Gender relations and identity have been recurring themes in
much of Scott Caan’s work, and they’ve never been more evident than in his most
recent play, “The Trouble We Come From.” The play’s structure is a departure
from Caan’s typical approach, but without missing a beat, he deftly weaves
flashbacks, scenes within scenes and a play within a play to not only take the
audience on a journey through his main character’s psyche but through our own
as well.
When we first meet Charlie (played with an endearing befuddlement
and sweet earnestness by Michael Weston), he is frantic, fearfully peering
through the windows of (what we assume) is his own house. He enters it
cautiously and proceeds to have multiple heart attacks as he stumbles upon
burning candles, incense, a glass of wine, a vandalized photo of him and his
girlfriend, and finally a pair of red lace panties strewn across the back of
his couch. Within seconds it’s apparent he’s having one of the worst nights of
his life.
Completely in a tizzy, Charlie scrambles up the stairs to
his bedroom, and after finally ascertaining that his unwelcome intruder Samantha
is no longer in the house, he calls his best friend, Vince (Scott Caan).
Caan is superb as Charlie/Weston’s foil. Released from
playing the angst of existential crisis, Caan plays Vince with impish abandon.
The result is a performance that is pure joy.
As Charlie begins to explain to Vince what has sent him over
the edge, we discover that after finding out his girlfriend Shelly is pregnant,
and having a poor enough reaction to send her running off to Detroit, he has
had several unexpected encounters with girlfriends from his past that have left
him questioning his future.
These past girlfriends (plus one additional character) are
all played by the same actress, Teri Reeves. In a remarkable Tatiana
Maslany-esque feat, Reeves seamlessly creates four completely separate and
believable personas: Joanna, Samantha, Kelly, and “the Blonde.”
I want to divert a moment to talk about Shelly (Claire Van
Der Boom), who even in her absence throughout much of the play is remarkably
present. Not only do we see her through Charlie’s eyes, but we see her through
Vince’s as well, not to mention her influence on the physicality of her and
Charlie’s living space. Thanks to Shelly, the refrigerator is chock full of
unexpired goodness and, in what will become a running gag throughout the play,
is also equipped with a foghorn like alarm that goes off when the door is left
open for too long.
Far from being written as a controlling leash-wielding fun-stealing
bitch who is a threat to Charlie and Vince’s friendship, Shelly is spoken of
only in fondness by both Charlie and
Vince. The rigged refrigerator leads to
Vince questioning what is going on with Charlie that would require it (when Charlie
was seven he left the refrigerator door open and ruined everything inside. His
mother “lost her mind, slapped him around and took off for a couple days.”) Not
once does Vince offer a condemnation of Shelly for installing it. Word that
Shelly is pregnant doesn’t spell the depressing end of the world for life as
Charlie and Vince have known it. Instead, Vince is thrilled. “We’re having a
baby,” Vince crows with glee, and thus inserts himself happily into Charlie and
Shelly’s growing home.
As Vince begins trying to talk Charlie down off the ledge,
we begin to discover what has put him there. It is here that we are treated to
our first “flashback,” or scene within a scene. Vince doesn’t simply fade into
the background though. Far from it, he is as active an observer as we are, and
Caan’s facial expressions as he watches these exchanges are priceless.
First up is Latina Femme Fatale Joanna. The Temptress, the
snake in the garden, the overpowering Id, and pure fantasy. Charlie says she’s
“without question the greatest sex I’ve ever had.” In fact, Joanna is a
powerful, and very recognizable, cultural trope. In the face of her, what man
could be expected to resist? Who could blame him? It’s her fault, not his, for
seducing him. This is our expectation anyway. And if it’s not clear enough
where we’ve seen “Joanna’s” before in past dramatic representations, Caan makes
sure we get it by calling up images of “Fatal Attraction” through a reference
to bunnies boiling in pots.
Reeves is an absolute delight as she teases and torments an
increasingly flustered Charlie, who is barely able to stand his ground against
her. She completely disregards his attempts to say no, even going so far as to
physically accost him, pursing his lips with her own fingers to force him tell
her what she is demanding to hear. In fact Joanna is the main reason Charlie
has begged Vince to come to his house, as protection against Joanna’s sexual
wiles and aggression.
