They ain’t no Bonnie and Clyde, that’s for sure.
I’m talking about Lisa and Clint, the irredeemably lost souls
and anti-heroes of Rebecca Gilman’s raw and edgy play from 2001, The Glory of
Living, now in revival at the Access Theater.
When we first encounter the pair, they are “meeting cute” in
a sick sort of way. Clint has
accompanied a buddy to the home that 15-year-old Lisa shares with her mother, a
prostitute for whom “discretion” means hanging up a sheet to separate the
living area from her bed. Clint and Lisa
talk over the noise of sex, and before you know it Lisa has agreed to run off
with him.
At first, given her lack of options, we are willing to
consider that this might be an escape route for Lisa. Clint seems to be relatively stable, if you
don’t think too much about his predilection for 8th grade girls. They actually marry and establish a home life
of sorts, moving from one cheap motel to the next—a lifestyle funded by petty
thievery for which Clint unfortunately spends time in and out of prison. They even have children, a set of twins who
are generally shuttled off to Clint’s mother, about whose own stability we can
only speculate.
Gradually, whatever hope we might have clung to for some
sort of redemption evaporates, and we come to realize that that what we are
dealing with is a pair of sociopaths for whom there is scant chance for
anything resembling normalcy. Clint uses
Lisa to help him find other lost girls (runaways and the homeless), who are
generally okay with trading sex for a can of soda or a ride somewhere. Clint sexually assaults and then discards them
by having Lisa take them out, shoot them, and dump their bodies.
As you can tell, Ms. Gilman offers up a version of the
outlaw story that completely obliterates any romanticized image of the kind
that has been painted of real-life criminals like Bonnie and Clyde or Ma Barker
and her boys. Nor is there a satiric
edge to the portrayal, such as someone like Sam Shepard might employ. Instead, the playwright paints a portrait of
lives stripped of empathy and meaning and hope.
There is more than a little irony at play when Clint says of Lisa, “you
don’t know what normal is.”
While the protagonists equally share the playwright’s focus
during the first act, the spotlight shines almost exclusively on Lisa in Act
II. It is she who is tried for murder, and
despite the best efforts of her court-appointed attorney, she is content to
shrug it off, readily admitting her deeds without a trace of remorse or any consideration
that she herself might have been a victim of a lifetime of abuse.
It’s all rather sad.
What Ms. Gilman has given us is a sense of the underbelly of
life that is occupied by society’s outcasts, rejects, and damaged individuals,
the ones that Judge Lisa Richette famously referred to more than 40 years ago
as “the throwaway children.”
The Glory of Living is a gutsy play for any company to
tackle. The production at Access Theater
is a powerful one, well directed by Ashley Kelly Tata, and well acted by the
entire cast. Key to its success are the
solid and disturbing performances of Hardy Pinnell as Clint, and, especially,
Hannah Sloat as Lisa, a character who defies armchair analysis and who casually
deflects sympathy.
But, really, this is a labor of dedicated and sober intent
for all involved. Access Theater, like
many other small, off-the-beaten-path Off-Off-Broadway companies, serves a
valuable function of making sure that significant theatrical voices are
heard. You are not likely to see The
Glory of Living at any Broadway or major Off Broadway house (despite its pedigree as a Pulitzer Prize
finalist), so you owe it to yourself to make the effort to head downtown and
climb those many stairs to the fourth floor of 380 Broadway to see this finely
tuned production.
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