All The World’s A Stage: Scott Caan’s “The Trouble We Come From”

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.

Scott Caan's "9/11"

A/N: Please note that this is more akin to a dialogue between me and the ideas in the play than a review or critical analysis.

“9/11”

Last January I had the opportunity to see Scott Caan’s play “9/11” in its entirety, as it would happen, just days after the terrorist attack by religious extremists on Charlie Hebdo in France. It was eerily timely, for despite the passage of thirteen years, “9/11” remains remarkably on point and sadly all too relevant.

Originally written in 2001, “9/11” takes place hours after the planes hit the towers. It follows a handful of characters’ attempts to deal with and make sense of the enormity of the tragedy, brothers Matty (Mark Pellegrino) and Sean (Scott Caan), Sean’s best friend Vic (Val Lauren) and several other characters they meet along the way. It is at heart a conversation about anger, fear, helplessness and ignorance.

Matty, Vic and Sean all have very different reactions to the tragedy. Matty is angry and vengeful, sensing that the world he knows has forever been changed. He sees danger around every corner, expects more attacks, and is ready to grab a gun and go to war. He knows exactly who his enemy is: Muslims, Arabs, people easily identifiable by differences in physical features, dress and language. He’s a racist and he knows it. He also doesn’t care.

Vic is struggling to maintain a sense of normalcy, clinging to the President’s direction that citizens should go about their usual business, go out, go shopping, and spend money to prop up a stock market in a tail spin. Vic’s attempt to behave as if nothing has changed infuriates Matty, who becomes increasingly agitated as Vic conducts business on the phone.

Matty is just as appalled by Sean, who shows up seemingly having no reaction to the attacks at all. But Sean, who is having quite the day himself, simply doesn’t know. When Matty fills him in, Sean, while horrified, can’t fathom the possibility of going to war. “This is America,” Sean says, “We don’t go to war. We bomb people.”  In Sean’s mind, “people” is synonymous with a place, the Middle East. Through that abstract conception, Sean erases the myriad of human beings who make up that place and thus has no problem imagining the entire region bombed out of existence.

Things come to a head when Matty attacks a man he perceives as Middle Eastern, only stopping because Vic intercedes and pulls him away. Matty’s defense of his actions leads to one of the most powerful exchanges in the play:

Matty:

            I see this guy and he’s giving me looks. He’s not American looking.

            He’s not European looking. He’s got brown skin and a beard down to here, follow me?”

Sean:

Yeah, he’s from the Middle East.

Matty:

             Middle Eastern cocksucker’s looking at me and giving me fucking

             looks, right?

Vic:

            Who’s giving who looks Matty? Who said he didn’t hear you call him

            camel fuckers?

Matty:

            Dude that’s what they are. That’s what they are. They’re bad people.

            I call bad people bad names.

Vic:

            He’s a person [emphasis mine].

Vic brings home the brutality of racism: ripping someone’s identity from them and imposing a falsehood that negates their own behavior and actions.  It’s something Vic knows all too well, for as it’s revealed a little later, Vic himself is of Iranian descent, a fact he and his family have hidden from everyone to avoid painful stereotypes, discrimination and violence.

But Matty is unrepentant, unwilling to truly hear what Vic is saying. The exchange continues:

Vic:

            What if that guy had blond hair and blue eyes what would you

            have done? Would you have slapped him? What if he was a fucking

            Nazi like you?

Matty:

            No, I would have done nothing about it. I would have walked away.

In forcing this admission, Vic lays bare the indefensible position of having to prove your loyalty if you are obviously an “other.”  It’s there in the demand that all who identify as Muslims or who are Middle Eastern voice a condemnation of Muslim extremists, as if without it, the suspicion will always linger that they are extremists themselves.

America has had a hard time letting go of this concept. One only need look back to the interment of Japanese Americans during World War II to see it in motion. For a country with an ideology built on the concept of freedom, we have a long history of doing violence to any signs of difference.

The real breakthrough in the play comes when Sean is speaking to Matty about Vic’s heritage. “Who cares,” Sean asks, “you love the guy. Who cares where his uncle or his father’s from?”

