Connoly Connects

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Plays are written, or used to be written, on paper, although today they start with letters more like shadows on a screen. They’re written by arranging alphabets that look something like the shadows of the shapes of letters. Some plays, though, have a pulse. They are very much not only acted, but alive on stage, flesh, blood and feeling. And some plays have a heart, a beating, burning heart. Their characters are full of passion, navigating elevated emotions. These plays, true theater, are about life, death and love all at once, filled with humor and tears mingled and mixed up. People in these plays do not break out into song at emotional moments. They're more likely to struggle as we see intimate experiences unfold, as if we are looking in on the privacy of lives lived, not something presented on stage for our entertainment.

While New York City is full of theater, and certainly the capital of musicals, there are very few of these plays with a beating heart and breathing human beings in extreme situations on stage. Theater as entertainment is everywhere and alive and well, and musical theater is very much at home. Los Angeles has Hollywood. New York has Broadway, but this kind of theater, intimate stories well told, acted and directed, is rare where emotion is at the core of and something beyond entertainment. We are all in a row boat in an ocean surrounded by salt water and waves when it comes to theater. Every now and then, a play comes along that you need to drink in deep. Other plays like waves break on the beaches of Broadway. Now and then a tidal wave of emotion hits a theater. It is cathartic, painful, emotional, uplifting and in the end the reason many of us love and go to theater.

“Connoly,” by Stefan Diethelm (remember that name, because at least I hope you will be reminded of it by others) is an intimate play on a small stage with big emotions. The play, with realistic dialogue, character, relationships and rhythms, follows Connoly (Nikki Neuberger), a girl placed in a mental hospital after her mother’s death. Her older sister, Dingo (Abby Messina), visits and gives her a stuffed animal as a companion, played by Emily Kendall Cohen, who becomes her “imaginary friend.”

Natalya (Alessia Secli) is the nurse (in formal uniform) who represents reality and rationality, constantly caring, interrupting and intervening. We watch Connoly, ripped out of her home, essentially alone and adrift in the emptiness of a white, clinical stark set with a bed like a womb from which she has yet to, and must, we hope, emerge. She speaks with her imaginary friend, hungry for connection. That stuffed animal is a souvenir of her sister, a trace of her presence. They are together even when apart.

In fact, the white set, the womb that welcomes and threatens, creates a world as if she has never been born, so removed rather than re-connected to reality. She has been removed from life, family, friends. Neuberger at various points even bemoans the fact that she has no life, so how can she lose it? Her life is gone. She is in a holding pattern, waiting for life to begin. The entire problem, or part of the problem, with someone who is suicidal is they may feel not only hopeless, but “removed” from reality and life. Then they may be placed in a bare, blank space to detoxify and be saved, but that may make them even further removed rather than reconnected. Dingo’s visits are the joy, the thing to look forward to, the love and the care, the flavor in a flavorless institution where Alesia Secli’s nurse provides the tonic of human interaction.

Dingo (played by Abby Messina) feels overwhelmed by the responsibility and inability to provide for Connoly’s sanity and safety. The hunger and inability, or belief in the inability, to help is the tragedy. Shakespeare may have subscribed to the idea that kings can face tragedy. The higher up, the further to fall. Stefan Diethelm understands tragedy comes from love, intimacy, humanity and beauty. I care much more about Connoly than I have ever cared about Shakespeare’s kings. Children are so much more valuable and vulnerable than kings, so much more human, honest and real.

Connoly says many frank, blunt, true things while adults get lost in the labyrinthe of details. A teddy bear is more true than any king’s crown. That stuffed animal here serves as a surrogate. In Melville’s short story “Billy Budd,” when Billy tosses his pipe into the sea, we know he has lost the ability to experience pleasure. When Connoly separates from Georgie, played by Emily Kendall Cohen, we know she is losing more than a friend. She is losing her link to life, to herself, to hope and that raises the stakes. Part stuffed animal, part soul, part friend, we see into Connoly's heart as if the playwright takes an ultrasound of her very core.

There are some people who may say that, at over two hours, includindg intermission, this play is too long. They’re wrong. Everyone’s legs are just long enough to reach the ground. This play is the perfect length, powerful from moment to moment from start to finish. Each scene works as a unit and advances the story and character. It is not just a well written play, but a well made one. This is a masterfully written play with a talented, young cast, just what the theater doctor ordered. While a thousand people walk into a Broadway theater, I venture to say more people walk out of this one touched by this play in each performance. It’s just an emotional powerhouse in a stark white set furnished by feelings, as the best theater can be. The bed at the center of the set feels like a life raft or a plank, the last piece of reality floating in an awful ocean, a space awaiting the sleeping beauty's waking. Dingo calls Connoly “pum’kin,” a beautiful, sweet name, but we also know pumpkins don’t last.

The cast does a wonderful job bringing Diethelm's characters, story and emotions to life from a script written with a great ear, eye and structure. You can tell that Diethelm cares for his characters, but they are talking. And they care for each other. Like Arthur Miller's "After the Fall," we see what happens when one person tries to save another. They give up or do they just change course? Diethelm is not using characters as a mouthpiece or microphone for a point of view. They are alive on stage. Nikki Neuberger is as sweet as the teddy bear she clutches. But she is also mature, emotional, blunt, delicate and passionate. She gives a great performance, overwhelmed, but also intelligent, powerful, vacillating between ecstasy and misery.

