The payoff of “I and You,” at the Bristol Riverside Theatre, is a genuine stunner. The woman sitting nearest me reacted to it by saying, “Wow! Just wow!”
It’s a justifiable sentiment, but while taken aback as much as anyone by playwright Lauren Gunderson’s shocker of an ending, one akin to M. Night Shyamalan’s in “The Sixth Sense,” I can’t help preferring the gentle, insightful honey of a play that preceded it.
For ninety-nine hundredths of “I and You,” Gunderson, a prolific and popular playwright who has relatively few productions in this region, accomplishes a remarkable feat. She has two characters, two people recognizable from everyday life, maintain and sustain an engaging conversation full of revelations, fueled by literary and other references, and fraught with the push-me-pull-you of a pair of individuals who alternately succeed and falter in establishing a friendship.
JJ Wilks and Silvia Dionicio are so natural as teenagers who are so different from the mold it’s wonderful they found each other, even if more by happenstance than by choice or design. Wilks’ Anthony comes across as the average teen, a basketball player who takes his courses seriously enough to invade Dionicio’s strictly guarded privacy to fulfill an assignment due the following school day. Within his effortless normality is a young man with myriad interests and a particular sensitivity to the project at hand, a presentation based on a portion of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” Anthony seems to have committed the collection’s entirety to memory.
Dionicio’s Caroline is a tad eccentric and less a loner, or just plain anti-social, than she first seems once we learn she suffers from liver disease and is isolated as much by medical necessity as by predilection until she receives a transplant, which we’re given to believe is imminent.
Director Gia Forakis is flawless in making all ring authentically in every detail. Her meticulous pacing and ability to coach Wilks and Dionicio into sparring, communing, making missteps, and reconciling in a manner that registers as absolutely true to adolescent behavior allows Bristol’s “I and You” to run a gamut of emotions and delights. It’s funny one moment, contentious at another, warm in significant spots yet showing the gap between Anthony and Caroline that threatens chances of real friendship let alone the possibility that Caroline might leave Anthony to fly solo on the Whitman project that unites them.
Forakis’s production is fun, intelligent, canny, complete, and charming without Gunderson needing to add a wham-bang, blow-the-roof-off-the-house ending.
The ending doesn’t hurt. In ways, it thrills. That doesn’t stop it from being a gimmick, an outstandingly memorable moment that will be talked about instead of how Gunderson, more cleverly, and more artistically, takes cues from Whitman to introduce themes and discussion between Anthony and Caroline.
Maybe Gunderson didn’t know how to end that play, the one in which Anthony and Caroline bob, weave, and come to regular consensus, so she opted for a wallop. Or maybe Gunderson decided to soften one reason for sadness for another that would include some hope, uplift, and even romance.
I don’t know what was on Gunderson’s mind in 2014 when she composed “I and You.” I do know I miss the play that was amusing and impressing me with the skill and ease with which it employed dart-like changes, petulance tempered by common sense or common ground, and that magical coming together of two distinct people as a pair or couple.
Gunderson has Anthony quote Whitman frequently, especially in advancing a concept that we are all an “I” living in a world with “You” and that we are separate beings who can meld into one unit while retaining some individuality.
Whitman’s line, “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” significantly informs Gunderson’s play and is cited in Forakis’ “Director Notes” in the Bristol Riverside program for “I and You.”
The idea certainly figures into the payoff. But more in hindsight than in foreshadowing, and that’s one of the problems I have with “I and You” as a script beyond the gold Forakis, Wilks, and Dionicio make of it for our constant entertainment.
M. Night Shyamalan, in constructing “The Sixth Sense,” informs the audience all along about what we learn so clearly at that movie’s ending. You can rewind the film in your head, see the clues, and wonder why you didn’t figure out the conceit until it was revealed.
In replaying “I and You,” I find clear signs that make the payoff plausible, but few of them amount to actual foreshadowing. They’re random facts you can look back on and say, “Of course, that’s the way in which she’s so sick; it isn’t just a ploy” or “Aha! Anthony’s talking about himself in that passage,” but nothing specifically leads up to Gunderson’s ending until she springs it.
The paucity of clues doesn’t diminish that ending. Nothing can. I just wish I could get over regarding it as grand finale fireworks, a gimmick, rather than as the lone thing that can happen to tie Anthony and Caroline’s engrossing encounter into a bow.
JJ Wilks is cheek-pinchingly superb as Anthony, a jock who is not the high school hero and who balances his basketball skills with true interest in literature, astronomy, and the plight of other people, such as Caroline. Wilks is the quintessential teenage boy, cool one moment, awkward the next, but always genuine. If you had a teenage daughter or relative, Wilks’ Anthony is the boy you’d want her to meet . . . and keep.
Silvia Dionicio also exudes authenticity but as a more peripatetic, temperamental, and teasing character than Wilks’ Anthony. Dionicio fascinates she jumps through Caroline’s various moods, poses, and resentments until she warms to Anthony and thinks he might want more than to finish some homework or gawk at the shut-in whose illness keeps her, a little by choice, in her room.
That room can be a place of fantasy, as the audience realizes as figments from Caroline’s imagination appear outside the bedroom window, an effect that comes clear when the payoff is revealed. Yana Biryukova makes those images fun while provoking curiosity.
Lee Savage’s set is shrewd in the way it approximates a messy girl’s bedroom yet is a place of mystery, the mystery Anthony often refers to via Whitman, and the mystery Gunderson is going to make us aware of. Grandly. Anthony’s coat and T-shirt and Caroline’s outfit are perfectly provided by Linda Bee Stockton. Lighting by Carolina Ortiz-Herrera and sound by Michael Keck also serve Forakis’s production well.
I and You, Bristol Riverside Theatre, 120 Radcliffe Street, Bristol, Pennsylvania. Performances through Sunday, February 13, Wednesdays and Thursdays, 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Wednesdays and Saturdays, 2 p.m., and Sundays, 3 p.m. $43 to $50. 215-785-0100 or www.brtstage.org.