Finally Matty cracks, confused and vulnerable for the first time, as he faces the possibility that he completely fucked up.

But let’s take that concept a step further. Who cares what his religion is. Who cares what his sexuality is. Who cares what his race is. He’s a friend, he’s family, you love him, and that’s all that matters. They are different from you and that’s okay. To me, this is the most salient, and the most powerful, point of this play.

Individually it’s overwhelming to figure out how to impact change on a global level. And the fact of the matter is, most of us don’t have that kind of power. But at the level of the personal, we have all the power. We decide if we’re going to listen to the Vic’s in our lives who hold us to account when we’re on the wrong side of things, whether it’s a friend, a co-worker, a journalist, Jon Stewart, or someone you met on twitter.

I found myself thinking a lot about this play as I read stories about mosque attacks in France in the wake of Charlie Hebdo, as I had discussions with a Muslim friend about the discrimination she and her friends face every day, as she spoke about how disheartening it was to see the only representation her religion, which she loves, gets in the media is to be used synonymously with terrorism. And how when she tried to share those feelings with people, they dismissed her complaints as irrelevant and refused to listen.

The simple fact is, it’s the agitators who are brave enough to call out discrimination when they see it and the people who are brave enough to take a long hard look at their own flaws, at their own contribution to the ugliness in the world, who have the most chance of impacting the lives of everyone around them in a positive way.

In a world where terrible things seem to happen on a daily basis, it may be the best that we can ask for.

Scott Caan's "Vanity"

On August 30, 2014 the Martha Otero Gallery in Los Angeles held a showing of photographs from Scott Caan’s most recent book, “Vanity.”

It was an absolute treat to be able to view some of the actual photographs from the book. For those who are curious, I’ll include a list of the photographs on display at the end of this piece.

I have always been drawn to black and white photography, which is partly why I enjoy Caan’s photography. The other part is what he chooses to shoot. It’s not surprising, really, that the majority of Caan’s pictures are of people. As both a writer and an actor, I would imagine that people must fascinate him, and Caan’s portraits certainly fascinate me.  

One of the photographs included in the gallery was “Joanna in the pool at the Oakstone, 2007.” Joanna is in the water, her back against the edge of the pool, staring straight at the camera. The camera’s focus is entirely on her, her eyes the focal point of the picture, the physical background a blur. Her gaze is unflinching. Her eyes capture mine, hold mine, and yet she is unreadable, despite how desperately I want to know what has put that look in her eye, the set to her lips, the tension in her shoulders. The photograph is a story, every detail a piece in a puzzle, the answer to which is tantalizingly unknowable.

It’s easy to forget the photographer in this equation, that the subject of the photograph is actually sharing a gaze with the person taking the picture, filtered through a camera’s lens.  Quite a few of the people in Caan’s collection are staring straight at the camera, just like Joanna. Their faces are a study in diversity, young and old, wrinkled and smooth, smiling and resolute. The number of times I find myself staring straight into their eyes reminds me of how often in life I don’t.

To meet another person’s gaze is to risk vulnerability, of opening a door and inviting communication. Acknowledging someone else’s existence or by contrast, having your existence acknowledged is not always a safe or comfortable space. You may not like what you see or the attention you might get. There is power in a gaze: Even that brief exchange of glances is laden with cultural assumptions and expectation. We are taught that staring is rude. We learn the hard way that it can be confrontational.  But by staring at the ground instead of sharing a glance with each other, we miss too much of the life that is constantly swirling around us.

That Caan’s subjects feel safe enough to share that gaze with their photographer ensures that his photographs never feel voyeuristic. Caan does not shrink from his subject’s gazes and they don’t shrink from him. Caan does not demand they smile for the camera, and it’s not just traditional ideals of beauty that catch his eye. His photographs are not slick or artificial. They are intimate sketches of humanity.

