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| Freedomland Synopsis |
Historically, Freedomland was a 204-acre amusement park in the Bronx where families in the 1960s could escape to a fantasyland of a perfect America. In Amy Freed’s excellent new play, the memory of a particular visit to Freedomland becomes one family’s shared awakening from decades of anger.
Noah’s (Dakin Matthews) adult children are coming home to dad, a professor of comparative religion. For these kids, homecoming is a pilgrimage to the scene of the family crimes, crimes committed decades earlier but still lingering in each of the children’s psyche like open, oozing sores that refuse to heal. First, there’s Sig (Veanne Cox), an artist who’s making a killing painting sad-eyed hobo clowns; then there’s her sister Polly (Carrie Preston), a career student trying to finish work on her doctoral dissertation on women of The Iliad; and finally there’s Seth (Jeffrey Donovan), a mad survivalist who’s given up modern comforts to live in a cabin in the woods. Into this mix is added Noah’s second wife, Claude (Robin Strasser), a sex therapist; an arts writer named Titus (Jeff Whitty); and Seth’s pregnant "partner" Lori (Heather Goldenhersh)."
Like Craig Lucas’ The Dying Gaul, Freedomland is a mature, angry work written by a writer with a very large chip on a very broad shoulder. This play is no easy ride, much like the roller coaster depicted on the Playbill cover. For these three motherless children, lives filled with promise in their youth have been damaged by a mother’s abandonment and its consequences. These kids have some major baggage to unload.
How responsible are parents to their children? Sisters to brothers? If we stop loving one another, will the human race become just a species of test-tube tots with no heart and soul? Playwright Freed bites off some big themes here (the meaning of life, love, family, and failure), sets her mad family down in a large country house in upstate New York, and lets them implode, a sound that is echoed in Seth’s bombing of a nearby church.
The most excellent of this formidable bunch is Matthews, giving one of those full-throttle performances that middle-aged actors yearn for, especially in a new play. His cantankerous performance is full of ecstasy and his scenes near the end of Freedomland with Jeffrey Donovan are loud, emotional, and inspiring as father and son lock horns and do battle. Another revelation is soap star Robin Strasser as the oversexed Claude. Strasser struts her glamorous, fit-as-a-fiddle body through a series of bath towels and muumuus in a hilarious turn as a predatory female.
In Act Two, Noah plays out scenes alone with each of his children that run like staged shoot-outs in the Wild West Show at the real Freedomland as each child gets a chance to deal with the past. Director Howard Shawitz, the artistic director of Washington D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, has an eye and an ear for bringing this loud, nerve-wracking play to life. Loy Arcenas’ beautifully realized set is evocative of an academic’s country home.
Freedomland is a solid, exciting work that reminds us that life is too short to spend in arguing.
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