Really not prepared to think about next fall yet!

Friday night, CU Players continued their production of Next Fall that ran from Thursday through Saturday. To see what the play was all about, Avid Acting Admirer Ali Sawyer went out to Friday night’s performance and reports on how it went.

Featuring talk of (abandoned) yoga mats, gayness, hypochondria, and religion, the topics of Next Fall, a 2009 play by Geoffrey Nauffts, are familiar to all of us. From the mundane to the profound, the play is a familiar and personal choice for a Columbia audience. Since we are bound to see our own qualities reflected in the characters, the show can suck us down an emotional sinkhole.

That’s what it did to me, anyway. I left feeling emotionally drained. It speaks to the strength of the acting that the play can hit such highs and lows of emotion side by side. Next Fall is played by a small and mighty cast of just six actors. Jumping through time out of chronological order, they tell the story of a gay couple, Luke and Adam, who struggle to make sense of their conflicting religious views.

The play begins with a dingy couch in a hospital waiting room. Three young friends and two older people, Luke’s parents, anxiously await word on Luke, who has been severely injured in an accident. Only after the play leaps back to an earlier year and then returns to the waiting room do we learn that Adam and Luke were in a relationship.

Luke and Adam, played by Aaron Kane and Zachary Flick, respectively, capture the playfulness of a new relationship with their scarcely-contained peppiness. The story soon shifts to heavier territory (although Flick persists with a jumpy quality for his character throughout): Luke and Adam’s relationship issues. While Luke is a devout Christian, stuck with the residue of his strict religious upbringing; Adam is an atheist undeterred from grilling his partner on his beliefs.

In the personable and unassuming set of Adam and Luke’s apartment, the play asks problematic questions. How does one reconcile being gay with the homophobic religion of one’s upbringing? How does a couple handle their conflicting religious beliefs? Like most people, I don’t know the answers to these questions that nagged me throughout the show, but the relatability of the characters made the lack of understanding easier to stomach. Between the personable characters and the openness of the set (thank you, Black Box Theater, for having no wings), the show invites the audience in and sends the message, we’re in it together.

Another major source of conflict for Adam and Luke is that Luke has never told his parents he’s gay. We meet Luke’s parents, Butch and Arlene, in the hospital room in the first scene, their hair cleverly whitened with baby powder. With a sugary, unfaltering southern accent, Jenny Singer shines in the role of Arlene. The deceptive sweetness of her speech makes it feel all the more absurd when racist comments pour out of her mouth. Singer captures the paradox of Arlene, the racially insensitive parent we know all too well, terrible yet not wholly unlikable.

Butch, effectively implementing a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy against his own son, is similarly difficult to like. In this role, played by James Steiner, we see another familiar figure: a homophobe enshrouded in denial about his own son’s sexuality, though it is not unclear. Almost too gentle for the role, Steiner gives us plenty of glimpses into his character’s humanity, conveying an ignorant persona that detracts from his offensiveness.

On a different theme, the play smartly comments on the problematic trendiness and thoughtlessness of charitable giving. Through the character of Adam and Luke’s friend Holly, Nauffts notes how we often donate to be seen donating, without care for the cause. Perhaps meant to be paralleled to Arlene, Holly is caring and well-meaning, but somewhat misguided. The proprietor of five yoga mats abandoned in her closet, a candle store owner, a meditation retreat goer, and a charitable giver, Holly is an amalgam of hollow trends. A master of the sympathetic facial expression, Rachel Cramer captures Holly’s caring nature and gives steady support to Kane and Flick. The three achieve chemistry as a group of friends that makes you want to grab a glass of wine and join them in the living room.

The play’s acting started on a relatively understated note (for all but Flick, anyway, who didn’t once lose his peppiness), but the actors soon proved that they could portray the extremes of emotion. In their conversations, Kane and Flick display earnestness, sincerity, and convincing pain when they fight. In the play’s climactic scene, Adam enters Luke’s room, where Luke is in a coma, and lies beside him on his hospital bed. When the homophobic Butch enters, he nimbly leaps off. A shouting match between the two men soon draws the other three characters, and all five crowd around the bed, literally fighting over Luke’s dying body. Each actor proves him- or herself to be a strong yeller, and the chaos of the scene was enough to bring tears to my eyes. Then the beeping of Luke’s life support machine turns into one steady drone, and the actors snap from yelling to devastation. In the following scene, Cramer in particular proves herself to be a convincing crier.

As director Cristina Angeles puts it, “The six actors I was given the honor of directing in ‘Next Fall’ are probably the most random group of people to ever exist together on stage.” That may be, but that makes it all the more impressive that were able to come together and connect in a production that is all about the complexity of human bonds.