Theater Review - Fraternal Disorder
Riffed wrangles dark themes and explosive revelations
No one really wants to hear about sexual abuse, which makes it even worse. As long as silence surrounds the initial crime, its repercussions easily lead to lasting psychological damage. You could call sexual abuse an act of theft that keeps on taking. Arts and culture are still working out ways to deal with the issue that go beyond clichés.
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Recent films examine the aftermath of abuse from the perspective of the grown victim (Mystic River), the unrepentant perpetrator (The Woodsman) and the greater community (Capturing the Friedmans). Actor’s Express first wrestles with the issue in its new “dark night” production of Riffed, which serves as a kind of warm up for Love, Jerry, a new musical about molestation issues bowing in January. Riffed, a world premiere by Atlanta playwright Gabriel Dean, deserves points for its heavyweight drama about the family secrets that stem from brutal violations. But Riffed also demonstrates the difficulty of doing justice to such fraught themes.
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Riffed hinges on the relationship between two brothers: Palace (Nick Rhoton), who’s serving a life sentence for murder, and Jason (J.C. Long), a young defense attorney. Jason visits Palace with a proposal to take his case and probably secure his release, but the convict views his well-heeled brother with suspicion. We learn that Palace’s trial included the revelation that he was molested in childhood by an uncle, and that’s only a hint of past transgressions.
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The play’s early scenes cut between the brothers in the prison visitor’s room and a nearby diner where their father, R.J. (Steve M. McElroy), and Jason’s fiancee, Rosalind (Jessie Dougherty Dean, the playwright’s wife), are waiting. The point of view awkwardly moves between the two pairs, setting a herky-jerky rhythm that could be easily rectified by putting both locations on the stage at once, rather than keep moving the actors on and off.
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Once Riffed settles into longer scenes, the actors become less stilted and director Joe Gfaller effectively cultivates the mood and undercurrents between characters: The brothers vie for the upper hand in their conversation, then pause for a companionable cigarette break. In Act Two, the newly exonerated Palace moves in with Jason and Rosalind, magnifying the pressures and injecting a little house guest-from-hell humor. The engaged couple prove loving but also sexually frustrated, while Rosalind seems unmistakably turned on by the jailbird’s presence. Jessie Dean wittily conveys Rosalind’s faux-naive coquettishness, which makes an inconstant character more likable.
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When R.J. drops by for a visit, the skeletons fall rattling from the closet. A traveling blues musician, R.J. owns a classic guitar that is the family’s prized possession, and each of the men takes turns with the instrument, singing tunes that subtly express their aspirations and hostilities. A co-founder of Relativity Theatre Concern, Dean wrote Riffed’s original songs, which set up an intriguing dynamic — music airs feelings that would go unspoken — until the contrived final number, which sets a confessional poem to a bluesy riff.
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Any treatment of rival brothers easily takes on Biblical overtones, but Riffed doesn’t evoke Cain and Abel as much as Jacob, who tricked brother Esau out of his birthright for a mess of pottage. By dwelling on family feuds and the polarity of outlaws vs. civilized men, Riffed feels like a smaller, more literal treatment of the kind of material Sam Shepard fashions into American archetypes.
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Riffed’s best moments capture real-world details, such as Palace’s explanation of how to make jailhouse tattoos. As long as Atlanta theaters stage plays with lank-haired, charismatic criminals, Rhoton should keep portraying them. But the play builds to such explosive revelations and taboo-breaking behaviors that Riffed can’t process them all. The father feels particularly underwritten: R.J. should go through a welter of feelings that seem untapped at the end. McElroy’s performance makes the character seem not just taciturn, but unfocused.
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Riffed powerfully illustrates how childhood traumas can lead to unimaginable outcomes, but it raises such moral complexities that its sudden conclusion feels like a retreat. It’s as if Riffed succeeds in hooking an elusive, mysterious sea creature, only to discover that it’s too big to land.