Theater Review—

Mourning For Mother, At Long Wharf’s Second Stage

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — If Quentin Tarantino and Stephen King (or maybe Kafka) got together to dash off an episode of the old TV sitcom Taxi, it might turn out to be something like Noah Haidle’s comic book of a play, Rag and Bone, which is being presented on Long Wharf Theatre’s Stage II this month.

That is, using a cast of actors whose background on Law and Order and other television shows trained them well in portraying realistically familiar “ordinary” types, the play piles on a continuous sequence of onstage sex, violence, bubble baths and heart surgery – as conveyed by copious bloody shirtfronts – and moves from the naturalistic to the supernatural as strange things start to happen, during what the program notes coyly describe as the universal “search for love.”

The title comes from a poem by WB Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in which the poet says “Now that my ladder’s gone I must lie down where all the ladders start in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”

That gave the playwright the idea of setting his play in a ladder shop, run by two brothers, George and Jeff, ever since their mother died and left them the family store. (This makes for a terrifically visual set, festooned with ladders of every size and purpose, and the real ladder company that provided the props is featured in a full-page profile in the playbill.)

Jeff, who misses his mother dreadfully, is mentally challenged. George, who cares for him, doesn’t tell him that he keeps the business going by moonlighting in illegal organ transplants – specifically hearts – which he keeps in a red plastic cooler, and which he apparently gets by mugging people. When a potential heart customer arrives, George sends Jeff out to buy ice cream or play video games, while he performs the surgery on a steel work table.

Conflict is introduced in the person of The Poet, who wanders around in a limbo of emotional numbness, induced when his heart was stolen some time ago. The kindly Hooker (with a heart of gold, of course) offers to perform some pro bono servicing in an attempt to help him feel something. This enrages her pimp, T Bone, who knocks her around until he is lured into a scheme to get $10 million from The Millionaire, who has just bought The Poet’s heart from George.

T Bone remembers his childhood dream of being a pilot and flying away to Bermuda. He wants to rescue The Hooker from a life of degradation and shower her with diamonds instead.

George is suddenly consumed with a sense of being unable to remember his mother, and asks Jeff to take mother’s heart- which just happens to be in his cooler- and transplant it into his chest (resulting in George being transformed into the reincarnation of Mom). And so it goes…

Playwright Haidle is a young man who decided to be a playwright when he was 17 and has been one ever since. He went to Princeton and Juilliard and apparently read a great many comic books, along with lots of satire and literature of the absurd.

The acting is good, as is Tina Landau’s direction. Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein feels Haidle is “one of the true originals of his exciting generation.” You can make your own mind up as to how you feel about that.

(Evening performances are Tuesday through Sunday, and matinees continue on weekends and Wednesday afternoons, until March 6.

Contact Long Wharf’s box office at 203-787-4282 or visit www.LongWharf.org for details.)