Kathleen Turner and Evan Jonigkeit; photo by Jerry Naunheim Jr.
Expectations could not have been higher as lights darkened at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis on Friday night. Before a packed house, our town’s celebrated regional theatre was offering what was billed as the world premiere, pre-Broadway run of High, a new play by Matthew Lombardo, designed by Tony Award-winner David Gallo, and directed by Rob Ruggiero. Of course, the buzz in the theatre was the greater because acclaimed movie star Kathleen Turner (Body Heat, Prizzi’s Honor), was starring in this three-hander about a nun (Sister Jamison Connolly) who has been summoned by her priestly superior with the assignment of counseling an unrepentant nineteen year old drug addict named Cody Randall (played by Evan Jongkeit). It was an evening brimming with promise. Unfortunately, at this point the lights came up and the play began.
To say that High was a disappointment does not do it justice. A play may be powerful, but deeply flawed, its intellectual or emotional reach may exceed the work’s grasp, or the staging has not done it justice, etc. In such cases, we feel sad for what might have been, but the experience remains illuminating and provocative. However, High was not flawed in any of these respects—it was an empty vessel with nothing of substance to say, made worse by pretentiously masquerading as having something earth-shaking or profound to tell us about loss of religious faith or the need for redemption in the contemporary world.
The play’s opening scene, in which Sister Jamison is coerced by the priest (a role convincingly acted by Michael Berresse, but underdeveloped in the script) to take on the young man was painfully derivative of the opening scene of Peter Shaffer’s famous play, Equus. As with Shaffer’s masterpiece, where a middle-aged psychiatrist with “professional menopause” is compelled to treat a mentally ill boy who has committed the horrific crime of blinding six horses, so Sister Jamison is obliged to leave her comfort zone to treat young Cody, an addict who has been somehow rescued from a hotel room, leaving behind a dead fourteen year-old boy who has been sodomized. As with Shaffer’s psychiatrist, who is forced to question his own ability as a healer, so Sister Jamison undergoes a spiritual crisis. We learn early on that she is a recovering alcoholic and has experienced the trauma of discovering her sister’s murdered body, a crime that she feels responsible for. In attempting to connect with Cody, we are supposed to believe that she goes back into her own past. As with Equus, this is depicted in scenes of direct address to the audience. But whereas in Equus, the psychiatrist’s guilty search for the cause of the boy’s breakdown is convincingly imagined, in High Cody’s crimes and especially his past (his mother was a prostitute; one of her johns got Cody addicted and sodomized him) feel unconvincing, “theatricalized” for their obvious shock value. The mystery of the boy’s sordid life, and even more sordid crime, leave nothing to the imagination, and feel contrived.
True, the playwright does his best to persuade us that he has had first-hand experience of Cody’s world—Mr. Lombardo’s Playwright’s Note begins with the sentence “On the afternoon of June 2, 2007, I woke up in a filthy and disreputable hotel room on 43rd Street in Manhattan”—there is nothing in script or performance to persuade us that this is true. If Cody’s character never rises above the level of the familiar junkie caricature, this is certainly not helped by Mr. Jongkeit’s shallow portrayal onstage. There was never any real menace nor pain—just a bag of self-indulgent gestures and stage tricks. He enters chewing the strings of his hoodie and scratching the back of his hands, as though these clichés ripped from Law and Order were enough to convince us that his torment were real. Mr. Jongkeit’s portrayal vacillates between extremes of self-pity and diabolical anger in a way which never convinces us of its inner truth. He is always acting. And the scene in which he tears his clothes off to try to violate Sister Jamison feels almost comic in its desperate attempts to bludgeon the audience into admitting that something “powerful” is happening. Not surprisingly, Ms. Turner’s hardy nun proves more than physically equal to the task and easily dispatches the boy.
High is, of course, Sister Jamison’s play, and she never once leaves the stage. Despite her efforts, Ms. Turner’s performance throughout was sadly lacking. She seemed genuinely uncomfortable onstage, especially in the first act, and was difficult to hear throughout. Her trademark gravelly voice (so seductive in Body Heat), unfortunately made things even worse in a play so dependent on monologue and clear diction in directly addressing the audience. The conceit upon which the Sister Jamison character is constructed is painfully obvious: four-letter words and tough talk conceal not merely a heart of gold, but a mask for her own religious crisis. She gradually overpowers Cody’s resistance and, so the playwright hopes, will charm us as well. Unfortunately, the initial shock of listening to a nun spew profanity becomes tiresome, and the foulness of her language is never complemented by depth of feeling. For this, it is not Ms. Turner but the playwright who is to blame for not making her a human being instead of a cardboard cutout of a woman in extremis. When, at the end of the play, she turns to the audience and tries to conjure us into believing that there is a coupling of this young man’s desperate final release (“For the boy is floating far up into that sea of constellations and has finally found—serenity.”) and her own need to resolve her crisis—“I need to be up there. I want to be—High”—we simply haven’t been convinced that we should respond emotionally either to her or her connection with the boy. Even if Sister’s ineffable longing has been written with a capital H (as it is in fact printed throughout Lombardo’s script), it still feels like High as in Hype.
