BWW Reviews: In Tandem's World Premiere Travels Neil Haven's Road of Grief

Road trips take their travelers into and through unknown territory. In Tandem Theatre's current World Premiere production Come Back presents an unusual road trip, figuratively and metaphorically penned by Milwaukee playwright Neil Haven. Haven's comic yet often poignant journey through love, loss and death features two women, Sky and Erin, in a battle of wits just after Erin has died from a rare blood cancer.

In Erin's detailed and rather unique will, Sky has been given the task to fulfill the wishes of her friend and discover the unknown territory of finding a fitting resting place for Erin's ashes on a road trip Erin had mapped out for her. The close duo developed into a soul linking partnership when Erin became a paraplegic after a glider accident, and then developed terminal cancer. In the interim, Erin decides Neil Young style, "Better flame out than merely fade away."

When Erin dies before her time at age 38, life unravels for Sky who tenderly cared for her, now missing the closeness and the life they shared, including Aretha Franklin songs, rhythm and blues, Malbec wine, and meeting under a tree each evening. Once pleasures to Sky, these memories haunt her day and night. Haven strings together cheeky yet funny sketches on Sky's 30 day cross county road trip, aka delivered on stage through Rowan and Martin's 1970 "Laugh-In" style, for the audience to ponder.

Half way along on the road in Texas, Erin's mother Val joins Sky, and the two traverse highways and cross words while encountering grief's tortuous territory. By humanizing Val, Carrie Hitchcock takes the edge off a sharply drawn mother disapproving of her daughter's final wishes, and validates a parent's grief of losing a child first, an unnatural order to life.

Kudos to an American Players Theatre actor Sara Zientek' for her Sky who captures humor contrasted against the character's struggle of her friend's death with charming sincerity. With Zientek equally comfortable on stage delivering anxiety, compassion or wit, the audience absorbs Sky's loss. Playing Erin's free spirited persona, Tiffany Vance appears intermittently throughout the performance when she reminisces Sky's friendship, while T. Stacy Hicks complements Sky in the role of Mel-another close friend who also grieves for Erin.

In ensemble appearances peering out from the opening and closing doors of Sky's journeys, Karen Estrada and TIm Higgins allow Haven's quirky personalities to entertain while asking thought provoking questions on how does someone memorialize a loved one? The seamless transitions move quickly along on an abstract, naturally colored stage design by Rick Rassmussen giving room for the audience's imagination to enjoy the story.

Haven's unconventional journey, if improbable at times, reaches into what Americans often avoid confronting--death, how to die, who will be there, where this happens, what wishes of loved ones are honored, which ones can be ignored, and why the platitudes people offer seem ingenuous when in the throes of grief. While grappling with own fate on one particular evening, Erin mentions to Sky, "To conquer your fear of death, perhaps you need to exhaust yourself of life."

In the production's tribute to the friendship between Sky and Erin, Haven's script demonstrates a loving, sacrificial partnership based on reaching into the depths of the heart, rarely written about, and one purely about how two souls can love without sexual romance. Mel's role, a male friend introduced into the trio, again without romantic undertones, adds another dimension to the emotional trip, that also comments on how people assume life will go on forever, and there will be extended future time for loved ones to be together, or to patch any relationship potholes. That premise proves to be life's lie, for no one knows their days numbered on earth, when the chance to share time loved ones will be closed forever.

At a Thursday night after performance talkback, Director Jane Flieller mentioned she hoped "the trip suggested a person comes out stronger after traveling the road of grief." A road necessary to "come back" to often as more time passes because in the script Mel explains, "You never get over it [losing a loved on], you merely get used to it."

Another woman listening to the talk back thanked the cast while wiping tears from her eyes. Her mother had recently died and the play, seen through Sky's journey, helped her remember her mother again by quelling her own grief with smiles and laughter.

What else can an audience ask of theater? That an evening performance, an exciting new production never before experienced, carry them on a journey into unfamiliar or unexamined territory exposing genuine emotions. On a day when the unwelcome news of a friend' diagnosis with a treatable cancer was deliverd by phone, the performance revisited this uneasy question of how much time would be left to enjoy this woman's free spirited aura. Applaud In Tandem for producing, taking that road less traveled while rewarding their audiences with a view of Haven's imaginative ride.

In Tandem Theatre presents the World Premiere of Come Back by Neil Haven at the Tenth Street Theatre through March 22. For information or tickets, please visit 414.271.1371 or www.intandemtheatre.org.

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