. Desperate to regain legal access to his young son, he has joined a program for sex addicts, where he is under the thumb of Paul, his sponsor. Paul, a prosperous businessman with an addictive past, has set him up with a place to live -- Arnulfo Maldonado's purposely dreary apartment set, with its sparse furnishing and cinder block walls, is the architectural expression of hopelessness -- and dangles the possibility of an office job, thus freeing David from low-paying kitchen duty at a Waffle House. Still, Paul's bossy manner, heard over the phone, doesn't feel entirely benign, and you can see David chafing at being treated like a child.

Then again, David -- who is lean, lonely, and perilously low in self-esteem -- is flirting with trouble. Coached by Paul to begin dating, he has matched on Tinder with Tally, in town (Moncks Corner, South Carolina) from Los Angeles, visiting with family. According to the rules, David is supposed to meet Tally outdoors in a public place; deceiving Paul, he has invited Tally up to his place for dinner.

David's reasons are murky, since he needs to avoid bedroom activities. At first glance, however, it is obvious that, for a committed celibate, Tally spells big-time trouble. By her own account, she had already seen "a rainbow of dicks" at seventeen and there's little evidence of a subsequent slowdown. She has daddy issues and (it is implied) a dire history with older men. (Her idea of a conversational icebreaker: "I have enough self-awareness to know, at my core I'm a dithering, spiritually weak, fragile... craven-ass white woman." Who could resist a siren call like that?) Equally scarred and snarky, she insists she never lies. "Although," she adds, "sometimes it feels like the right thing to do." Well, you can't say David wasn't warned.

Indeed, Tally, who has done her homework, has an agenda for the evening; actually, she has several, as we keep hearing new and different reasons for the meet-up. As her behavior becomes more provocative, David is surprised by "how little you seem to care. About my record." In any case, a theme emerges from Tally's musings: "I'd really like to be barefoot and pregnant right now." Later, she mutters, "I gotta pop out some kids, damn it." Is it a sign of desperation that she sees David as possible father material?

Whatever Tally is up to, it rarely seems to matter, since the action of Lowcountry is listless, and its characters are mere constructs. Rosebrock is concerned with American culture's punitive attitude to sex, which, in her view, is a poisoned fruit of capitalism. Certainly, David is an unlikely predator, having slept with exactly three people; during a period of steamy texting with a seventeen-year-old student, he kept his pants on while sharing a so-called dick pic. The play has no interest in what drove him to break the habits of a lifetime and misbehave. Tally alludes to a lifetime of psychological scars but provides few details. She is also haunted by her mother's death from cancer, which, in a novel passage, she attributes to Bill Clinton: "Cause, she was a god-fearing woman, but!! She woulda killed that guy, really she thought he embodied... Just, everything wrong, with the global economy... American, moral hypocrisy... Whole social order..." It's another case of a playwright preferring to editorialize rather than flesh out her characters.

Jo Bonney, the director, gambles that the quiet action will eventually yield some slow-burning suspense, but, until the violent climax, the play remains energy-deficient. It's nice to see Babak Tafti, absent from New York stages for several years, as David, who seems poleaxed about his abject state. The actor's nuanced work suggests the character's conflicts, his passively rebellious nature versus his determination to get back to a halfway decent life. (David was adopted from an unnamed country, allowing a twist about immigration that is so poorly integrated it feels like Rosebrock read about it in the news and decided to force it into her completed script.) The South African actress Jodi Balfour, best known for her television work, never quite gets at Tally's nervy, restless core, but the character is a slippery one, to be sure. As the hectoring, falsely cheerful, Paul, Keith Kupferer is the kind of friendly bully whose backslapping manner can be felt even over the telephone; he makes an eleventh-hour appearance at precisely the wrong moment, setting in motion events that all three characters will regret.

In addition to Maldonaldo's set, Heather Gilbert supplies a surprisingly complex lighting design; as sunlight fades and night approaches, various practical units come into play, causing significant alterations to the onstage look and mood; note also, the lights in the adjoining building, seen through the upstage windows. John Gromada's sound design efficiently delivers the long phone conversation with which the play opens, along with effects like children playing and birdsong, and musical selections that include Bette Midler singing "From a Distance." Sarah Laux's costumes are sharply observant, especially the slightly too-obvious seduction ensemble chosen by Tally.

Rosebrock has long been interested in the American love affair with self-help and recovery, not to mention the disruptive effects of sex, all of which she spoofed hilariously in the 2018 comedy Dido of Idaho. She followed up a year later with Blue Ridge, a rather wan drama set in a rehab center for substance abuse. Lowcountry is a similarly low-key affair; if you're going after an entire culture's broadly toxic effects, you need more vigor (and, ideally, humor) than the playwright supplies here. As it is, even her most arguable points feel too much like whining. And when all is said and done, it's not clear why Tally is so intent on bedding David or why he doesn't quickly send her packing. As a capper, they make choices that will probably take them off the streets for a long, long time. --David Barbour