“If there’s one thing reality can’t tolerate,” says Dr. Phillip Cotton (Reed Birney), “it’s competition.”
But you knew that already, didn’t you, Mr. or Ms. Avid Theatergoer, you fiction-lover, you believer in hope against the odds. You know what the struggle is, against the sodden day-to-day, against the crashing disappointments. You’ve given reality the finger, haven’t you? Chester Bailey has too — or he would have, if he had any fingers.
We first meet Chester (Ephraim Birney) in a hospital room. While working in a shipyard with his colleagues — part of the massive army of civilians who helped our World War II effort — he was attacked by a madman with an acetylene torch. The madman burned out his eyes and burned off his hands. Yet as we see him, Chester seems completely normal — hospitalized, certainly, but well on his way to recovery. This is also how Chester understands himself. The difference is that Chester’s understanding has landed him in a mental hospital. Our understanding has landed us at the Contemporary American Theater Festival.
Chester Bailey unfolds itself as a series of brief monologues involving Chester and his treating psychiatrist, Dr. Cotton. This, too, is much the same way it is with us, where internal monologues and storytelling go before (I’m gonna ace that interview) and after (it’s all office politics down there, anyway) the event.
Chester — Ephraim Birney imbues him with vigor, optimism, and a spot-on accent — has lived a perfectly ordinary life, with one exception. His father, upon his mother’s frantic insistence, has pulled strings to get Chester a job in the shipbuilding yard, so that he does not have to go off to fight the war. The great humiliation of being an able-bodied, male civilian during the war has thrown him into a maelstrom of loneliness. One night, alone at Penn Station, he spies a lovely young woman at a vending stand. He steels himself to walk up to her — and buys Chicklets and a paper. He never gets another chance.
Chester Bailey closes July 28, 2019. Details and tickets
As for Dr. Cotton — Reed Birney delivers him up with a determined, hangdog resignation, as though he had witnessed his own execution, and was OK with it — we see an accomplished man, whose life has been tinged with sadness. Ministering to the men coming back from the Solomons and the Philippines has been unspeakably depressing, and so he has come to the provinces, and Long Island’s Walt Whitman Hospital. The son of a printer, he pushed himself through college and medical school, showing that even in the most elevated of professions you can land in a dead-end job. His personal life is a mess, through not much fault of his own.
Chester’s particular delusion is that he can see and — because he can’t actually see — that he has hands. Though he has no eyes, his brain tells him he can see, and that his vision, admittedly imperfect, allows him to see first light and shadow, then forms, and finally shapes and colors. He sees his hands. He feels his hands. His brain, desperately shielding him from the horror of his condition, manufactures an interior world more powerful than the exterior world. Chester is no madman. He is a supremely rational man, and no more rational than when manufacturing rationales to allow himself to believe what is manifestly untrue.
Dr. Cotton’s job, of course, is to defeat Chester’s brain, explode that interior world, and let the horror come flooding in. And as we watch Dr. Cotton’s own interior struggle, the larger truth of Joseph Dougherty’s profoundly insightful, beautifully written play floods in. Our interior world — some of which is true, some of which we only hope is true — allows us to persist in the face of exterior horror and disappointment. It is at once a justification for theater, and a terrific example of what it can do.
In that, it is a perfect companion to another excellent production in this year’s CATF, Wrecked, a cautionary tale about a shared interior world which is a shield against reality.
Profound insight, otherworldly writing, and a superb cast make Chester Bailey the best show I saw at CATF this year (I was unable to see Antonio’s Song, about which Debbie Minter Jackson will report.) Those of you who saw Studio Theatre’s Admissions — the best show I saw in DC last season — will recognize Ephraim Birney as the high school senior dealing with the effect of affirmative action on his college aspirations. And those of us who watched House of Cards when House of Cards was cool will immediately recognize his dad, Reed Birney, as Frank Underwood’s beleaguered Vice-President, Donald Blythe. Both actors are at every moment their characters on stage, even during each others’ monologue.
And — particularly given the intimate setting of Studio 112 — special kudos should go to scenic designer Luciana Stecconi, who managed the difficult feat of making the stage look both like a hospital room and Penn Station, and to fight director Aaron Anderson, who managed to realistically present how a blind man with no hands would fight.
Chester Bailey by Joseph Dougherty, directed by Ron Lagomarsino . Featuring Ephraim Birney and Reed Birney . Scenic design: Luciana Stecconi . Costume design: Beth Goldenberg . Lighting design: John Ambrose . Sound design: Brendan Aanes . Technical director: Monique Robine . Fight director: Aaron Anderson . Stage manager: Tina Shackelford . Produced by the Contemporary American Theater Festival . Reviewed by Tim Treanor.
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