Photo: Jim Dalglish
Review by Rebecca M. Alvin
Where we start out in life is not necessarily an indication of where we will end up. Myriad choices and opportunities come our way and we respond, or don’t, as we see fit in the moment. The paths we end up on sometimes lead us to find incredible strength we didn’t know we had. Likewise, some points in the path lead us to the depths of our weaknesses. Both the strengths and weaknesses prevail in contradictory, sometimes devastating ways for those who become parents. The incredible love and responsibility, joy and pain create something new from the building blocks of our personalities pre-parenthood, and we emerge with knowledge, power, as well as intense fear.
In the new play, The Playground, written and directed by Jim Dalglish, Anna Botsford plays Joan, a former college professor whose identity shifted drastically when her husband took a high-paying job working with hedge funds, leaving her to be a stay-at-home mother for their young child. It also lead her to the affluent Upper East Side of Manhattan and placed her in a world of women who were taken care of by their husbands, women who hired nannies to take care of their children and who reinterpreted the concept of self-care from one of wellness and health to a rigorous schedule of manicures and shopping. The disconnect between Joan’s intellectual life and her maternal instincts and these pampered women is just the backdrop, though. The Playground is a play about empathy, judgement, and rationalization.
Although there are video projections showing the various characters Joan tells us about as she confesses her increasingly disturbing story, Botsford really carries the play as a one-woman show, and she does so spectacularly. She tells us her side of a story in which she behaved abhorrently, but asks us not to judge her, inviting us to empathize with her situation and buy into the rationalization of the choices she made informed by economic privilege, American-citizen privilege, and the presumably universal desire for upward mobility. As an audience, your response to this plea for empathy and understanding will depend upon your own socioeconomic status and experiences. While some may readily see her choices as understandable, if regrettable, others will be unequivocal in their judgement of her behavior.In any case, you will notice your own judgements about Joan. You will pay attention to your own mind forming its determinations about her character, whether empathy comes easily, with difficulty, or not at all.
The Playground is an achievement in inciting us to critical thinking the way only the arts can. We don’t find out until the very end what Joan has done, and it does come as a shock. But all along, Dalglish and Botsford invite us to engage with issues around race, gender, parenthood, and immigration so that by the end, however we feel about Joan, we actually have learned a tremendous amount about ourselves.
The Playground will be performed Friday and Saturday, October 23 – 24, 7 p.m. at the Art House, 214 Commercial St., Provincetown. For tickets ($40/$30 Students & Under 18/$20 Helltown members/$20 Card to Culture members) and information visit helltownplayers.org.
