A REVIEW OF "ASSISTED LIVING" AT ACT- A CONTEMPORARY THEATRE—CHOOSE TO DIE LAUGHING

Pictured Kurt Beattie and Tim Gouran
Photo: (c) LaRae Lobdell

Laughter, no matter how genuine, can also feel like whistling in the dark when theatrical comedy looks too much like possible reality. I had a hunch I would enjoy the world premiere of Katie Forgette’s play Assisted Living—a Mainstage Production in The Falls Theatre at ACT, April 19-May 12—and oh how I did. I laughed hard and often, like everyone around me. But I think my own laughter hid an emotion felt by many others in the audience: foreboding.

I loved this play and I highly recommend it. I consider the writing brilliant and the acting superb.  But it didn’t take long to understand why the theater’s press release said Assisted Living “ ... takes a darkly comical look at America’s current health care system and where it could be headed.” The story is set in a future version of our nation that we hope we’ll never see, after the collapse of the health care system and the demise of Medicare. With so many baby boomers now old and ill, and space at a premium, prisons have been emptied and their inmates sent to Pakistan, so prison buildings can be used as elder care institutions under the Senior Provision Act, a.k.a “SPA.”

MITZI GRABS Laura Kenny Tim Gouran
Photo: Alan Alabastro

Even if you have a healthy appreciation for the “gallows humor” secretly shared among people who work in law enforcement or medicine, you might not be prepared for the opening scene. It’s nighttime in a prison-turned-assisted living facility. A young orderly named Kevin, prone to horseplay and singing to himself, steers a loaded gurney into a darkened lobby, pulls back a rug, lifts a hidden hatch cover, and dumps a corpse down a chute. That is, of course, after removing the dead woman’s bracelet. He yells to an unseen person below, “Stiff. Incoming!”

Get used to it. In what we hope is only a side-splitting farce, the now elderly baby boomers end up in government-run nursing homes, with all their assets sold at government-run auctions in order to pay for every single item needed for their government-run care, even bags for bodily fluids. No mooching off Uncle Sam in SPA Facility No. 273! In an ultra-conservative society, it’s downright unpatriotic to ask for any help from your fellow citizens who pay taxes.

And those people who ever ate junk food, gained weight, smoked, drank, or did anything else in their lives that possibly led to their chronic health problems (or, in other words, were human) are considered immoral, unpatriotic leaches on society, and disposable, for the good of the taxpayers. In order to save money, this place even has a robot named “Hal” for a night nurse. We never see him, but the idea of this inhuman machine patrolling the darkened halls felt frightening and creepy to me, as did the ever present hypodermic needle gun, ready to over medicate anyone who did not comply.

Pictured Tim Gouran and Jeff Steitzer
Photo: (c) LaRae Lobdell

When new resident Joe Taylor (played by ACT’s Artistic Director Kurt Beattie) moves into No. 273, it isn’t because he had squandered his God-given former good health. He’d been mugged, resulting in a fall that broke his hip, causing him to be hospitalized more than once, ill with pneumonia, etc. etc. No matter. To the bitter, unsmiling, accusatory and hysterically funny Nurse Claudia (Julie Briskman), these inmate-residents are all the same: worthless—and unworthy of respect, dignity, or compassion. As a member of a generation that expected entitlements, but didn’t get, she now resents the baby boomers and her anger is palpable.

Deeply disturbed by what he finds in his new environment, Taylor tries to lift the spirits of his fellow residents. He had been an actor, and when he discovers other former actors in his midst, he convinces them to read plays and give a holiday performance for families and fellow residents. Those other actors are—Beatrice “Judy” Hart (Marianne Owen, Beattie’s real-life wife) and Wally Carmichael (Jeff Steitzer), the later from whom Nurse Claudia withholds hearing aid batteries.  Another member of their troupe, a former nurse named Mitzi Kramer (Laura Kenny) copes with her circumstances (and incontinence) by caring for others and maintaining her cheerfulness. With some cooperation from the orderly Kevin (Tim Gouran) they secretly rehearse. 

TWINKIE Julie Briskman Jeff Steitzer
Photo: Alan Alabastro

Nurse Claudia is outraged at the idea of this uprising, which upsets her tightly ordered world. She dominates through her strict schedule of too much quiet time and too little visiting time, and she controls through fear, medical sedation, and the constant threat of banishment to the first floor, from which people never return. But rest assured; good, at least temporarily, triumphs over evil, and the plot takes a satisfying twist at the end.

All through the drama, razor-sharp humor, combined with moments of poignancy and tenderness kept me 100% engaged. But having already read a shocking article in the play’s program—filled with statistics about how aging baby boomers will impact the health care system—that projected scenario weighed on my mind even as I laughed. And I knew too much about a real assisted living facility, where both my father and mother-in-law once lived.



TRIUMPH Tim Gouran Jeff Steitzer Laura Kenny Marianne Owen Kurt Beattie
Photo: Alan Alabastro



Whether you laugh your head off or feel a little shiver down your spin (or most likely both) you will recognize three important things:

1.) ACT has done it again, giving us the highest quality theater experience, a feast of talent.

