On the Shore of the Wide World

Kris Vire

Published: October 5, 2008

SHORE THING Deneen and Lucy Carapetyan try to make sense of things.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

Simon Stephens’s warm drama glimpses the inner lives of three generations of a suburban Manchester family. Eighteen-year-old Alex (Brian Deneen) brings home a girlfriend for the first time, jarring his parents Peter (Paul D’Addario) and Alice (Elise Kauzlaric) into wistful thoughts of their own missed opportunities. Fifteen-year-old troublemaker Christopher (Josh Schecter) gets a disillusioning look at his beloved grandfather’s dark side. And an unforeseen tragedy causes everyone to question their familial ties.

Played out episodically over the course of a year or so, Wide World is novellike in Stephens’s remarkable ability to reveal his characters’ innermost workings; it feels at times like reading Michael Cunningham without the narration. That’s helped by the remarkably precise and empathetic work of Berry and his well-matched cast (Deneen and Kauzlaric are particularly dazzling).

It’s not a perfect play; though some excursions, like building-restorer Peter’s recurring visits to a pregnant client (comic gem Karyn Morris), sharpen the playwright’s themes, several scenes are unnecessary, and it’s nearly an hour before the play starts to take dramatic shape. Stephens suggests finally that each generation of parents passes to its children, or tries to, the best of what it has to offer. This kind of evolutionary theory of parenthood and society meshes with the source of Stephens’s title, the Keats sonnet “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.” We may fear aging and being forgotten, as Keats and these characters do, but our influence survives us.

http://www.timeoutchicago.com/arts-culture/theater/59437/on-the-shore-of-the-wide-world