In the dark backroom of the English Markets Building, a play was being born. I ventured out to the theater on Chapel Street and was greeted there by a shadowy figure who led me inside. There, a developing set had been laid out for the New Haven Theater Company’s latest offering, Smudge. The play, which first played in New York in 2010, is a contemporary look at parenthood and its problems, with a rather unusual take.
My guide into the dim recesses of the building was Peter Chenot, NHTC regular (The Magician and The Seafarer, to name a few). Chenot plays Pete, brother and boss of Nicholas and husband of Colby, who is pregnant with the couple’s first child as the story opens. Nicholas is played by another NHTC regular, Christian Shaboo, who starred in both Shipwrecked! and The Cult. Colby is played by Katelyn Marie Marshall, a relative newcomer to NHTC featured to good effect in The Cult last spring; the play is directed by Deena Nicol-Blifford, who also appeared in The Cult, among others, and directed The Seafarer last season.
Smudge runs from Nov. 5 through Nov. 14.
The aftermath of the birth of the child — named Cassandra — is the main business of the play. Cassandra, Nicol-Blifford says, is a “fourth character,” signaled by lighting and sound effects developed by, respectively, NHTCers Trevor Williams and Megan Chenot, who is also composing incidental music for the show. Smudge, says Nicol-Blifford, “has some sci-fi elements, but is mainly about how we manage the disappointment of our expectations.”
Written by Rachel Axler, a two-time Emmy winner best known for her work on Parks and Recreation and The Daily Show, Smudge was developed in 2009 at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in Waterford. The NHTC team chose the play after a summer of reading many possible scripts. Smudge came along late in the process; Nicol-Blifford suggested it, as she’d seen it at the O’Neill. “And it just came together immediately” when the current cast members took on the roles for the initial reading. The play, the team says, is striking in its intimacy, as we see these three people try to handle a situation that truly tests their individual resources.
While Smudge is dark in its humor, with potentially “disturbing content,” Nicol-Blifford stresses that the play is entertaining, calling “for good comic timing.” Part of our pursuit of normality, of course, requires making even the most nightmarish situation somehow acceptable. And there’s the child to consider. Every parent wants a happy baby, and who’s to say that a child, no matter how different from parental expectations, is not happy in ignorance of what is “wrong”?
Smudge is a one-act that runs through 16 scenes in 80 to 90 minutes with no intermission.The play, Nicol-Blifford says, jumps about a bit, following a sequential arc but showing us brief “snapshots of time” in the lives of the characters. One scene featured the couple contemplating their baby’s ultrasound image, and not sure what to make of it. It looked, well, “smudged.” The scene portrays some of the anxieties that come with pregnancy — diet, health, what’s “normal” — but in a low-key, relaxed way.
Another scene portrayed the sibling relationship between Pete, “an overgrown frat boy,” and Nicholas, as Pete pressed Nicholas for details about the kid and waxed paternal about his own brood of three. Family dynamics are important in Smudge and, as Nicol-Blifford says, “the reactions of the two parents to their unusual child are polar opposites.”
The child is abnormal, but not in precisely defined ways. Colby finds herself disgusted by the child’s condition; Nicholas is more fascinated than repelled. The play, while not “about” birth defects per se, uses the situation of first parenthood as the occasion to examine how people react to the unusual and the unexpected. That both Nicholas and Pete work for the U.S. Census Bureau also plays its part in what Axler is aiming for: not simply the “normality” that any couple wants their child to possess, and by extension their family life, but the statistical notion of where each of us fits in. Via Cassandra, Nicholas becomes interested in “the gray area,” the people who don’t fall easily into accepted categories.
“The play is a lot more universal,” Nicol-Blifford says. “It’s not just about family and childbirth. [Those features] make the play accessible, but it is thought-provoking in a lot more ways. The more you think about it, the more you see in it.”
See Smudge’s first steps in the world on its initial New Haven Theater Company run on Nov. 5 and 6. The following week, the show runs from Wed., Nov. 11 to Sat., Nov. 14. Click here for more information and tickets.