On page 105 is a picture titled “Medicine 6^th and San Jacinto LA 2007.” It’s a photograph of a man sitting on a sidewalk, staring at the camera, as he shoots a needle into his arm (of what I’m assuming is heroin or some other drug).  His expression is resolute, and like Joanna, unflinching. It makes me wonder so many things. How Caan inspired this man’s trust to allow him to shoot it in the first place. And by allowing to have his picture taken, what did this man want us to see? What is his story? What happened that placed him on that street corner and drove him to put that needle in his arm?  When I look at that picture, my eyes keep coming back to his eyes, to his face, and thus to a reminder that his life is big and complex and that one moment in time, captured for eternity in that photograph, is only one small piece of it and even that one moment, I cannot fully know. 

The beauty of “Vanity” is the way each photograph, each captured piece of time, invites you to linger, invites you to marvel at another person’s existence, and invites you to fail at guessing who they really are.

I marvel, too, at Caan’s abilities with the camera, especially considering the way he explained his process to interviewer Mac Sandefur:  “I dig the idea of not knowing what I got and hoping it’s good. I got 36 chances with a roll. If I’m out and about running and shooting on the street, if I get one picture out of that I’m like, ‘I got something. We got a good photograph.’ That whole thing is rewarding.”

In this digital age, it’s eye opening to remember that when shooting film, you don’t know what you’ve captured until after you develop it. What a wild dance it must be to see something that catches your attention, to snap a photo or thirty, and then only after the moment is long gone do you know whether you really had something…or nothing.  Photography is life in 20/20 hindsight, and one that can only be appreciated when it is no longer anything but a memory.

As for the opening itself: it was small and intimate, populated largely, from what I could tell, with family and friends.  I’ve seen a lot of book signings in my day, and I’ve seen many when the numbers of friends the authors expect to come don’t show up. Scott Caan’s friends showed up. And that says a lot. In fact, in my book, it pretty much says everything.

List of Photographs:

Page 7: Christiana and Leopard at the Oakstone, 2009

Pages 12/13: Liz and heater at the Chateau, 2008

Page 24: Amsterdam Red Light Walk Alley tho, 2004

Page 26: Clear Port going somewhere

Page 27: Shallow Lane Museumplein Amsterdam, 2004

Page 33: Eight Hours Straight Prague, 2006

Pages 38/39: Jefe El Salvador, 2006

Pages 52/53: Going to California, 2012

Pages 60/61: Joanna in the pool at the Oakstone, 2007

Page 62: Mickey Avalon The Viper Room, 2007

Page 81: Camping Trip

Page 83: Steve Rudy Bagel Ford P16, 2010

Page 90: Lake Bird Chateau Hollywood, 2009

Page 117: Cloney Shoot Melrose Alley 2011

Pages 118/119: Duane Peters 80s Contest, 2010

Pages 130/131: Bird shoot in the Belushi Suit, 2009

Page 147: The one that got away on her Nikon, 2005

Page 153: Last Frame Ipanema Beach Rio, 2008

Pages 154/155: Atlantic Ocean 2005

Pages 158/159: Back lot super sport, 2008

Pages 166/167: Trailer Park Jacksonville, 2005

(My apologies to Mr. Caan for any errors in my very non-photographic memory of the photographs on the walls that night.)

Scott Caan's "Word Faithful"

I’ve had the privilege of seeing three of Scott Caan’s full length plays produced on stage and as I’ve come to expect, the latest, “Word Faithful,” is populated with characters struggling to find their place in the world both individually and romantically.

The play is predominantly devoted to Jake and Samantha, ex lovers who at the beginning of the play are both with other partners.  But from the moment we see Samantha applying last minute makeup in front of a mirror, adjusting the armor of her appearance, so to speak, as she prepares to let Jake into her apartment, and back into her life, we know that whatever is between the two of them is far from over.

It would have been easy, expected even, to make Jake and Samantha lighthearted and likeable characters. A madcap story of how these two zany people ultimately discover they’re made for each other. But this is why Caan’s writing packs an emotional punch. He never chooses the easy route.

Early on in the play, in an extremely unsettling sequence, Jake reveals a desire to smash his current girlfriend in the face to get her to shut up. This is followed by an expression of rage so deep (set off by the simple act of finding eggshells in the food she prepares for him) that he wants to kill her. He then goes on to describe how driving devolves into an internal argument with himself over whether or not to plunge his car headlong into a tree.

