'Bloodlines' At Fells Point Corner Theatre.

Daniel Baum’s new play, Bloodlines, which kicks off the 2009 Baltimore Playwrights Festival, asks the question: What makes a person Jewish? Is it being raised in the Jewish faith? Is it being born to Jewish parents? How if one parent is Jewish and the other is not? And what happens if members of the same family disagree on the answers?

Bloodlines explores these questions in the person of Sarah, who brings her new boyfriend home from college to celebrate Passover with her mother and grandparents. Sarah’s father has recently died, and as the family struggles to navigate its way through the ceremony in his absence, long-suppressed tensions begin to surface. Gradually, inevitably, Sarah’s idealized vision of her family is tarnished … perhaps beyond repair.

Unfortunately, the questions that Baum raises are finally more intriguing than the play itself. Baum uses a series of monologues to frontload much of the backstory—at least one per character, all coming roughly within the first five or ten minutes. Co-directors Marianne Angelella and Peter Shipley find no better way of staging these speeches than to have each actor extricate himself awkwardly from the Seder table and hurry downstage as the lights dim to indicate “internal monologue.” One or two such moments might have been effective; five or six coming in succession, however, merely keep the play from building any momentum from its initial steps.

When the script allows the characters to interact and especially to argue, the blood starts pumping and the drama comes to life. This is particularly evident as the first act builds toward intermission and the arguments over what several characters call “the politics” of Judaism grow increasingly heated. In their haste to prove their points, Sarah, her family members, and—most unexpectedly—her boyfriend let secrets slip and reveal aspects of their personality that have long been papered over by politeness.

The actors are at their best during these moments. As Sarah, Lucia Diaz-French lets her face and body be open books—we see every flicker of anger and smoldering frustration, but also every grateful smile and warmhearted gesture. Sarah is still young and struggling to make sense of herself—in the fierce stubbornness of her convictions, she is well matched by her grandmother, Miriam, and Diaz-French shows us glimmers of the young woman Miriam must have been.

Dianne Hood makes Miriam just formidable enough—she is obviously devoted to her granddaughter and husband, Herb (her daughter-in-law is another story), but there are certain beliefs (Sarah—and Baum too, I suspect—would call them prejudices) that not even love can transcend entirely. Miriam proves willing to sacrifice love for principle, but despite her brave words, in the end we see the heartache and fear in Hood’s eyes.

Janise Whelan plays Sarah’s mother, Lila, as Miriam’s opposite—the many sacrifices she has made throughout her life and her marriage have been for love rather than in spite of it. Whelan suggests that Lila does not resent her sacrifices so much as the sense that for Miriam (and at times, it seems, Sarah) no sacrifice would have been enough.

In contrast, Mike L. Barrett plays Herb as a man totally free of resentment. This is consistent with the script, but I wonder whether the play would have been richer had Baum explored that side of Herb a bit—a lifetime of acting as family peacemaker (with only moderate success) must wear on a man, but there is little sense in the play that Herb regrets anything other than no longer having a garden (a curious tidbit from one of those early soliloquies that, as far as I can recall, is never mentioned again).

A more significant oversight concerns the character of Sarah’s boyfriend, Josh, who—as played by Chris Krysztofiak—is conscientious, funny, and very charming … until he learns something during the Seder about Sarah that completely changes his opinion of her. Of the play’s several twists, I found this the most interesting, and so Josh’s total absence from Act II was a tremendous letdown—even if Baum isn’t as interested in their relationship as I was, Sarah and Josh surely deserve at least one more scene together, whether they find closure there or not. The program does not help matters by failing to note that Krysztofiak plays two roles—in addition to Josh, he appears in the second act as Miriam’s nurse, and so when he made his first entrance in scrubs, it took me a moment to shake my confusion and realize I was watching a new character.

Indeed, on the whole, I found the second act anticlimactic. Compared to the vigorous debates of Act I, the drama that concludes the play feels contrived. We learn that Miriam is dying of an unnamed illness, and that her only hope of survival is a blood transfusion. Because she has an extremely rare blood type, the chances of finding a matching donor are slim, but for some reason, nobody—including, apparently, Miriam’s doctors—thinks to test Sarah.

Herb instead writes Lila a note asking her to be tested, though Lila is not a blood relative, so it seems to me he’d have just as much luck asking a stranger—better luck, really, since it is no secret how Lila and Miriam feel about each other. Of course, Sarah discovers the note, setting up the play’s climax, in which blood as theme and blood as plot device come together in a not-very-satisfying way.

Part of the problem may have been that in the crucial final scenes, several of the actors seemed to be struggling with their lines. This can be fixed, of course, and yet I think I would still have trouble accepting that Miriam’s illness could have progressed as far as it did before someone thought to test her only living blood relative. By delaying this moment until late in Act II, Baum makes possible an emotionally-charged confrontation in Miriam’s hospital room that, for all its commotion, failed to engage me as fully as in earlier scenes, when characters argued with each other, rather than merely shouted.

Bloodlines is presented by Fells Point Corner Theatre as part of the 2009 Baltimore Playwrights Festival. It is playing at Fells Point Corner Theatre, located at 251 South Ann Street in Baltimore, on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 PM, and Sundays at 7 PM, through July 5^th. There is no performance on July 4^th. Tickets are $10-$17. For more information, visit http://fpct.org/ or call 410-276-7837.

 

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