She sees what’s wrong with the world and how lame adults’ decisions often are. She creates a character who is a poet and a painter, someone sensitive, with the temperament of an artist who draws to get her emotions out of her. She sits in the kingdom and prison of her bed, which the world has been reduced to. She is full of pain and hungry for pleasure. She paints beautiful pictures, but still feels trapped in a place between a rock and a hard stop.

She is a prisoner of youth, innocence and isolation, believing she has become a burden on a sister too young to be a mother, and arriving at terrible solutions. We know or should know that suicide is not a solution, but the inability to find a solution. Truman Capote said many suicides occur in impersonal places like hotels. People feel removed from their reality. Nikki Neuerger throughout the play as Connoly yearns to return home to her life. Abby Messina as Dingo (is that a version of Don’t Go?) leaves and returns, showing a mix of love and personal responsibility. There are so many internal conflicts, as well as external conflicts. That’s what makes this play so powerful, like a Mozart symphony with melodies weaving in and out and never gone.

Connoly (whose name is shouted repeatedly, like an alarm clock trying to wake her up from the sleep of her sorrow) is told she can’t return until she’s safe and stops harming herself. Nietszche wrote that the only humanizing influence in a mental hospital is the other patients. In this show, we don’t meet other patients. We see Connoly reaching to reclaim her humanity, despite pain, a sensitive person whose sensitivity only increases her sorrow. It’s really a love story, in some ways, between two sisters who are each other’s world. Or at least Dingo is Connoly’s world, her lifeline, played by Abby Messina. It’s a great relationship created on stage. These characters care about, and sometimes for each other. We see the love. It’s obvious. Why isn’t that enough? And we believe, given time, it would be.

Abby Messina shows us a loving, overwhelmed sister who when she blames herself for her sister’s sorrow only increases that sorrow. Toward the end, we see her physically change, as sorrow consumes her too. She talks about her job and bills, the realities her sister is shielded from through seclusion. When the play ends, it’s as if the two sisters have exchanged places. I don’t want to give away the plot, and hope I haven’t, but suffice it to say, for a  moment I thought that Dingo had moved into the mental hospital for more than a visit.

Emily Kendall Cohen as Georgie, the teddy bear and an imaginary friend dressed in a Nirvana shirt (shades of Kurt Cobain’s own tragedy), is a constant presence, often seated in a corner on the floor. Delaney May’s direction creates the perfect balance between imagination and insanity, intensity and intimacy. Emily Kendall Cohen says more without words than most actors in monologues. And when she speaks, which is also a lot, she is passionate, at times Connoly’s heart embodied and at other times a friend. There are moments when at least I worried she would turn on her friend and suggest something terrible, but she never does. The entire cast is masterfully directed by Delaney “Lanes” May with blocking, staging and lighting (by Cody Ham) that shows us a world full of passion, emotion and most of all love. It’s really a play about two sisters, one in trouble and one unable to save the other. The second sister’s visits in the end cause pain. The apple is dangled and then snatched away again and again in this Eden where the snake is not outside, but something in the soul.

When Connoly gives up hope, momentarily or permanently, she has a burst of creativity where she makes beautiful things as a gift to her sister. This is a play that has heart, tears and a brain. It shows us, or at least convinces us, that maybe by being there a little more for each other we can battle the isolation that some feel. Maybe we can be or help people build or find the life raft they need to make it through the breaking waves that hit us every day. And it reminds us that all we have to do is find and focus on the good and the hope, rather than losing that thread. Love is truly all around in this play. So is suffering. And geat dialogue. Connoly is so focused on what she needs and wants that she doesn’t realize she is so deeply loved. Her sorrow hurts her sister in a strong sister play and an all female cast with a key core relationship. Emily Kendall Cohen, as an imaginary friend, fills out the emotional landscape of this powerful play.

"Connoly" succeeds in capturing the thinking of a child who can make a terrible decision, unable to distinguish between today and tomorrow, a mis-step from which some recover and others do not. I’ve heard suicide described as you killing future you. It is frequently called a permanent decision (solution, although it is not a solution) to a temporary problem. "Connoly" is the most emotional play I have seen in a long time and a truly new work by a new, powerful voice in theater. In a sea filled with saltwater, it is a fresh fountain of emotion. In the end, Dingo talks with a kind of imaginary Connoly, which she has internalized. Connoly arrives at an understanding. Love not death is the solution. Patience not immediate gratification is the point. Is it in time or too late?

Sometimes knowledge comes too late and sometimes it arrives just in time, but communication, connection (isn’t that what theater is about?) may be the cure, if you can call it that. This play is written with empathy, eloquence and emotion. Very few plays, it can be said, can save a life. I believe or hope this one actually could. You can’t possibly ask for more from two hours and change than what “Connoly” provides. I believe it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find two hours better spent than seeing this play.