Joan Marcus Photos
Michele Selene Ang and Katherine Romans.
Set in Lexington, Kentucky (home of the University of), Leah Nananko Winkler’s The Brightest Thing in the World is a rom-com, a sitcom, and a story of addiction and recovery, of the bond between sisters, of goofy romance between a nerdy woman and a more worldly one. It has babbling drunks and maudlin drunks, tough honesty and an almost slapstick emergency, with enticing baked goods, cutesy Christmas paraphernalia, a random dance number, and a final scene of intense, visceral truth. The play, receiving its world premiere, is running now at Yale Repertory Theatre through Dec. 17, directed by Margot Bordelon.
The play has two main sets (Cat Raynor, scenic designer). The first is a very comfy-looking, upscale café called Revival, presided over by Lane (Katherine Romans), an outgoing baker-barista. The second is the bougie living room of Lane’s older sister Della (Megan Hill), complete with stone fireplace and outfitted for Christmas with stockings and tree. There are a few other spaces, empty of props, to suggest the outdoors or an area of action not wholly naturalistic. When a lone park bench appears for the final scene, you might guess there won’t be a happy ending.
Commissioned by Yale Rep with support from Yale’s Binger Center, the play originated in 2020 during the pandemic. Its setting has been pushed back to 2016 – 2019 — that more innocent time, remember? — which allows for a throwaway-laugh line of optimism about the 2016 election. It’s a way of saying that, in some ways, these characters are a bit clueless, and that, for my money, is what made warming to their story a bit of a stretch. Winkler knows how to pile on the cute — and costume designer Travis Chinick took that and ran with it for the Christmas scene. Though all that is a set-up for the exposure of something rotten — opioid addiction and the toll that battling it takes on the addicted and those who love them — there’s still a lot of bubbly dialogue to get through.
Ang, Romans, and Megan Hill.
The intention to show that even positive, charismatic, dynamic people can suffer from heroin addiction (yeah, like rock stars and other celebrities) is valid, and Katherine Romans’s Lane is energetic, vulnerable, and fun to be around. Early on, a tiff between Lane and Steph (Michele Selene Ang), Lane’s favorite customer at Revival, centers on how “woke” and smart Steph, a parttime journalist, presumes herself to be — check out her NPR tote! — and how not quite a knowledgeable reader she assumes Lane to be. It’s staged a bit as a red state vs. blue state moment, and at that moment it might seem that this will be a story of two women discovering how to see each other beyond easy-to-track labels. Instead we add two other hashtags for quick dramatic intensification: teenage pregnancy and heroin addiction.
Even so, there’s not a lot of serious discussion of these issues, nor of what anyone really thinks. As Lane and Steph form an uneasy couple and Della looks on dotingly, there are no scenes of the parents who threw Steph out and have raised her child, Bee, nor of Lane doing the sorts of things she might do to support her habit when she starts using again. Instead there’s a hyperventilating emotional meltdown with Steph insisting she’s happy. Which is to say, wild mood swings happen in the space of a single speech, and the vapid dialogue is just a way of not facing anything that might require an adult response.
And about that child: though she never is seen, we’re told that she’s 14, making Steph 31 already. That fact arrived as one of the play’s most surprising reveals, as everything in their speech and mannerisms led me to believe that Steph and Lane were in college, at best, with a few years to graduation. At one point Della checks out a guy on a dating app who is rated “a 9 for Kentucky” — “or a 3 in L.A.,” Steph quips. Maybe people hold onto their youth better in Kentucky, so that 31 is the new 21. In any case, had Bee shown up, it’s possible her maturity level would have surpassed her mother’s.
That all changes with the final scene. I don’t want to give away what has transpired to that point, except to say that Michele Selene Ang’s Steph transforms into a person of rage and pain and need and love that completely alters the person we’ve been watching. It’s like she aged a decade in those three years. Maybe that’s what Winkler and Bordelon want us to see, and it’s a very stark shift; I’d just welcome a suggestion of a little more depth from her before that point.
There are other features of the play that walk a fine line as well. In real life, humor can sometimes defuse a tense or threatening situation, but onstage, aiming at humor in the midst of an emergency scene can add the tension of “trying to be funny.” How the audience will respond is anybody’s guess. The scene when Della and Steph must cope with a possibly overdosing Lane has a complex mix of drama and comedy fueled by overwrought emotions — exasperation in Della and anxiety about Bee walking into the scene from Steph — that create a situation desperately in need of cooler heads prevailing. In Bordelon’s hands the timing works, and Ang’s and Hill’s ability to leap from blithe, laidback partying to freaked-out distress creates a needed dramatic crux. But it’s also suddenly, abundantly clear that Lane — for all her troubles — is the most mature of the three, and so a problem the other two aren’t really equipped to handle. Earlier, Lane’s litany of every “cure” for her physical malady she tried before she got to heroin is a fast-paced scroll-through of anything anyone could possibly think of, while her account of the effect of heroin — for all its chipper tones of facing the music — comes weighted with the heavy wisdom that, it seems, only experience could teach her, unfortunately.
And that’s the best of The Brightest Thing in the World — its sense that even the brightest and best of us can fall prey to bad choices that lead to bad ends, and even great hopes based in real change are only as strong as the will to see them through. The play leaves the characters, and us as we are in the midst of the COVID pandemic and the opioid epidemic, sadder. But how much wiser?
