“A Guide for the Homesick” Stumbles and Misses its Flight Off-Broadway – front mezz junkies, Theater News

The Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Ken Urban’s A Guide for the Homesick

By Ross

“Suck it down, baby,” he says to the very nervous, younger man who has accompanied him into his airport hotel room, somewhere in the vicinity of Amsterdam. He’s talking about the can of beer he suggests they ‘shotgun‘, as he can’t find an ice bucket to keep the cans of beer bought from the recently closed bar chilled. This is the set-up of A Guide for the Homesick, a determined new play by Ken Urban (The Remains; Sense of an Ending) that stumbles into view at the DR2 Theatre, filled with expectations both within and outside of the plot that doesn’t go down as well as the beer. There is the promise of something compelling and captivating during those first few moments when two Americans take shelter from the complicated stormy world that is swirling and pouring down outside of that hotel room, and even though their personal storms are eventually revealed, the piece as a whole doesn’t quite hit the mark as solidly or honestly as one would hope.

Directed with unclear intent by Shira Milikowsky (ART’s The Lily’s Revenge), the play gives us two characters who are caught in a state of limbo near the Amsterdam airport. Both are looking for escape and/or distraction through engagement and beer. McKinley Belcher III (Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman on Broadway) carries his dilemma with a sharper stance, consistently trying to engage and maintain a connection with his newly found acquaintance. He doesn’t want to be left alone with his thoughts, he eventually tells the extremely uncomfortable Jeremy, played with a one-note variation by Uly Schlesinger (Cherry Lane’s This Beautiful Future). Belcher’s Teddy, on the other hand, finds numerous tonal complications to play within as the two strangers in one hotel room navigate their situation and their unspoken need that the other could deliver.

Schlesinger’s Jeremy has shown up at the hotel bar, he tells Teddy, after missing his connecting flight from Uganda to Boston. He’s a well-educated Harvard grad, young and anxious, on his way back from a volunteering gig as a medical assistant in a clinic in Uganda. He’s also an emotional wreck, closeted and filled with shame, almost vibrating from discomfort and tension once he’s inside the hotel room, designed almost too precisely (for the abstractions that come later) by Lawrence Moten (Broadway’s Chicken & Biscuits), with deliberate lighting by Abigail Hoke-Brady (MCC’s The White Chip), defining costuming by David C. Woolard (Primary Stages’ The Roads to Home), and a solid sound design by Daniel Kluger (Broadway’s Oh Mary!).

Teddy, on the other hand, seems more solid, on an adventure in Amsterdam with a good friend who is about to get married to a woman, who, it turns out, is calling Teddy continuously all through the night. Something is clearly wrong here. With Jeremy, obviously, but also with Teddy and his traveling companion. Teddy’s friend, he finally admits to Jeremy, isn’t just out having a good time on his own in Amsterdam, but is missing after a disagreement they had the other night. We lean in, curious, as both of these character’s stories need some dissecting. That is clear, and we are given a chance about halfway through the overly long set-up of ‘will Jeremy stay or will he leave’ conflict to see what exactly these two are running from.

In quick sharp turns, we are allowed to see their background stories, played out by and with the other, in Jeremy’s Uganda, and Teddy’s hotel room, to different levels of success and engagement. This is code for something compelling, but before we get there, a sexual pass is made after Teddy sort of misunderstands Jeremy’s intentions, and the tightly closeted Jeremy freaks out and tries to leave the room. Once again, a stance that starts to wear itself out and push on the boundaries of believability. The play’s formula seems primed for an examination of internal sexual complications that could lead to a deepening of understanding and acceptance, but something doesn’t sit right in its unpacking. The way Schlesinger plays his anxious Jeremy never feels like there is a strong enough desire to stay. Definitely not as powerful as the desire to run, and because of that imbalance, when he continually decides to remain, have another beer, and engage in a more complex conversation with Teddy, it never truly feels authentic in the battle between the two opposing needs. And it really does.

“Try me, help me understand,” Teddy pleads with the resistant Jeremy. And in a way, we are asking the same of Jeremy. The play to make sense needs him to want to stay more than leave, so we can be witness to the investigation of each of their stories. They are dutifully told in flashbacks that attempt to open up the narratives and lead us toward that understanding we crave. Belcher does a strong job portraying both his main role of ‘good friend’ Teddy who is worried about his buddy who left him after a fight, and as the out gay man in Uganda who became friends with Jeremy at the emergency clinic. Every time they flip over to that world, Belcher makes it all come alive with his sharply defined portrayal, pulling us completely. The other parallel processing of Teddy’s story, with Schlesinger playing the role of Teddy’s soon-to-be-married friend who seems to be in the middle of something that either resembles a panic attack or a manic episode, isn’t as neatly defined and therefore takes us a beat or two to realize what is happening.

Death and guilt are placed firmly in the room, flaring out into the space between them from stories that are almost too neatly organized to the other. Layers of emotional engagement are peeled back, in a way that is meant for us to see these two lost souls becoming closer to one another, but the conflicts seem to only make connection more impossible. The shifts, especially at the end, don’t really add up to what transpired just before, and I never really believed that any safe space was created, especially for the overly anxious Jeremy. But the stories that are played out in flashbacks have some edge to them that pull us in, although that final wall reveal pushes our suspension of disbelief to the edge. If we were going to go there, abstractly, it would have helped if the hotel room wasn’t so detailed and reality-based. Even though Belcher has done a spectacular job embodying the other character, his ending can’t be explained honestly, as no one in the room was there to see it or re-tell it. It’s not entirely honest or authentic, much like the rain that falls outside the hotel room in what appears to be a hallway lit with hotel light wall sconces, and even though the ideas and violence represented in that harrowing last scene in Uganda elevate the piece emotionally, it also feels strictly formulated for effect.

Recently I read a note from a playwright that discussed the idea that for a play to work, we must believe that the characters can not leave. They must have a reason that compels them to stay inside the drama, and even though playwright Urban unpacks the reframed rationale for Jeremy to stay in the room with Teddy, his conflictual stance never feels stronger than his anxious need to escape. The powerful pull of union with Teddy isn’t strong enough as played by Schlesinger or as directed by Milikowsky. Therefore A Guide for the Homesick never feels authentic enough for this engagement to be played out. The need isn’t strong enough to support the action, or non-action, taking me out of the emotional space and leaving me homesick without anyone to guide me through.