Dirt: Messy, Preachy, Confused

Arriving at Contemporary Theater Company to see Bryony Lavery’s Dirt, the audience members navigate around beds of soil surrounding the minimal set to find their seats. They look at a glossy white floor with a red chair. In the red chair is a neatly piled mound of soil. As the action of the play unfolds, the soil moves from its carefully assigned place to the glossy white floor and onto all of the actors.

The set becomes a beautiful metaphor for the messiness of ordinary human life. If the playwright had used only that metaphor in her script, it would have been a simple and heartbreaking look at the beauty and failings of everyday people living their everyday lives. However, that’s not what Lavery gives us. Her script is a confusing mess of metaphors and themes, lectures and details. The actors make a valiant effort to keep the audience entertained, but the script trips them up repeatedly.

Dirt is at times a script that is heavy-handed and preachy, full of language that sounds like academics discussing their dissertations – but three of the characters are academics. Matt (Tyler Brown) is a Ph.D. candidate who hasn’t settled on a dissertation but is obsessed with time and logistics. May (Corinne Southern) is a professor lecturing on quantum physics. The main character, Harper (Amy Lee Connell), is studying religions and spends her time disproving the existence of a god. Each of these academic subjects becomes a theme, but none of them become the theme.

The dirt in everyday human existence is explored in many possible ways: the ground we walk on, the dirt we clean from our homes, the dirt we wash from our bodies, dirty sex, dirty words. An environmental theme is loosely tied in, and the playwright talks of ways we poison our bodies. There’s an added subplot with Guy (Sami Avigdor), an ex-junkie turned Reiki healer, and Elle (Laura Kennedy), a waitress trying to break in to voice-over acting.

The web of themes and storylines centers around the unexpected and mysterious death of Harper. It’s as though Lavery wrote a rough draft and forgot to edit out the tangents that didn’t directly support her thesis. We never really arrive at a satisfactory plot, for the audience both oddly interesting and baffling.

The script simply tries to do too much, creating too many issues for the actors and the director to overcome. Three separate times, the script calls for two characters to act out overlapping monologues. The result is a cacophony of sound that the audience can’t follow. The actors give it their all, and it’s evident the director worked on pacing so that some of the intent cold be heard. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t clear enough and the meanings of six monologues are mostly lost.

The script also calls for characters to narrate scenes they are in, so actors have to jump back and forth between being an active character in the scene and a passive narrator outside of the scene. The constant switching becomes too much for the actors, and the effect is lost.

The script contains so many words it appears the production staff couldn’t keep up with all of them. This play needed a strong dramaturg to keep it all together: Instead, the director and actors are left to try to wrangle all of the loose ends into a cohesive picture.

Against a background of intellectual lectures and monologues that can’t be understood, small details create glaring missteps in this production. Matt tells us that he shaved for the occasion of his and Harper’s dinner date, but Brown’s facial stubble can be clearly seen from the audience.

Guy is a Reiki healer, but Avigdor is given stage business of sprinkling glitter over Elle and waving his fingers as though conjuring a spell as she lays down for her session – indicating no one did research into Reiki healing before staging those scenes.

Elle tells us that she will illustrate the menu specials in mime, and that the key to mime is precision. Considering most of the props are invisible, the director should have taken Elle’s advice and spent more rehearsal time on how to precisely use props that aren’t actually there. The actors are sloppy with their miming, and if they were not narrating their actions, it would be impossible to tell what they are doing in most of these scenes.

Aside from sloppy miming, the acting in this production is phenomenal. Corinne Southern is especially good as May, Harper’s hands-off mother who lectures in quantum physics. She’s far too young to play the role, but that can be forgiven after seeing her strong performance. Amy Lee Connell doesn’t quite connect to her character, Harper, in the first thirty minutes of the play, but by the second act, Connell has settled in and gives an excellent turn as the overly articulate lingering spirit. Tyler Brown is so good, he made the audience anxious as he waited on stage talking about stolen time. Both Laura Kennedy and Sami Avigdor are highly entertaining, and they give us some of the funniest moments of the play.

Dirt is a messy script that the actors take on with gusto. If you enjoy high-quality acting paired with quantum physics lectures and philosophical musings on dirt and life after death, this show will not disappoint. If you’re looking for strong plot lines and professional miming, you won’t find that here: Instead, you get a confusing mess of themes and metaphors and details that trip up the actors and the production staff. But maybe that’s the point. That’s life.

Dirt by Bryony Lavery runs (in rep with The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl), performed by Contemporary Theater Company, 327 Main St, Wakefield. Through May 7. Box office: (401)218-0282 Web: contemporarytheatercompany.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/events/1734648883512320/ Tickets: app.arts-people.com/index.php?ticketing=tctc Contains sexual content and strong language.