I think it would be fair to say that anger is culturally understood as a negative emotion, ugly in nature, confined to dark and demonized spaces. The inability to manage anger blamed for anything from road rage to mass shootings. But it is also impossible to speak about anger without considering the intersectionalities of gender, race and class and how these three things have to impact our interpretation.

Male rage, particularly white male rage, is often inseparable from an expression of entitlement and privilege, driven by a desperate need to assert both. That rage has all too often manifested itself in physical violence upon the bodies of women. It is physical abuse. It is rape. It is sexist, but it is also all too often homophobic for it is rooted in gender essentialism. Men not deemed “masculine” become targets of it too. The extreme is Eliot Rodger, killing seven people in a shooting spree in Santa Barbara earlier this year because he felt rejected by women. Or Marc Lepine who killed 14 women in 1989 in Canada because he hated feminists. But it also exists in every legislative attempt to remove women’s agency from decisions pertaining to their own bodies. To many women, male anger is terrifying and the avoidance of incurring it is a daily navigation.

Jake is fucked up, but not that fucked up that he doesn’t understand his abusive and suicidal impulses are deeply disturbed. Samantha tells him he sounds like a crazy person, but what Jake is expressing is far too normative to be dismissed as a fringe emotion. And while Jake is more than a little terrifying and off putting in that moment, his conscious awareness of what he’s saying, his sense of wrongness, is actually a step in the right direction. Because alongside the history of violence against women goes a history of society’s refusal to acknowledge it or do anything about it.

Samantha, however, shows no such control. After she and Jake sleep together and he tries to sneak out, she is enraged. She tells him flat out if he invokes the name of a friend to lie to her she will douse him with water and punch him in the face. And when he does, she follows through. But though Jake is angered by it, he does not punch her back. He does not mishandle her in any physical way. But he is quite rightfully upset at her actions and he calls her out. For all of Samantha’s reliance on self help seminars to teach her to tamp down her emotions, they can’t be contained. In fact, her anger is exacerbated by her attempts to stifle it and when it does finally surface, it is explosive. But where Jake truly seemed horrified by his violent urges, and upset at Samantha’s physical attack, Samantha herself seemed unfazed.

And that’s not a surprise. Culturally speaking, we don’t view female anger as dangerous. In the case of Jake and Samantha, Jake towers over her. At no point would you consider him to be in actual danger. And while male anger is often (rightfully) demonized, female anger is dismissed. It’s not taken seriously. It’s the stuff of mockery and jokes.

As Jake and Samantha demonstrate, anger and violence have become almost synonymous. Violence has become an extension of anger. And so anger has become a taboo emotion. One that is not utilized, but quashed.

But anger is also clarifying. Because while Samantha is wrong to strike out physically at Jake, her anger is justified. It is righteous. And it is her anger, ultimately, that strikes a chord with Jake and helps to change his behavior by the end of the play. And this is where issues of race, gender, and class are most relevant to the issue of anger. Because anger is often the voice of the oppressed. And to render anger unequivocally as wrong and dangerous and violent is an oppressive act in itself. In the face of a case like the police execution of Mike Brown, to keep calm and chill out is to be complicit in tyranny.

But if there’s anyone who would seem to understand the righteousness of anger, it’s Brian, the cuckolded lover who would appear to have the most justification to lose it. In fact, physical violence is exactly what Jake expects when Brian shows up at the apartment. Because history shows us that violence is how the fate of women gets decided:  Jake and Brian fight and winner gets the prize.

But there is no fight for two reasons. Jake runs away the second he opens the door, and as it turns out, Brian is better at the whole human being thing than either Jake or Samantha. While Brian is hurt, and rightfully upset, he never heaps guilt or shame upon Samantha. He never indicates that she owes him anything. Not for being nice to her. Not for loving her. He loves her regardless and he respects her choice, even when it’s not him.  While Jake simply expects physical violence to be the only choice when confronted by his “competition," Brian frames the incident through a different lens. Samantha’s own agency. To Brian, Samantha’s choice is the only thing that matters. Brian isn’t overcome with anger because in his mind, he never had a right to it in the first place.

