UND Play Explores Working Class Dreams and Realities

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

After last month’s classic and satiric musical comedy, “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” The UND Theatre Department switches gears drastically with its current production, “Scarcity.”

This recent play by Lucy Thurber premiered in New York only three years ago and opened November 16 in the basement lab theatre of UND’s Burtness Theatre, under the direction of graduate student Ben Klipfel.

“Scarcity” is a modern American reworking of the style of British drama popular in the late 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called “kitchen sink” and “angry young men” dramas.

It’s a raw, unapologetic portrait of a severely dysfunctional working-class family in a small Massachusetts town, none of its seven characters particularly likeable or even sympathetic except 11-year-old daughter Rachel. Her parents, Martha and Herb, alternate between verbal abuse, boozing, and rough sex with each other. There is some humor from time to time, but a bitterly dark and ironic humor.

The plot focuses around precocious reader Rachel and her mathematically gifted 16-year-old brother Billy, both of whose mental maturity and desire for a better life keeps them all the more frustrated with their home situation and schooling opportunities. Then a pretty young schoolteacher takes a special interest in Billy, setting off yet more friction between Billy and his sister and his parents.

Michelle McCauley dominates the production as Martha, with a decent performance by Andrew Markiewicz as Herb. Both bring out the love-hate conflict they feel about their son’s new passion for education and his questionable new relationship with this outsider teacher, nicely played by Emily Elisabeth Hogenson. Nick McConnell does a good job showing Billy’s stress trying to deal with pressure from all sides, and Amy Driscoll makes a sensitive Rachel. Matthew Hegdahl and Daphne PanKratz fit in well as Martha’s frustrated police-officer cousin and his put-upon wife, but their roles are underwritten in the script.

The script explores some interesting material not often seen on local stages, but Thurber is no Edward Albee or Harold Pinter or John Osborne. Especially in the opening scenes, much of the dialogue feels self-consciously forced, not quite literary but far from naturalistic and not stylized enough to keep some of it from being just a bit embarrassing.

The lines, characterizations, and the overall play do get better as “Scarcity” goes along, but then it’s suddenly over after the second act, leaving a void where according to all expectations there should be a third act.

In fact the original production was scathingly denounced in the New York Times review, perhaps an overreaction but not without bringing up some valid points. The show did get favorable notices in The New Yorker magazine and a few other places, but the play is certainly not for every taste.

Still, UND’s cast tries hard and it is good to see this sort of play from time to time instead of a steady diet of the same old tried-and-true theatre warhorses.

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