Next we meet Samantha, one of Charlie’s two past loves. She’s
the girl Charlie couldn’t get out of his system. Done was never done, and
breakup after breakup only led to Charlie chasing after her again until she
finally got back together with him. Then one day he stopped chasing her and she
was left alone. For that reason, Charlie is convinced he ruined Samantha’s life
and her appearance now is tied to her need for revenge.
Reeve’s Samantha is petulant and demanding. In a classic ex-girlfriend
goes psychotic Lifetime movie move, she makes herself at home in Shelly and
Charlie’s house, taking a lighter to Shelly’s face in the picture on the table
and draping her panties on the back of the couch. Like with Joanna, we see the
dark side of women’s sexual “empowerment,” one that strikes fear in the men
involved.
In the middle of Charlie’s struggle to convince Samantha to
leave his house, he runs into “the Blonde” outside the theater. Reeves’ imbues
the character with a coy innocence and as the music swells, we see an instant
connection between the two. She invites Charlie for a drink. Once again Charlie
is faced with temptation, and it’s all he can do to say no, going so far as
falling down on his knees in agony as she walks away.
Samantha only agrees to leave Shelly and Charlie’s house
when Charlie promises to meet her later at her own. The first act breaks with,
much to Vince’s chagrin, Charlie leaving to fulfill said promise and Vince
waiting for Joanna.
If there is a running theme throughout Act One, it seems to
be a deep anxiety about male helplessness in the face of a female seductress. And
Caan wastes no time in knocking it down. Vince’s thoughts on accountability are
made quite clear early in the act when he scolds Charlie for trying to excuse
his actions by saying he knows they’re stupid.
Vince says: “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this,
you do it a lot. Saying something is stupid, admitting to it before you say it,
does not in any way exonerate the stupid thing you’re about to say. It’s still
stupid. It doesn’t make it any less so if you cop to it before hand.”
In other words, admitting you’re a stupid asshole doesn’t
excuse you from accountability for being a stupid asshole. Biological urges do
not excuse bad behavior. No matter what Joanna, Samantha, or even the Blonde
do, the only person to blame for Charlie’s actions is Charlie.
It’s a refreshing slap in the face at a seemingly cultural
imperative to lay the blame for men’s actions at the feet of women. Her dress
was too short, her shirt too low what’s a man to do it’s out of his control.
Vince, and Caan, call bullshit.
Act Two begins with what may go down as one of my favorite
sequences in the play. It’s still nighttime; Charlie returns home and grabs a
bowl of cereal, leaving the refrigerator door open. The foghorn blows and Caan
goes to town with physical comedy as Vince, sleeping under a blanket on the
couch, yells in terror, promptly falls off and then scrambles in a blind panic
across the floor, only stopping when he hits the stairs leading to the bedroom.
Chest heaving, he hangs on to both the blanket and a pillow for dear life as he
tries to pull himself together.
Already miffed at his rude awakening, Vince grows
increasingly agitated as Charlie’s explanation of what happened with Samantha
meanders around through various musings on the progression of women’s sexuality.
But finally Charlie admits that nothing happened with Samantha. He ended it.
For good.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Vince is ready to claim victory
for Shelly and Charlie and call it a night. Until Charlie reminds him it’s not
over. They still have to deal with Kelly. Samantha wasn’t the only woman
besides Shelly he ever loved.
But before Charlie talks about Kelly, he wants to know what
happened with Joanna. As Vince desperately tries to change the subject, Charlie
susses out that Joanna and Vince slept together. In yet another hilarious
sequence, Charlie demands to know how it was, and Vince finally admits it was…
okay. Charlie has a harder time accepting that Vince didn’t have the best sex
of his life with Joanna than that his ex girlfriend and best friend had sex all
over his house. As Vince comments later in the play, fantasy always trumps
reality.
But finally Charlie tells his final story of the night and
we flash back to his conversation with Kelly.
Reeves brings a sweet vulnerability to Kelly. Unlike Joanna
or Samantha, Kelly bares her soul for Charlie, and us. She admits she was a
shell of a person when she was with Charlie, too afraid of rejection to be true
to herself. But everything in her life is wonderful now, and she’s ready to be
in a relationship. She wants Charlie back. Needs him back. Because despite how
great her life is, it is, in essence, empty without him in it. His final rejection
breaks her heart. Unable to even look at him, she walks away in tears.
