Sarah Hartshorne
A Family Drama

reviewed:
The Goodbye Room premiering at the Bridge Theatre,
written and directed by Eric Gilde for Happy Few Theater Company,
as performed on Wednesday March 9, 2016

Write on a piece of paper with lemon juice and the letters are invisible. Hold a flame near the page and the writing is revealed. If humans are the writing, grief is the flame. Tragedy reveals us to the world and to ourselves. It's true that everyone deals with grief in their own way because to grieve is to be vulnerable, to experience the rawness of humanity. The Goodbye Room, a new play by Yale School of Drama alum Eric Gilde, depicts a family of three as they cycle through that vulnerability.

The family is Edgar, played by Michael Selkirk, and his daughters Maggie (Sarah Killough) and Rebecca, Bex (Ellen Adair). The girls have just lost their mother, Edgar's wife. Killough and Adair portray their characters with realism and nuance, allowing the two to find balance and meaning in distinct ways while neatly avoiding the Good Daughter/Bad Daughter trope. Rather than exploring such a simple dynamic, Gilde has written a true depiction of the floundering a small family endures when it loses one of its core members and must struggle to find a new equilibrium. It's impossible for any one person among the surviving family to take on the deceased's role, and the power struggle between the sisters as they adjust to the new status quo is deftly written.

The play gets off to a rocky start. The play opens with Edgar and Rebecca walking from their car to the house after Rebecca's long-delayed flight - this means the first lines are spoken from offstage. Perhaps it was the amplification, but Selkirk and Adair's voices were achingly self-conscious. This alienating literal distance kept me out of the story for the first scene.

After a few beats of stilted acting atop of a (purposefully, and appropriately) awkward scenario, Sarah Killough came in like a fresh breeze for the second scene. Her presence revived the stage. Craig Wesley Divino as Sebastian, a family friend and former boyfriend of both sisters, is excellent throughout, and time and again helped to return my attention to the plot and its emotional stakes.

The dialogue was alternately fresh and ponderous. More than once I was pulled out of the performance when a character uttered a line usually delivered as a self-conscious sitcom punchline: "Life is funny, isn't it?" Those false notes aside, Gilde's writing is peppered with bright moments. Consider what Rebecca says of her mother's funeral: "I can't wait to get it over with, but all I want is for it not to come." That's a spot-on summation of the insidious double nature of grief.

Both Selkirk and Adair are warmed up and dialed in by the end of the play. The final scene, with the daughters finally opening up to each other, was nearly perfect theatre. The actors have a natural chemistry, and it is pleasing to see them play against one another.

The Goodbye Room ends with a plot thread I'd been praying wouldn't get pulled all the way out: namely, the suggestion that their mother is haunting the living room. Is this a gimmick an otherwise realistic play needs? To their credit, the actors handle the supernatural innuendo well.

Special acknowledgement should be paid to sound designer Jacob Subotnick for keeping the creepy, haunting music to an effective minimum.

Gilde's play, by turns humorous and heart-breaking, shows us how the dead remain with us, their lingering presence for better or worse. Whether the dearly departed's presence is meant at the end of the affair to be understood as literal or only metaphorical, what rings true here is the reminder that tragedy both unites and divides, and that these effects are sometimes simultaneous. As a ride down a universal lane of human experience, The Goodbye Room isn't without a few bumps, but it's a journey worth taking.

Photos, top to bottom: Ellen Adair; Sarah Killough with Michael Selkirk; Killough and Adair with Craig Wesley Divino; Killough and Adair. Production photos by Colin Shepherd for Happy Few Theater Company.

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Sarah Hartshorne grew up in western Massachusetts, and attended Boston University until she was a contestant on America's Next Top Model. After working as a plus-size model for brands like Skechers, Palmer's and Ulla Popken, she returned to school and graduated summa cum laude from SUNY Purchase. She lives in New York with her husband and two cats. Find her online at her website or on Twitter: @sarahhartshorne.

Back to Issue 19, 2016