Theatre in Review: The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness (Ma-Yi Theatre/Connelly Theatre)

	Ali Ahn and Christopher Larkin

The young siblings at the heart of The Sugar House at the Edge of the Wilderness have been burdened with an extraordinary history of tragedy and displacement, and, as the lights come up on Carla Ching's drama, the possibility for improvement is remote -- especially since one of them is dodging a charge of arson.

Han and Greta were raised by Han's parents; this was in China, with its one-child policy, so Greta, who was found in an orphanage, had to be kept secret. When their mother died in a traffic accident, their heartbroken father put them up for adoption. They were claimed by Gabe and Hettie, an American couple, who brought them to Chicago. Gabe died, and Hettie hit the bottle; before vanishing altogether, she sent Han and Greta to New York, to spend time with Doc, Gabe's brother, a noted rock journalist, and Opal, his wife/girlfriend.

Clearly, Han and Greta have endured enough trouble for a lifetime, but, as the play begins, there's more to come: Greta, to avoid prosecution for burning down Doc's home, has been remanded to some kind of rehab facility. Known in the script as the Sugar House, it is run by Baba Yaga, a smiley-faced tyrant with the manner of a kindergarten teacher and the instincts of Ken Kesey's Nurse Ratched. Her unorthodox, tough-love approach involves bullying her clients into good behavior, awarding them paste-on gold stars for cooperating with her. (Five stars get you contact with the outside world.)

The play tracks Greta's progress through this weird institution, while, on the outside, Han, typed for too long as the good sibling, blows his top, taking to the streets to vent his rage. Ching works up a fair amount of tension around these events, especially when Baba Yaga is on the job; even for someone with her killer instincts, Greta poses a challenge, and she also has a couple of tense run-ins with Opal, who knows plenty about being a foster child. But the script is built on an uncertain foundation -- it's an uneasy mix of naturalism and various forms of fantasy -- and, rather than worrying about Greta and Han, you may find yourself pondering the many questions left unanswered by the script.

First and foremost, there's the Sugar House, which is like no other psychological institution on earth. (The name apparently comes from the shelves of candy found there.) It is the domain of the bizarrely named Baba Yaga, who dresses entirely in white and wields a giant staff that also functions as a piece of chalk, allowing her to draw big circles around the stage, enclosing her patients and their loved ones before a therapy session begins. Her methods including belittling, deceiving, and all but torturing her charges -- that is, when she's not keeping them drugged. There are indications in the script that the Sugar House scenes have been conceived in an intentionally fantastical manner, but it's never clear how they are meant to jive with the rest of the script.

There are other nagging questions. Greta says she burned down Doc's house, but he and Opal appear to live in an apartment, and, in any case, it's never clear how much damage was done. (They don't seem overly upset at having their possessions incinerated.) Greta's fury at Han, which precipitates the fire, isn't convincingly portrayed. Also left unexplored is how Doc and Opal feel about the possibility of taking responsibility for these damaged children. And Greta's escape from the Sugar House strains credulity; are there no other staff members around to stop her, especially when Baba Yaga is screaming at the top of her lungs?

The tougher passages have a real bite. When Baba Yaga, who is Asian, tries to make nice with Greta, the latter tartly replies, "You think I'll bond with you 'cause you look like me?" When asked why she turned to arson, she replies, "Have you ever read The Art of War?" Then again, the maudlin is not avoided. Speaking of his father, Han says, "He was a man whose heart was...it was so big that it became too much for his body." The scene in which Greta faces the memories of her three mothers is a bit too much-- one dead parent is a tragedy; three in a row is enough for a girl group. In the last analysis, Ching struggles to find words commensurate with her characters' outsized emotions and terrible histories.

At the same time, The Sugar House remains watchable, thanks to Daniella Topol's canny, tough-minded direction. As Greta, Ali Ahn is the kind of kid you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley; she has a stare that would stop traffic and she's pretty adept at hurling furniture when the mood hits her. When she faces off with Cindy Cheung's cheerful, yet sinister Baba Yaga, sparks do fly. There's also good work from April Matthis as Opal, who, alone among the adults, has a clue what Greta and Han are going through, and Bjorn DuPaty as one of Greta's fellow inmates. David Spangler struggles with the thinness of Doc's role and Christopher Larkin seems to be trying to strike a balance between anger and passivity as Han. (He sings the play's original songs - written by him and Ching -- quite nicely, however.)

Another plus factor is the highly original production design. Clint Ramos' set places an articulating wall -- a kind of collage of window frames, lamps, and pieces of trellis -- upstage. It is carefully lit by Japhy Weideman, who gets some very striking effects from an upstage ground row and head-high strip light, both facing the audience. The video design, by Alex Koch and David Tennent, is reasonably well done -- especially when dispensing information about the time and place of each scene or transmitting the characters' tweets -- but some of the bigger effects, gotten from a camera placed on a helmet worn by Greta in solitary, seem unnecessary. Shane Rettig's sound design blends ambient pop music -- like Iggy Pop's "Here Comes Success"-- with the unsettling sounds of flames. Theresa Squire's costumes are perfectly fine.

More than most, however, a play filled with such terrible events -- and characters so covered with scar tissue -- needs a surer-handed presentation. This one tries to be too many things at once, and none of them get to the heart of Greta and Han's pain.--David Barbour