Review: ACT's THINGS YOU CAN DO Needs Better Answers

The world is in a particularly tumultuous time right now, so having a play with a call to action feels especially necessary. Live Girls Theatre!'s production of "Things You Can Do" did just the opposite, restating how global atrocities are too daunting and too vast to help mend on a local scale, and with your personal life containing its own problems to address, the best thing to do is accept the atrocities and hope for the best.

We are introduced to a visibly upset Stevie (Hannah Ruwe), a young grad student who has just been pulled from a frozen lake after falling through the ice. She has returned home from graduate school for undisclosed reasons, only to find that the home she left is not as comforting as perhaps she had hoped. Her angsty younger sister Bella (Clara Hayes) takes every opportunity to either spit venom at the perfect older sister who abandoned the family, or make feeble attempts to bond with her at inappropriate moments. Stevie and Bella's mother Clara (Alyson Bedford) is rightfully flustered when she discovers from someone else that not only is her eldest daughter in town, she almost drowned in a frozen lake.

Stevie studies the cryosphere and understands the scope of global warming's impact. She has the wet clothes to prove it. But the play is not about global warming, really. "Things You Can Do" is about how daunting the thought of dealing with global warming can be, especially when you're wrapped up in your own problems.

The issues at hand are very modern and unfortunately common, as Clara's children deal with sexual harassment, abandonment issues and overmedicating. "Things You Can Do" examines how it feels to be overwhelmed with global issues that seem impossible to fix, but the problem is how the play handled the familial problems.

First of all, the youngest daughter Bella is a character we have seen before: a rebellious, angry, Barbie doll-shooting teen that never stops acting aggressively annoyed throughout the play. This made it difficult to take her very upsetting circumstances seriously, since her behavior was so predictable. Stevie's character is more unique, but represents the perfect, older sister who, according to Bella, abandoned the family to go to graduate school. Stevie's character also gets discredited when this very intelligent young scientist seems to fall for smarmy Fletcher's very lame seduction tactics.

Characters like Fletcher (Jonah Martin) are one of my biggest theater buggaboos. If you're going to put a skeevy, patronizing man-child into your narrative, they better be imperative. Fletcher truly served no purpose other than to repeatedly pester Stevie to her breaking point, finally agreeing to go on a date with Fletcher because, as he says, she owes him one (because he did not let her drown). And I will warn you that during quite touching moments between other characters, Fletcher will inexplicably show up to play guitar in the background.

Clara and Fiona, Clara's paramedic friend, on the other hand, were flushed out, complicated, and showcased a large spectrum of emotion. It's strange to me that the younger characters weren't given the same emotional range.

I do not want to understate how much I enjoyed Alyson Bedford's portrayal of Clara. She did a phenomenal job of giving Clara that unique cocktail of warmth and anxiousness that felt very maternal. Maria Glanz's portrayal of Fiona exemplified subtlety, incorporating micro-moments of sweetness behind Fiona's tough exterior.

This play was really perplexing. After watching all of the characters have their fears confirmed that they should not bother trying and just accept their fate, that very passivity seemed to be rewarded with an ending that knit together way too perfectly, deux ex machina style. It's still unclear to me about what exactly is the take-away, whether we should learn from the mistakes of the characters and fight back, or give in, assuming that everything will work out. Alyson Bedford's Clara and Maria Glanz's Fiona are reason enough to go see it, but in general, "Things You Can Do" felt too defeatist for my taste. I give "Things You Can Do" an underwhelmed 2/5. Some issues are just not meant to take lightly, especially now.

"Things You Can Do" performs at ACT through July 31, 2016. For tickets and information, visit them online at www.acttheatre.org.

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