BWW Reviews: MICHAEL AND EDIE Celebrates Area Premiere at Villanova Theatre

For those of a certain age and artistic bent, "Michael and Edie" may immediately conjure the thought of Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick and her husband Michael Post, but that's fortuitously not the premise of Rachel Bonds' MICHAEL AND EDIE, in its area premiere at Villanova (Vasey) Theatre.

Directed by multiple Barrymore winner James Ijames, the 2010 New York Times Critics' Pick is the very small story of two bookstore employees who never click with a relationship. Or at least that's the very superficial description of a show that's far deeper than that. Ijames takes Bonds' tale of loves, losses, and change and shapes it into a wintry fantasy that chills as it warms.

Mitchell Bloom plays Michael, a new employee at a used book store in the city, who's alternately madly in love with the other employee, Edie (Sophia Barrett) and on the phone - a tin can with a string - to his sister Sarah (Sarah Ochocki) back home, dealing with her clinical depression. Sarah has moved into the bathroom and sleeps in the bathtub, just as Michael all but lives in the bookstore; they each have their way of hiding from the world. Sarah goes home at night to a young man named Ben (Kyle Fennie) whose identity isn't immediately clear.

Though they share a love of books - including building fantasy houses with them - and odd movies, Michael and Edie don't click with each other, but they do become friends. Michael, who bounds into the play like an eager wet puppy, takes on many of Sarah's qualities, including a reticence about life; Edie absorbs some of Michael's willingness to look beyond the window curtains and to gingerly set foot outside her circumscribed life.

Michael dictates love letters to Edie to the universe. Edie wheels around on book carts picking out the authors and titles of the store's books alphabetically from Aesop to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Their boss, John, likes to pop in mysteriously and disappear even more mysteriously, delegating work with reckless abandon and showing no actual interest in books other than their being shelved. He's a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but he's as funny as a walk-on comic role gets. Two young people in their first jobs are leading interesting, though everyday, lives, while their employer lives out something that intrigues them.

It's at the end of the first act, when Sarah starts to come out of her shell, that Ben disappears. Then he winds up, mystically, in Sarah's bathroom. The depressed Sarah and the discovered-to-be-dead Ben strike up the relationship that Michael and Edie don't have. While the bookstore is Michael's and Edie's womb, with bookstore owner and pathetic guardian John (John Baxter), the comic relief, looking over them, Sarah's bathroom is a limbo where a dead man not ready to move on and a young woman not ready to live can hide in their own way.

As Ben realizes his sister no longer needs his presence, and as Michael and Edie both begin to adjust to their bookstore world and each other, Ben leaves limbo to go into the universe, when Sarah asks him to take her with him. Michael is as much withdrawn by Sarah's death as Edie had been by her brother's presence in her life and apartment.

Although the ending may be reflective of loss, it's still comforting and, ultimately, satisfying. It's a small, quiet play, and Ijames wisely allows the silences to do their own talking. There's no effort to cover the silences, to use stage business to obscure them or to introduce sounds that distract from them. Bloom and Barrett are very fine actors and are able to use the silences to great effect. But it's the scene between Ben and Sarah in the bathroom when Ben decides to leave that may convey the most feeling to many. Be prepared to confront the losses in your own life when you face this show.

The set, a two-level with the bathroom upstairs (which only enhances the symbolism) and the bookstore downstairs, and with props that do multiple duties - including a ladder that's also Michael's bed, a coat that's also a blanket, and the infamous and charming, childhood-evoking, tin-can phone, is striking, and one badly wants to browse the bookstore that's been created for this show. It's a lovely piece of work by Meghan Jones and crew. It's as creative as the one for RED HERRINGS.

Kudos to Ijames and company for a finely nuanced production of a small - and, at ninety minutes, short - but deeply emotional show that's one of Bonds' best. This is what an area premiere should be, at its best.

At Villanova Theatre through the 22nd. For tickets and information, call 610-519-7474. Up next is a production of Brecht's THE THREEPENNY OPERA directed by Valerie Joyce.

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