E-Mail This Article to a Friend Floating anxiety John Kuntz’s beckoning Jasper Lake BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Jasper Lake By John Kuntz. Directed by Douglas Mercer. Set by Eric Allgeier. Costumes by Carlos Romay. Lighting by Eric Larson. Sound by Haddon Kime. With Sarah Abrams, Eric Gould, Amanda Sywak, Edouard Tournier, Sharon Mason, Bill Molnar, Jennifer Burke, and William Gardiner. At Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through October 17.

Like the rest of us, John Kuntz has a two-sided brain. But his cranial duplex is laid out a little differently. On one side live the eccentric, goofball inventions — grandmotherly ex-managers of Smurfs on Ice, guys who have to sit on sugar — that have cracked us up in the playwright-performer’s four solo shows. Across the way, however, is a genuine, even poetic penchant to disturb, most tautly flexed in the play he wrote for himself and Paula Plum, Sing Me to Sleep. Jasper Lake is Kuntz’s most ambitious ensemble drama, a haunting and fragmented chamber piece for eight actors, and the best thing he’s penned since Sing Me to Sleep. But too many extraneous laughs from next door are allowed in.

As we’re told in a choral prologue, the play is named for a beautiful and seemingly indifferent body of water on which the affluent shoreside community of the same name sits, harboring, like the lake, secrets and echoes of secrets. The myth of Narcissus and Echo doesn’t slide in until late in the 95-minute work, fixing it, in part, as a study of upper-middle-class self-absorption beneath which desperation grows like algae. Echoes, though, come in early and often. At first, as the play’s characters share the opening narration, which is backed by soft piano, water noise, and shadows of groans, I thought, "Oh no, Jasper Lake Anthology; who can pull this off?" But the echoes prove accumulatively powerful and disturbing, not only providing trickle-down connections between almost placid acts of violence but setting up the play’s principal relationship between two troubled, and troublingly callous, young women, one of whom is dead.

The central set piece is an old bathtub that stands in for the center of the lake, a vortex "where voices collect like fish in a whirlpool," as well as the scene of a previous suicide. Suicide is a motif in the play, a balm that may tempt even the family cat of one of the play’s two households. Said family comprises the near-somnambulistic, migraine-afflicted Nora; her husband, Mitchell, who is sexually abusing his stepdaughter; and his provocative but hurting 17-year-old victim, Jennifer, who is in psychic communication with the young woman who killed herself in the tub and looks on à la The Lovely Bones. Except that she’s not in her own little heaven but hovering overhead in a car with a Britney-Spears-roadie-manqué she picked up at a gas station. Affecting a collision between this clan and the new folks next door is maniacally friendly Midwesterner Deb, who has just moved to the enchanted spot with workaholic clothes-hanger-manufacturing spouse Jerry and their teenage son, Caleb, who has been in "trouble" though a jury let him go.

Pop culture of a certain age is built into Kuntz’s brainpan, and here we get a spattering of family sit-com, popular song, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Touched by an Angel, John Hughes’s œuvre, and various chronicles of the creepy. Parts of it are over the top and cut into the dominant mood of sadness and dread. But those tones do prevail, even over jokes about washboard abs that look as if they were carrying a couple of loads of laundry and a sublimely loony neighborhood cocktail party in which the benumbed Nora stares into a cheese plate seemingly on the brink of paralysis and the passive Jerry confides to a corner an S&M daydream involving a naked dentist and an orgasm of hummingbirds.

With regard to the wacky humor that pervades Jasper Lake: no one is asking Kuntz to become David Lynch. The combination of sit-com and Psycho is what makes his sensibility unique. But some of the jokes in Jasper Lake seem like archly Kuntzian flotsam and jetsam drawing us out of a refreshingly un-spelled-out tale of old sorrows translated into dysfunction deeper than words. We’re told that jasper is a kind of quartz found at the bottom of rivers and lakes that’s a symbol of healing. A chunk gets ritually passed on here, but in Jasper Lake, the only way to heal seems to be to put oneself beyond healing.

New York–based director Douglas Mercer helms an at once formal and surreal staging that, abetted by Haddon Kime’s sound design, maintains the uncomfortable feeling of the play even when Jennifer Burke’s Deb is behaving like a mad cheerleader in a morgue. Although funny, this cartoon bull with a china collection is overwritten and overplayed given the enigmatic oddness of what else is in the water. Because Jasper Lake has been entered in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (Kuntz is a master’s candidate in BU’s graduate playwriting program as well as a Huntington Playwriting Fellow), the piece had to be cast with non-Equity actors. They acquit themselves well, especially BU senior acting major Amanda Sywak, who as Jennifer mixes ache into pert arbitrariness as surely as her precocious character might concoct a cocktail.