2.) Writer Katie Forgette (whose husband, the acclaimed actor R. Hamilton Wright, directed the play) is a genius. I can’t wait to see what she will create next.

3.) Art matters. If anyone ever needed an example of how art examines issues in our society and makes us think, this is it.

Don’t let the disturbing parts keep you from enjoying the outrageous humor this play offers. Your own mind will scare you more than anything you’ll see here. For many of us in the audience, perhaps the creepiest thing of all is realizing the baby boomer generation is now the oldest surviving one, in this not-too-distant fictional future. The show opens with the Beattle’s song “Help” and closes with Bob Dylan’s “Times They Are a Changin,” and the juxtaposition of my generation’s music with images of the nation’s oldest citizens felt like a shock.

Go see this play. And take an ultra-conservative politician with you. Please.

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Just What you Needed: "One Slight Hitch" at ACT — a review

Except for the remembered joys of motherhood, I’ve never had a good reason to revisit the 1980s, but I did so last Thursday in Seattle, at ACT — A Contemporary Theatre. There for opening night of a play called “One Slight Hitch," a comedy by Lewis Black set in 1981, I probably had more fun than I had in the entire actual decade.  

Katherine Grant-Suttie, Marianne Owen, Kirsten Potter, Kimberley Sustad, and R. Hamilton Wright in back.
Photo: Chris Bannion

The play uses only one set, the interior of the well-appointed home of Doc and Delia Coleman in suburban Cincinnati. It represents everything safe, sane, and insipid about the ‘80s, right down to the floral sofa pillows that perfectly match the floral wallpaper that perfectly matches the floral arrangement on a table. But in that conservative and affluent setting, complete and hilarious chaos threatens the wedding day of one of the couple’s three daughters when the clueless former lover of the bride-to-be shows up for an unannounced visit.

Although the entire cast did an outstanding job, in my opinion the parents, Doc (yes, he’s a doctor) and Delia, stole the show. The role of Doc, played by R. Hamilton Wright, gave this versatile and most amazingly talented actor a chance to show his funny side. He embellished the script with subtleties of voice, expression, and physical comedy that felt spontaneous and oh so fun. I had been impressed by his acting in the serious role of dental mechanic Harry Wilson in “The Pitmen Painters” and just became an even more ardent fan.

Equally delightful and impressive was Marianne Owen as Delia. Make that Delia the Drama Queen. What a talent! I'll be watching for her name. Owen nailed this character perfectly. She was the high-minded hostess invested in pulling off the perfect wedding one minute and the witty, sharp-tongued, Valium-popping, exasperated wife and mother in a bathrobe and curlers the next. But she spoke seriously at one point in the second act and imbued the scene with depth and poignancy as she reminded us of the differences in generations.



Kimberley Sustad, Katherine Grant-Suttie, Kirsten Potter
Photo: Chris Bennion

Kimberly Sustad as Courtney Coleman, the bride-to-be, also acted her role with flair. In this comedy with a serious side—about recognizing our real wants and needs versus the ones we pretend to have for the sake of convention or approval—she walks the fine line between liberated female writer and about-to-be cookie cutter 1980s wife and never loses her balance. Even her quintessential ruffled and romantic ‘80s wedding dress, so obviously not representative of her real taste, spoke volumes.

The heavy drinking, hilarious, and sexually liberated sister Melanie Coleman, played by Kirsten Potter, added more than her share of laughs to this comedy. Potter delivered sidesplitting one-liners in quick succession and, like Wright, made the most of her lines with the small nuances that show her to be a true pro. In spite of her vices, I loved her most of all.

Katherine Grant-Suttie, an adult of at least average height, played the part of a pigtailed, Walkman-wearing, young teenaged girl, not even old enough to drive. But she met the challenge well and created a funny and charming character. I admire the fine job she did, even though this casting choice required my imagination to work a little.

Shawn Telford and Kimberley Sustad
Photo: Chris Bennion

The two remaining characters were Courtney’s ex-lover and fellow writer, Ryan, played by Shawn Telford, and her fiancé, Harper, played by John Ulman. As elsewhere in this masterful script, we meet two characters who each have another side and surprise us when they turn out to be more complex than our first impression would suggest. Telford could get the laughs with nothing more than a move or look and Ulman slipped skillfully between his nauseatingly suave persona and the more believable fellow later revealed.

The only confusing part came when these two would-be, should-be rivals ended up sitting so close together on the sofa I wondered if the plot was about to head off in a whole new direction. But it didn’t, and I’m not sure what that action was meant to imply.

This play resolved all the confusion and craziness with a sweet and satisfying ending. My companion, whom I have never seen laugh so hard, exclaimed, “That was just what I needed!” If life seems way too serious, do yourself a favor and go see “One Slight Hitch.” I'll make it easy. You can order your tickets right here.

It might be a farce, but it hits close enough to the truth of family life, relationships, and the ‘80s themselves, to make you grateful to be an outsider who could laugh at someone else’s near disaster of a day. 

Congratulations to playwright Lewis Black and everyone else involved.

Playwright Lewis Black with Cast members Marianne Owen and Kimberley Sustad
Photo: LaRae Lobdell

Copyright 2012 Candace J. Brown