Sing the Body Electric by Michael Hollinger, directed by Deborah Block. Theater Exile, Philadelphia, May 2018.
Michael Hollinger’s newest play, Sing the Body Electric, presents two high school students in a fascinating situation. As beautifully acted by theatrical newcomers Kishia Nixon and Trevor William Fayle, they distrust each other, challenge each other, and eventually move into a relationship that seems convincing and satisfying. Nixon in particular impresses us as a fresh stage personality.
Fayle’s character was scarred physically and emotionally when he was struck by lightning on a golf course and his female companion was killed. Thus the title of the play has literal truth. Still, it is misleading.
Hollinger’s creation has no connection with the famous Ray Bradbury short story of the same name that was dramatized on the Twilight Zone TV series. Its subject was a robot that becomes part of a family. At least one audience member said that he came specifically to see a staging of the Bradbury story. (“A fable? Most assuredly. But who’s to say at some distant moment there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose stock in trade is love. Fable, sure, but who’s to say?”)
Nor does the play have much connection with Walt Whitman’s similarly-named poem.
Hollinger poetically frames his characters with allusions to light and dark, to electricity and atomic elements. The dialogue of his young characters is believable while simultaneously evoking supernatural forces and spirituality. He then creates a parallel plot involving the father of the boy and mother of the girl. And even though these parts are well-acted by Anthony Lawton and Kimberly S. Fairbanks, their behaviors are implausible. In a surprising lapse from the playwright’s normal superb plotting, they seem manipulated.
He’s a former science teacher whose wife walked out on him three years previously and won’t even speak to him on the phone, yet he won’t let go. He still keeps her shoes and other personal belongings, and keeps leaving phone messages. Lawton is a sympathetic actor, but it’s hard to feel empathy with this guy. The girl’s mother is separated or divorced as well, and working as a mental health counselor where one of her clients is the injured young man.
Lawton agrees to see her professionally and, at their first session, she tells him it’s time for him to let go. He immediately agrees — and asks his therapist for a date!
You needn’t have attended a course in social work to know that it’s forbidden for a therapist to have a romantic relationship with a client. (Mainly because the therapist would be taking advantage of an uneven relationship.) But when Lawton’s character says he’s attracted to her, she invites him to dinner. She doesn’t hesitate, she doesn’t question the propriety. If she had done so, and then reluctantly made the date, I might have accepted the premise. But as this situation unfolds here, I can’t buy it.
Then too, in later scenes of this one-act play, each of those adults reveal terrible secrets about their pasts which seem contrived. It’s such a shame, because Hollinger, as always, has written naturalistic dialogue and Deborah Block has directed with striking criss-crossing of actions at opposite portions of the stage.
Still and all, with substantial editing, Sing the Body Electric could turn into one of Hollinger’s most gripping creations.
Mary Lee Bednarek plays a peripheral character with no great import, while Masha Tsimring displays unusual lighting effects that reinforce the theme.