Father and son seek a common language in Next Act’s 'Secret Mask'

Ernie (James Pickering) is suffering from stroke-induced aphasia.  George (Drew Parker), his 40-year-old-son, has just flown into Vancouver to see him – for the first time since Ernie skipped town when George was just 2.

That’s how things begin in Canadian playwright Rick Chafe’s “The Secret Mask,” now receiving its U.S. premiere in a Next Act Theatre production being directed by Edward Morgan.

The jagged and separated jigsaw pieces on Rick Rasmussen’s set suggest how wide the water has grown between father and son; they also reflect Ernie’s frequent inability to solve the puzzle of language.  He calls a pen a “panker.”  Dead people are “cardboard.”  A menu’s smorgasbord is “the whole Jesus on the cross.”

Aided by a compassionate speech pathologist named Mae – chief among several female roles embodied by Tami Workentin – George begins making sense of what Ernie is trying to say; Morgan and his actors get physical to ensure the audience can follow along.   

Ernie’s steady improvement tracks the increased communication between a father and son working through their own version of aphasia, product of four decades during which they’ve exchanged neither phone calls nor letters.  Learning to speak again, Ernie at least has a trove of memories to recover.  Father and son together have almost none.

Late reveals make it hard to credit the notion that these two have been this completely out of touch.  But Pickering and Parker make it easy to credit the painstaking dance through which they begin to come together.

Bearing a striking resemblance to an aging Hemingway, Pickering channels that dying lion’s combination of wary suspicion, truculence, pride and frustration at a world he no longer fully understands – as well as the embarrassment and shame that he hasn’t used his time in that world more wisely.

Making his Milwaukee debut, Parker is a sharp chip off the old block.  While his George can be impatient and angry, one also easily sees the underlying hurt of a man who’d like to reach out and touch but doesn’t know how.  He buries himself in work and yells at his own teenage son to mask all that he feels.

George’s many calls home to that never-seen son and to his own wife – cheating on him and brainwashing their boy – is a major flaw in an otherwise compelling show; they join things said by Ernie and George’s conversations with his own never-seen mother in suggesting that one of the chief reasons why fathers and sons drift apart is because vindictive women poison the well.

Those obtrusive telephonic sidebars add flab to a show that needs a trim and takes too long to conclude.  But Ernie and George will not be denied; Pickering and Parker ensure their thaw feels true.  It’s beautifully played – and reason aplenty to see this warm show.

“The Secret Mask” continues through Dec. 10 at Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St.  For tickets, visit www.nextact.org.  Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.

PROGRAM NOTES

Papa Hemingway: It’s fortuitous that Pickering can resemble the late 1950s Hemingway, because Papa was clearly on Chafe’s mind in shaping who Ernie is.  Not only do the two men share the same name. In addition, Ernie is an unpublished novelist who lives in an apartment where the bookshelves teem with Hemingway, prompting his visiting son to ask “what’s with all the Ernest Hemingway?”  Ernie’s description of his childhood – and his complicated relationship with his own father – strongly recalls Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories.  Ernie’s favorite sports – tennis, skiing, fishing and hunting – were Hemingway’s favorite sports. 

Like Hemingway – who committed suicide in Idaho by shooting himself with a rifle, in part because of his frustration that he could no longer string words together – a despairing Ernie makes noises about killing himself with a rifle because he can no longer string words together.  Still beset by aphasia, Ernie calls that rifle a “piece of potato”; the potato has long been associated with Idaho and is among its chief crops.  Like Hemingway – and like George – Ernie is a loner, filled with vitality and warmth that he doesn’t know how to express.  Like Hemingway – and again like George – Ernie feels entrapped by women and domesticity.  “The foundational home,” Ernie says of the domestic hearth, “is not always the ticket.”

Channeling “Luna Gale”: Mae isn’t the first compassionate health care professional Workentin has played this year.  She also gave a memorable performance in January as a social worker in Renaissance Theaterworks’ “Luna Gale.” As Mae in “The Secret Mask” and as Caroline in “Luna Gale,” Workentin nails the frustration driving a loving woman who wants to do more and ultimately can’t, given a social welfare system with too little money and too many cases.  In both roles, Workentin exudes care and concern, as well as a world-weary recognition that her best will never be nearly good enough.  In both roles, she conveys a combination of righteous indignation and disappointment when others fail to step up to the plate and do their best.  At one point in “The Secret Mask” during which George is shirking what Mae sees as his duty, Workentin gives Parker a look of withering contempt that bore right through him and kept going; at other moments her Mae is all love and dumplings. It’s terrific work.

Inside the Brain: Rasmussen’s jigsaw-puzzle set is supplemented by numerous objects from Ernie’s life, dangling upstage from separate strings like ornaments on a Christmas tree.  Frequently lighted by Aaron Sherkow in rainy grays and blues, these pieces and objects suggest the inside of Ernie’s brain, in which the synapses are clearly firing – even if connections are often fraying or missed.  During moments when Ernie and George come fully alive to all the beauty in the world and each other, that backdrop blazes with brighter colors.  Rasmussen’s jagged pieces also suggest ice floes, recalling an Arctic expedition described after intermission and thematically related to what remains frozen in this play’s men, despite the emotional currents running beneath the surface.

James Pickering: This Milwaukee treasure has been acting here about as long as George has been alive, and his excellent performance in this production proves anew how lucky we are that he continues to work.  Ernie has a long and challenging dramatic arc, from a man whose struggles with language initially lead others to deem him paralytic or senile to the sharp, sensitive and sometimes wistful man we see at journey’s end, looking back with regret at his ravaged life and nevertheless fiercely determined to carry on. 

Watching Pickering’s Ernie makes me all the more excited to see Pickering next summer as King Lear, a role I’ve been on record hoping he’d play as far back as 2010.  Pickering will climb this daunting mountain in Optimist Theatre’s 2018 production of “King Lear”; dates and other cast members have not yet been announced.

Next Act and Shakespeare: Speaking of Shakespeare, Next Act’s next production is Bill Cain’s “Equivocation,” an outstanding and very timely play featuring the late-career Will trying to make art in an age of terror.  I’ve described it elsewhere as Shakespeare “choosing between the truth he wants to tell through art and the propaganda that King James’ court wants him to write instead.  Imagine a more sophisticated, political and considerably darker version of ‘Shakespeare in Love’ that also explores what happens when our politicians define what counts as truth.”

“Equivocation” will be directed by Milwaukee native and rising star Michael Cotey, who helmed a first-rate production of Cain’s play at Northwestern.  In the Next Act production that begins on Feb. 1, Cotey’s cast will include David Cecsarini, T. Stacy Hicks, Josh Krause, Eva Nimmer, Jonathan Smoots and Mark Ulrich.

 Further sweetening the pot, Next Act has just added two Shakespeare-themed readings during the run of “Equivocation.”  On Lincoln’s Birthday (Feb. 12), Next Act will host a reading of Angela Iannone’s “Seeds of Banquo,” featuring the man whose brother killed Lincoln – Edwin Booth – rehearsing for an 1870 production of “Macbeth.”

On Feb. 20, Next Act will host a reading of Lauren Gunderson’s “The Book of Will,” a play about art, memory and legacy involving the loyal Bard followers who collected his plays for the legendary1623 First Folio.  The Next Act reading comes between its standout production of Gunderson’s “Silent Sky” this past fall and its much-anticipated production this next April of Gunderson’s marvelous “I and You.”

One of four Gunderson plays riffing on Shakespeare, “The Book of Will” is currently receiving a full production at Skokie’s Northlight Theatre; it runs through Dec. 17.