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Long night’s journey
TV flickers in The Moonlight Room
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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The Moonlight Room is a top-quality television movie in the shape of a play. What distinguishes the work, with its at-risk-youth-at-odds-with-parents plot and hospital-waiting-room setting, is the uncanny ear that 33-year-old Princeton grad and first-time playwright Tristine Skyler presses to the way kids — in particular, Manhattan-born and –bred kids — think and talk. Into the mouths of bright, calculatedly scruffy teens Sal and Josh — who have brought friend Lightfield to the emergency room in the middle of the night following too big a helping of the street drug Special K — Skyler puts such a right-sounding mix of sarcasm, slang, erudition, and desperation that you want to overlook the play’s formulaic situation and social-work agenda, its less well-drawn adult characters, and some structural awkwardness. But is this really one of the best plays of 2003, as deemed by the New York Times following its Off Broadway success? Well, Josh has an amusing riff about a fat aunt who buys bulk-quantity products at the Price Club; next to a two-foot jar of spaghetti sauce, he opines, she doesn’t loom so large. I’d say that The Moonlight Room must have been up against the dramaturgical equivalent of some pretty small vats of Ragú. Still, it’s easy to see how audiences, particularly those of post–September 11 Manhattan, might warm to The Moonlight Room, with its image of NYC as "the city of the lost and the missing" and its young, lost soul in a Rainbow Brite T-shirt declaring life one long recovery from exiting the Eden of the womb ("free food, free housing"). On that level, the play is like ER caught in a sandwich between Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth and Beckett. But on the main floor, it’s more mundane: a transient, suspended set-up wherein revved-up, disaffected children careering dangerously toward adulthood confront their mortality while their parents confront their "culpability." From the bar rooms of O’Neill to the Kansas eatery of Bus Stop, way stations abound in American drama. And Skyler, who co-wrote the bus-terminal-waiting-room-set indie film Getting To Know You, seems determined to add the impersonal ante-chamber — here a cold space bordered by orange plastic seating and dominated by two looming, garish, fully operational pop machines — to the list. The play, which is being given a charged yet aptly bereft turn under the direction of Paul Melone, begins with Tracee Chimo’s tough pixie of a Sal alone on stage but for the soda oases and a plastic plant, nervously hooking the heels of her clunky boots. With the shambling entry of Ian Michaels’s Josh, who had gone in search of cigarettes, comes nervous, trivial conversation that masks the tension of the two chums waiting to see whether their drugged friend will survive and, in Sal’s case, do so before she misses her 3 a.m. curfew. (It may be fine for Josh to stay out all night, she says, but "I come home tomorrow and I’m on the back of a milk carton.") Much of this dialogue is funny and incisive, holding a mirror up to urban teen communication the way Mamet does to the profane, inarticulate pontification of macho males. Picking linguistic nits, the two stressed friends argue whether pot is a drug or a "pastime." Josh, who probably bears some entrepreneurial responsibility for Lightfield’s crisis, insists he does not sell drugs but merely delivers them. And Chimo, a Salem State grad, and Michaels, only recently sprung from Lexington High, are convincing teens, flexing their worldly wits, resorting to passive-aggressive competition, or spewing litanies of parental resentment to deflect attention from how scared and barely hanging on they are. Chimo aces Sal’s mix of punk sophistication and angry mortification, not to mention that "Excuse me?" attitude directed at all things adult; then she has a spontaneous little laugh that somehow makes the belittlement charming. And bed-headed Michaels, pacing cockily in his too-long pants while betraying his agitation in bold, jerky gestures, is a teen train in clear peril of derailment. The play is written in tight scenes separated by blackouts. And once the adults — Sal’s divorced and depressed mother; Lightfoot’s angry, widowed father; Josh’s nerdy medical-resident stepbrother — start showing up, things are not as sharp. (The less said about the overused pay phone, the better.) David Krinitt is amusing as the humorless, jargon-spouting resident, and David Jackson brings danger and dignity to the outraged dad bewildered by what he didn’t know. As Sal’s embittered mom, her daughter’s rock inexcusably crumbled, Cheryl McMahon dodges stereotype in a role that could have been better developed: a woman who so looked forward to a suburban life that when it doesn’t happen, she goes through the Larchmont motions in midtown. But what shines in The Moonlight Room are the kids.
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