NEW YORK, NY.- Roundabout Theater Company’s website tells you right up front that the title character of “Jonah,” Rachel Bonds’ slip-slidey, stunning new play, “is not all he seems.” And if you click on the link to the production’s content advisory, self-harm, suicide and physical abuse are among the topics it flags.
All of that can leave a theatergoer in a state of wariness — which, it turns out, is a great way to watch this play: trusting nothing, unsure where reality lies, guard firmly raised against any kind of charm. Mind you, “Jonah” will charm you anyway, and make you laugh. So will Jonah, the adorable day student (or is he?) whom Ana, our teenage heroine, meets at her boarding school (or does she?). Who and what is illusory here?
The notes I took during the show are filled with skepticism like that about my own perceptions, even as Danya Taymor’s all-around excellent production, which opened Thursday at the Laura Pels Theater, lured me right in.
The flirty, funny banter between the self-assured Ana (Gabby Beans, in a top-of-her-game performance) and the more broken-winged Jonah (a disarming Hagan Oliveras) is utterly adolescent, as is the way they occupy their bodies. They still have the flop-on-the-floor looseness of little kids, but it’s mixed with cheeky daring (mostly hers) and mortified caution (mostly his), because hormones and desire have entered the picture.
“I don’t want to be weird,” Jonah says in Ana’s dorm room, when things between them edge toward intimacy, “and I just want you to feel OK and safe and my whole body is basically an alien colony, I have been colonized by sex aliens and I’m sorry.”
With a flash of white light and a zapping sound, the comforting comedy of that milieu vanishes, as does Jonah. Ana is now in her bedroom at home, where a guy named Danny (Samuel H. Levine), who appears to be her brother, gives off a profoundly creepy vibe. (The set is by Wilson Chin, lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and sound by Kate Marvin.)
“Dad’s freaking out downstairs,” Danny says, and quickly we pick up on a few things: They are in a violent household, united against an abusive parent, and there is a skin-crawling but mutual sexual energy between Ana and Danny, whose hypervigilant attention to her involves both possessiveness and manipulation.
Flash, zap and Danny is gone, and Ana is older, more aloof, away at a writers retreat, maybe? A knock at her door, and a guy named Steven (John Zdrojeski) appears, dorky and eager and mosquito-bitten, preppy in a way that makes him seem like he ought to be windsurfing. (His summer-casual costume, by Kaye Voyce, is just right.)
Might Steven be a bona fide good human being? Could Ana be imagining this scenario? Is Danny a memory or a character in a book she wrote, or both? Practically humming with tension, Bonds’ many-layered play moves through time, shuffling realities, tracing Ana’s trauma, disorienting us.
“Jonah,” which put me in mind of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive,” is the kind of play that reveals itself slowly but entirely, without undermining its own considerable power by wrapping anything up neatly.
A tautness comes over us as we watch it, a brace-your-body fear. Throughout, we know when we sense danger, even if sometimes it is a false alarm. But how to recognize safety? Ana can’t tell anymore, and neither can we.
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‘Jonah’
Through March 10 at the Laura Pels Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
