An Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Dream Big World Theatre’s Cracked Open at Theatre Row
By Acton
Why won’t she come downstairs? As Matilde’s (Katherine Reis) family busily prepares a party celebrating her high school graduation, she remains alone in her room, silent except for angry, blaring music. Just when they’ve run out of excuses to tell her friends waiting outside, she descends in a violent explosion (fight director Judi Lewis Ockler) that makes her mental health problems unignorable.
Dream Big World Theatre‘s Cracked Open (director and writer Gail Kriegel) is set during the 1990s, which president George H. W. Bush had established as the “Decade of the Brain,” meant to drive awareness of mental health issues in the U.S. New treatments were on the rise, along with concerns and skepticism about over-medicated young people. Rather than offering clear solutions, these developing options only create more confusion for Matilde’s parents, Mae (Pamela Bob) and Rich (Bart Shatto), whose search for help is met by a phalanx of self-assured professionals, each offering a contradictory diagnosis and prescription.
Matilde’s outburst exposes fault lines in a family seemingly long in denial about her need for help. Her younger sister Edith (Blair Dimisa) lashes out at her mother, Mae. Mae falls into despair, her hopes for both her daughter’s and her own future set aside (Pamela Bob is gripping in her raw desperation). Mae’s mother, Lillian (Lisa Pelikan), is ill-equipped to deal with problems out of her wheelhouse as a grandmother. Rich, a TV news reporter, worries that publicity about his daughter’s illness could end his career, along with that of his brother (Paul Castree), who relies on Rich for his job as a cameraman.
Eventually, Matilde is placed in a substandard facility that could use much tighter security, far from home on an exotic-sounding bus line. There she meets Billy (a charming Rubén Caballero), the more experienced resident down the hall. Billy is perhaps too sentimentally conceived as a harmless dreamboat (he even plays the ukulele), but watch Joyia D. Bradley in her scenes as his supervisor. Her wordless caution lends his otherwise anodyne character an edge.
Cracked Open is particularly well cast (casting director Jamibeth Margolis): Paul Castree and Bart Shatto, playing brothers, have a striking family resemblance, as do Lisa Pelikan and Pamela Bob playing mother and daughter, and Katherine Reis and Blair Dimisa as sisters. Madeline Grace Jones shines as Hope, beautifully portraying a painfully shy (at first) neurodivergent young woman. The eleven performers portraying thirty-two roles (including Scott Harrison as a hunky rabbi and Jenne Vath, strong in multiple roles) are always distinct, thanks to versatile performances and clever costume design by AC Gottlieb and James Nguyen. Lighting design by Yang Yu deftly transports us from scene to scene.
Kreigel directs her script with an adept sense of pacing, letting moments of silence, such as the scenes of the sisterly bond between Reis and Dimisa, sink in. The play moves swiftly between naturalistic family moments and impressionistic scenes like support group meetings and an especially ludicrous counseling session. Even if Matilde’s story wraps up a little too nicely, I enjoyed this engaging new play, well-staged by a talented cast.
