Theater Review: Bleach, an immersive evening with a call boy

Bleach

By Dan Ireland-Reeves

Directed by Zack Carey

Starring Eamon Yates

Bleach is one of those plays where entering the theater is half the fun. It is staged in eerily quiet corner of outer Brooklyn, and you enter the theater by walking down an unpromising stairway directly from the sidewalk, where you would normally expect a trash chute. Entering the “theater” (renamed “Tyler’s Basement” for this play only) through a solid metal door that looked like a meat locker portal, you are ushered into what appears to be a very small, humbly furnished studio apartment and seated with 9 other audience members on worn chairs (mine kept leaning back). Asleep on the bed is our protagonist Tyler (Eamon Yates), an adorable young blonde kid just recovering from one of his tricks with a wealthy Manhattan John. After he rolls naked out of bed, we spend the next 70 minutes with him as he shares his life, dreams, history, and traumas (sexual, laundry, and others) with us. The title of the play ominously refers to how he is cleaning his blood-stained underwear after the as-yet unexplained problematic trick. By the end of the 70 minute monologue/play, we understand more of what when wrong, but also know much more about Tyler as a person and about the work he does.

Playwright Zack Carey paces the drama well. Tyler starts superficially, speaking in the slightly musical-nasal manner of so many young gay men. He reassures us (perhaps too confidently) of his stability, his great sex life, and his friends. Like many such young men, he turned to prostitution out of economic need and a desire to remain in overpriced New York. As the play goes on, he touchingly shares more of his insecurities as well as his small-town background—he briefly describes a return there where he feels utterly foreign. One of the more human moments is when he shares an early teen sexual feeling with a guy he had a crush on, nicely describing the unique same-sex teen experience of sharing a locker room with guys you are attracted to. He both loves and loathes his work as a call boy and his clients, and seeks human warmth and companionship just as we all do. We eventually learn of the dark side of his life, as he has been a party to a three-way trick that turned violent and murderous. He remains oblique about his role in this until the end, when a camera (too-conveniently found in his backpack) that has recorded the sordid events makes him aware of his complicity. The play’s ending is a nebulous mix of sexuality, death, and entertainment, largely playing on the fantasies of the audience to fill in the actual denouement.

Eamon Yates performed his role courageously, appearing to be about 20 years old biologically and emotionally, and projecting all the false bravado common in young people. I enjoyed his moments of vulnerability (like his description of his early crush) and would have liked more of that. Too often he kept up the sensual-hooker-façade side of himself, which kept me more distanced from his character than was necessary. I needed just a bit more sympathy with him to fully experience his pain and dilemmas. There were several moments of immersive audience participation, including a lap dance (luckily that was not me, since my flimsy chair would have collapsed backwards). The immersive, claustrophobic design was excellent in forcing us to enter Tyler’s world; a traditional stage would have created too great a wall and allowed us to see him as a foreign species. The claustrophobic audience of 10 made the whole thing seem voyeuristic…lucky for us Tyler liked being on display. There was effective simple lighting design throughout, as the room turned black, red, green, or bright white to suit the mood. I enjoyed the seedy venue, play and the performance; it allowed me to enter a foreign world up close and personal.

Theater Update: The Ferryman on Broadway

Last winter I was bowled over by Jez Butterworth’s epic Northern Ireland tragedy The Ferryman in London (see my review here). I thought it was perhaps the best play since August, Osage County. It has been doing well in its transfer to Broadway, drawing stellar reviews and excellent audiences,  especially for a three-hour tragedy. How would I respond the second time? In all ways but one, I continued to admire the play. Its relentless spiral of tragedy, alternating between great joy with two dozen characters (and animals) and oracular foreboding, all driven by the disappearance of a family member, is a wonderful structure for an epic drama. Its Shakespearean ambition and pacing remain effective. I was more aware of a weakness, however. The playwright Jez Butterworth’s virtuosity in forwarding the plot and affect with so many characters comes with the risk of not having any one character to focus on, like a Blanche DuBois, Hamlet, or Willy Loman. This risky dispersed structure worked well in London when Quinn Carney, the brother of the disappeared family member, gradually emerges as the central character and gives the play its final tragic focus. In London actor Owen McDonnell gave Quinn a steadily increasing pathos and complexity that, despite his limited number of lines, established him the clear tragic focus and provided a center to the play. In New York Paddy Considine, an English TV/movie actor who originated the role in London, was less nuanced, powerful, and successful. This robbed the play of its core and made the tragic ending less overwhelming. The rest of the cast was excellent, equal to what I saw in London. The play is great, but this production reminded me that even great plays can be vulnerable to casting, especially plays where adult actors share the stage with real infants, ducks, and rabbits, and have a limited time to make their impression.