Want to give a gift to a friend? If you’re a playwright and your pal’s an actor, you can forget the homemade cookies and hand-dipped candles. Even if you can’t afford a car, you can give a vehicle — as playwright John Kuntz has to Paula Plum, for whom he wrote the one-person play Miss Price, which is now in its world premiere at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. That the accomplished Plum commandeers her present like some pinched and tweedy queen careering around a small-town library in the manner of Miss Grundy crossed with Isadora Duncan will surprise no one. That Kuntz, who’s best known for bouquets of eccentric vignettes including Freaks and Starfuckers, is the author of this slight if poignant play about a woman caught between rigid routine and repressed hysteria may.
Miss Price has other surprises up its sleeve, including the fact that its title character does not appear — except to Plum’s life-starved librarian, Eleanor Shields, on whom Miss Price has been thrust as an unwelcome assistant. Eleanor has lived in the New England town over whose library she presides her entire life — as have most of the residents (whether out of " tradition or laziness " she cannot say). Her only boyfriend long ago committed suicide (in a dishwasher). At home she cares for an invalid mother (who lost the use of her legs in a midlife sledding accident inspired by the penultimate chapter of Ethan Frome). As you might guess from the above, the drollest, most Kuntzian bits of Miss Price occur in parentheses.
On the job, where we find her, Eleanor does the same bustling thing every day. Each of the play’s short episodes is set during the 15 minutes before the library opens, when we find our passive-aggressive heroine moving from the elaborate unlocking of a heavy invisible door to rituals of tea brewing, pencil sharpening, and vigorous book check-in. Under the slightly surreal direction of Eric C. Engel, the character’s activities move from imperious drudgery to near-dance. Similarly, as the invisible Miss Price at first annoys and then starts to thaw Eleanor, volumes that had been returned through a slot by persons unseen start to appear in the clutches of gloved, bejeweled hands. Susan Zeeman Rogers’s rendition of the drab, old-fashioned library may be realistic, but the production slides off that track with regularity.
Miss Price is a bit of an odd duck. Plum, her character’s pent-up hostility, genuine anguish, and giddy laughter sneaking by turns through her bookish, straitlaced demeanor, is never less than a pleasure to watch. Her Eleanor is given to arch language and " absurd tangential rants " that can be quite funny. Sometimes these fit the character, as when Eleanor tersely informs Miss Price, whom she has already reprimanded for such sins as smiling and smelling good, that " there are only two things that bother me: sound and motion. " Avoid them and you can expect to get along fine. At other times, the Kuntzian fillips seem strained or incongruous. Still, the play is an interesting if sentimental departure for the writer, who has moved from his own one-man shows to Sing Me to Sleep, an accumulatively creepy suite of monologues revolving around a serial killer, to last season’s multi-character take on The Wizard of Oz, Emerald City.
Scene by scene, as Eleanor converses, now begrudgingly, now in a lonely torrent, with the unseen Miss Price (the play is less monologue than half a dialogue), something akin to a friendship develops. Miss Price, who has fled a lesbian lover in California, evidently picked the New England town where Eleanor rides herd over the books by blindly sticking her finger on a map or in a phonebook. Eleanor, who initially regards such behavior as suspiciously " spontaneous, " takes to choosing passages of prose by stabbing her finger into the middle of books, thus allowing " fate " to offer up jewels from Thomas Hardy and Virginia Woolf and, on one occasion, a recipe for tuna-fish balls. Eventually, she confides in Miss Price that her morning routine, until compromised by company, had included a piercing scream. The two then share a bonding, tonsil-ripping outburst.
The change in the librarian’s personality, however, seems abrupt, not to mention a little pat. One minute she’s sniffing disapprovingly at romance novels; the next she’s malapropishly declaring them as addictive as " crap cocaine. " And the conflicted relationship of Eleanor and her demanding mother, whose death leaves the librarian both liberated and devastated, needs more flesh on it.
" Love, " the still-prim Eleanor concludes as her new friend prepares to return to her San Diego romance, seems " a very practical thing to do. " For her own part, she will remember Miss Price in the highly personal way one does a character in a book. It’s a sweet conclusion to a quirky confection that’s a little low on the loopiness and edge that have been Kuntz’s trademarks.