Kelly is also a woman all of us know. Whether we identify
with her ourselves or just recognize her lovelorn desperation from romance
novels and movies. Culturally speaking, Kelly is the girl who reminds all us
other girls that our lives are not complete without a man.
But there is more to this story, and it’s Vince who tells
it. Charlie treated Kelly like crap. And she let him. What did Charlie do on
Kelly’s birthday? Played golf with Vince. Bros before ho’s? Not in Vince’s
world. The way Charlie and Kelly interacted was wrong. Nowhere does Caan make
it clearer that relationships and sex needs to be a two way street than in
Kelly’s story. Vince’s biggest condemnation of Kelly and Charlie’s relationship
is that Kelly never had a voice, not in bed and not anywhere else. That’s not a
relationship, Vince says, that’s prostitution. Female desire is every bit as
important as male desire.
Throughout the play, Charlie has noted the cosmic
coincidence of running into these four women on this particular night at this
particular time. He’s convinced that somehow he’s being tested. It’s teased
early on that the entire thing might be a setup when both Joanna and Samantha
clearly know who Shelly is and follow her on social media. Jealousy and competition between women over
men and women’s distrust of their male partner’s fidelity resonate
culturally—and the motivations for all these women to play this game are
certainly not outside the realm of possibility.
But Caan knocks that down too. Vince doesn’t even consider
for a moment that Shelly is “twisted” enough to pull off such a thing. In fact,
it’s none of these women’s fault this is happening. It’s Charlie, Vince
surmises, who has in fact put all three women back into play in his life in
order to test himself. And as far as The Blonde goes, desire for other women
doesn’t end with commitment. That’s just the way the universe works. The point
is, Vince reminds him, that Charlie said no, took responsibility for his own
actions, and passed. With flying colors.
Night turns to day and Vince tells Charlie it’s time for him
to let himself off the hook and enjoy the beautiful life he is creating with
Shelly and their baby. As Charlie pulls a bottle of water out of the refrigerator
and promptly closes the door, it’s a physical verification of the progress
Charlie has made in his life.
Now we finally get to meet Shelly in the flesh, but all our
expectations for what comes next are sent spinning when she walks onto stage
from the audience holding the playbill for “The Trouble We Come From” in her
hand even as we hear Charlie thank the crew for their hard work and tell them
he’ll see them the next day.
In that moment it’s revealed that none of what we just
witnessed was “real;” it was all artifice, a play within a play.
Claire Van Der Boom brings a range of emotions to Shelly.
Both self assured and vulnerable, Shelly is not afraid to speak her mind. She
is appalled at the play she just witnessed, appalled that Charlie not only feels
the need to put his angst up for public display but that he still has that
angst at all. Shelly might want Charlie in her life, but she doesn’t need
him, especially at the expense of her own dignity.
As she walks away, Charlie scrambles to explain himself. The
play wasn’t real. Yes, he has anxiety, yes he comes from a shitty childhood and
has a hard time accepting the good things that have happened in his life, but
he’s emotionally mature enough and intellectually developed enough to know that
what he has with Shelly is good. He loves her, appreciates her, and wants to
build a life with her. Their relationship is healthy and therefore as Shelly
puts it, boring. No one would want (or perhaps need) to watch it, but “living
it,” Charlie says, “is fucking fantastic.”
And then Charlie falls down on one knee and in yet another
defiance of expectation, the play doesn’t end with an engagement. While Charlie
offers to marry her if that’s what Shelly wants, Shelly tells him none of that
matters. When she says “I do,” she’s saying yes to the only thing that does
matter: building a life together, with him and, she reveals, their daughter.
Early in the play, Vince says it’s a concept of God that
offers hope for dealing with our problems. But one of the things that I love
most about Caan’s work is optimism that things can be better. We can be better.
Identities and ideas that hold us back can be teased out and overcome. Sometimes,
though, the hardest thing to do is recognize when we are being culturally
played. This is the trouble we all come from.
But this is why art needs to recognize and focus on
what’s broken in our culture. What makes Caan such an important voice at this
particular moment in time, is that he uses what’s broken to show how it could
be made right.