(Please note that this is by no means a comprehensive discussion on anger and violence. These are merely the wanderings of my own thoughts as sparked by the content of the play.)

Random Comments and Observations

The entire play is hilariously funny.

The set design was gorgeous, the attention to detail enhancing the written words of the play. From all the decorative pithy boxes to the (I actually don’t know what they’re called) little soothing zen plant and sand that Mia Serafino kept using to show Samantha tamping down her emotions.

An enraged Mia Serafino is a thing of beauty. I will never get the image of her breaking the “Keep Calm and Chill Out” decorative box, tossing around all the little sticks from her zen plant, and throwing the sheet over her head in a fit. Serafino has a tremendous sense of timing and is a gifted physical actor.

I can’t even begin to describe the gloriousness of the mockery of male posturing that took place through a closed door between Jake and Brian. Seriously almost died laughing.

The way Jake kept calling Brian different names throughout the play, even to Brian himself, culminating in Samantha calling him by the wrong name. So. Fucking. Funny. I was in tears.

The donuts and coke hidden in the potted plant. OMG. Again. Tears.

Seriously felt so sorry for Brian when Samantha told him that while she loved him, she loved Jake more. Brian was awesome!

Loved Samantha reading Patti Smith’s “Kids” at the beginning of the fourth scene.

Loved the black and white photography they used in the set design for the fourth scene. Wondering if any of the pieces were Scott’s…

Mia Serafino, Danny Barclay, and Jim Nieb are the real deal. All three are gifted actors. The quality of work coming out of Playhouse West is truly stellar.

Going into a funny rom com and coming out talking about anger and how amazed you are at the lack of shaming heaped on Samantha. But that's Scott Caan for you. You're always going to walk out of his plays thinking a little bit harder about something.

Play Synopsis:

Scene One brings Jake back into Samantha’s life after a two year absence. She’s with Brian. He’s with Kim. Brian is a 37 year old horse trainer. Kim is a 19 year old who can’t cook. Neither Jake or Samantha is happy. Jake is pretty honest about that. Samantha is in deep denial. Samantha claims she called Jake to show him her brand new beautiful apartment (complete with “Peace” “Love” “Keep Calm and Chill Out” “Ride a Cowboy” decorative boxes), along with her brand new beautiful “self” formulated through Self Help books and Tony Robbins seminars. But Jake guesses that her real intention was to make herself feel better by seeing how fucked up he still is. The attraction between the two of them is undeniable, and the scene ends with the two of them making love on the living room floor.

Scene Two begins with Jake engaging in some serious gymnastics to wriggle his way out from under Samantha without waking her up. He’s just heading for the door when she catches him. And she loses her mind. She is absolutely furious that Jake would sneak out, leaving her to wake up alone with the future of her relationships with both Jake and Brian completely in doubt.  Samantha desperately tries to make sense of what happened, but ultimately, even though both of them are miserable and obviously still deeply in love with each other, Jake ends up leaving.

Scene Three takes place several days later and opens with Samantha packing. We quickly learn she is moving in with Brian and he’s on his way to help her take some boxes to his place. And that’s when Jake reappears. With a ring box. Samantha’s elation turns to rage when she opens the ring box only to find it empty. Samantha orders Jake to get out, but before she can get rid of him, Brian arrives. After some failed male posturing on Jake’s part, Jake finally leaves after Brian asks Samantha which man she wants to be with and she indicates Brian. However, after Samantha confesses she and Jake recently slept together, Brian finally gets her to admit that while she loves him and knows she should want to be with him, her love for Jake surpasses anything she’s ever felt before. Brian kisses her on the head and leaves.

Scene Four opens several months later. Samantha’s apartment has a new décor. Gone are the Self Help platitudes. In their place are several black and white photographs. Jake arrives. This time he called her. He tells her all the reasons they belong together, are stuck together, in fact, and once more produces the ring box. Which is still empty. Samantha orders him out, telling him words are intangible without something solid to hinge them on. Jake smiles. Reaches into his pocket and produces a ring. The happy couple kisses, even though the success of their relationship in the future is far from assured.