Blood from a Stone

It's the first night of the new year, and I'm already bored. Everyone I know is laid up with a cold or (more likely) a hangover. What to do? Find a show to see, of course. Browsing through the lists of what was playing, I found that not much new had started previews over the holidays, and there wasn't anything I'd seen that I particularly wanted to see again. Why start the new year retreading the last, you know?

I ended up deciding on Blood from a Stone at The New Group. It seemed dicey to drop the cash on a debut play that I hadn't heard a single thing about, but I'd read this article in the Times and realized that the playwright had been a security guard at a dorm I was a summer RA in a little over a decade ago. I remembered him being friendly, if a bit reserved, so I thought, Why not?



I admit to having been a bit worried about the show. I knew at the start that it had about half an hour cut from it during previews and was now two instead of three acts. I prepared myself for a work in progress and tried to keep an open mind. I'm glad I did.

Ethan Hawke is the star of the show in every way. He’s onstage for maybe all but five minutes of the two hour and 45 minute running time. He plays an ex-Marine come home to small-town Connecticut to visit his troubled family before heading West on what seems to be some sort of soul-searching adventure. What I loved about what he did is that it was so deeply naturalistic--nothing about his performance is showy or attention grabbing. It's a lot more subtle and nuanced than that. Even though I loved Before Sunset and Sunrise and retain a deep affection for Reality Bites, I’ve always been a little put off by Ethan Hawke. There’s this kind of pretension about him that I’m quite possibly just making up. Suffice to say, I didn’t expect to be as impressed as I was.

Everything about Hawke's performance is perfectly mirrored by the show itself. It's a real slice of life--sometimes funny, sometimes violent, often ugly. I heard people comparing it to Sam Shepard's plays, but it's so much more grounded and real than that writer's work. It's more like Shepard cross-cut with Arthur Miller (whose name also came up on the way out of the theater--more on that in a moment).

We begin with Hawke and Ann Dowd as his mother, raging about the awfulness inflected by the father of the family. But when the patriarch arrives home, Gordon Clapp seems to be playing him as an emotionally stunted, yet oddly lovable man. And that's when the play started to feel special. This is about a family that lets their angers and disappointments live on the surface. They alternate between cursing at and ignoring each other, and their greatest strength is in picking sides. More than anything else, it's the entrenchment of familial alliances that keeps coming to the fore--that and the failure to actually communicate, no matter how much they say.

Clapp is stunning as father Bill. And though he does and says some terrible things, I found his to be the easiest character to feel for. I was excited to see Natasha Lyonne and Daphne Rubin-Vega, two actresses I've really loved in other shows. Both had very small roles which might have been disappointing but for the fact that the rest of the show is so good and that they both play their parts perfectly, Lyonne landing some loud laughs as sensible sister Sarah, and Rubin-Vega radiating sex appeal as neighbor Yvette.

The last moments of the show are incredibly uncomfortable. And the music choice for curtain call is appealingly ironic. On the way out, as mentioned, I heard someone comparing the playwright to Arthur Miller. "You just can't look at this and see the same structural integrity as Miller," random dude announced. Yeah, duh, that's true. But if you're walking out of the first play someone ever wrote, and the worst you can say is that he doesn't have the same structural brilliance as one of America's greatest playwrights living or dead--well, that ain't too shabby.

It's true: the pacing is a touch muddled, and the plotting doesn't always have the necessary momentum, but even so, this is a carefully observed show that never feels like a slog even with the long running time. There's more than enough talent on and behind the stage to heartily recommend it.

On a separate note, I also saw Natasha Lyonne in Tigers Be Still at the Roundabout a month or two back, and it's kind of thrilling in this tabloid-ready age to see an actress who has a history of addiction and has spent some time in jail come back to acting by doing great work in small off-Broadway shows. She may not be raking in the dough, but she's just getting better and better and (hopefully) laying the groundwork for a long-lived career based on real talent and ability. Exciting!