Review: GOOD DAY, Great Play

Westmont College presents Good Day by Westmont alumna Diana Lynn Small. Directed by Mitchell Thomas, Good Day is a well-crafted production that delivers precise characterization of confused, chaotic people. The play is about Anna (Elena White), a young woman disabled by the overwhelming emotions of fresh mourning. Simultaneously resilient and vulnerable, Anna has a magnetic quality despite the repellency of her emotionally shuttered personality.

Anna returns to her childhood home when her long-ailing father passes away. Along with the routine baggage of a young woman angry at the father she couldn't say goodbye to and the mother who ignores her, Anna also copes with the emotional shutdown that occurs in moments of extreme duress. She sits inert on the front lawn, unable to enter the house where her father's body awaits pick-up from the funeral parlor. Good Day is like the thriving hive of wasps in in the tree above the front porch: it illustrates the buzzing turmoil that occurs with severe emotional trauma, when the mental filter that mixes concurrent thoughts and impulses into singular thoughts is deactivated, and emotions are too vast to experience fully.

Other characters serve as proxies for Anna's repressed and redirected emotions. Isaac (Connor Bush) is an exterminator hired to handle the wasp situation. Desperate for distraction, Anna teases Isaac with behavior that alternates between that of a petulant child and a damaged seductress. Isaac, awaiting a phone call with the results of a melanoma test, is in his own emotional limbo. In preemptive mourning for potential bad news, Isaac is drawn by Anna's fatalistic charisma. Chris (Merckx Dascomb), the awkward delivery boy, lives in the naïve hope that Anna's father will recover. Toby (Nina Fox), the precocious girl scout, is sensible and confident, and displays a measured awareness of the inevitability of death-a sense of control that Anna has temporarily lost.

With considered performances and directing that indicates the subtle heaviness of time passing slowly, Good Day balances humor and poignancy. The set, an outline of a house in plywood, suggests Anna's tenuous connection with home; the white front door, a barrier between her and her father's body, is a physical manifestation of her inability to accept his death. Isaac and Anna try to find distraction in each other, but reality is a phone call and a closed door away. When funeral attendants take the body, the open front door signals sudden availability for character transformation-a portal into the next phase. Anna can finally take tenuous steps out of her buzzing purgatory and begin to accept her new reality. She disappears into the house and Isaac walks offstage, his ringing phone a harbinger of his own new reality. A stunning exploration of mourning, Good Day highlights the struggle to overcome emotional paralysis and move toward resolution.

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