Milwaukee Chamber Theater presents the world premiere of Wisconsin playwright Kurt McGinnis Brown’s Broken and Entered. The show is staged in a small, black box-type theatre. “Black” is the operative word here: a few of the play’s scenes are conducted entirely in the dark, with only two flashlights providing illumination. The play itself can also be pegged as a dark comedy, as it involves a massive number of residential break-ins, all conducted by a pair of adult brothers searching to erase their past.
As the play opens, the brothers demonstrate their skill as bungling burglars. Stumbling around in the dark, they make a narrow escape before the owners come home. They don’t have far to go. Brothers Wally and Vern are living nearby in their family’s now-vacant home. Their father has been AWOL for many years and it seems the mother failed to cope afterwards. She recently died. So now it’s just the brothers, wondering how to interact with each other.
The reunion is heartbreakingly realistic, and it’s easy to identify with their attempts to mend frayed family ties. They can’t help but share old family stories as they sit in the house where they grew up.
The brothers have a couple of things in common: both hated living in their particular neighborhood (as children), and loathing for the alcoholic father who belittled them throughout childhood.
Now they are jobless and broke, with nowhere else to live. They decide to make the house unrecognizable by tossing out the old stuff and stealing replacements from a wealthy nearby neighborhood. As each living room curtain and end table is replaced, the boys start to feel better. They make a list of what to steal next, such as Tupperware and a bath mat.
Added to this mix is another returned-to-the-nest neighbor. She’s Jamila, about the same age as the men. She was 14 when she first moved into her home – becoming the only black family on the block. In the succeeding years, she was educated at a prestigious university, got a good job and her finances flourished. Her current goal in is to “punish” all the whites who made her neighborhood such a miserable place to grow up. She plans to buy all the dilapidated houses in this area and level them for future development.
Although such plot points sound depressing, playwright Kurt McGinnis Brown inserts an impressive amount of humor into the situation. Wally, the younger brother (Andrew Edwin Voss), tells tales of his sudden departure to El Salvador after his mother’s funeral. This makes no sense to the more dependable Vern (Jonathan Leslie Wainwright), who wishes that Wally had saved his money instead. One senses that Wally has a pure heart under his unkempt exterior. He is the optimist, the romantic and more than a little naive.
It is a testament to these talented actors that they appear credible as brothers. There is a natural, easy banter between them (punctuated with brief bouts of wrestling).
As Jamila, however, Marti Gobel has her work cut out for her. Her character isn’t nearly as well-delineated as those of the brothers, but she manages to use all that is provided to her. Gobel always seems to turn in great performances, and this is no exception. She excels at playing strong female characters. In this play, she adroitly does a gender switch when Jamila refuses to talk about love with the starry-eyed, romantic Wally. Despite her reserve, however, by the end of the play it seems that she is starting to fall for the lovable goof.
Credit Suzan Fete for getting off to a good start in her directorial debut. Although the play’s ending is contrived and hastily wrapped up, the rest of the play flows with a sense of sustained urgency. With Fete in charge, the humor arises naturally from the situations created in the play. A small quibble is that some of the one-liners could be more naturally introduced into the material. All in all, this is a must-see play during the fall theater season. (If the title sounds familiar, this play was produced by Milwaukee Chamber Theater as a staged reading in 2010.)
Production elements are impressive, too, with an interesting set-within-a-set design. A stylized cut-out of the boys’ home is the set’s centerpiece. Jamila’s “home” appears at downstage right, although the dwelling itself is masked by sheets of fabric painted with abstract-looking trees. The costumes are a hoot, especially Vern’s succession of vintage T-shirts. Also spot-on are the various outfits worn by Jamila, which range from cocktail wear to running gear. Wally appears (intentionally) as clothing style-impaired.
The play’s lighting deserves mention, too, as it runs the gamut from pitch black night to full sun.
