by Melissa Wiley | April 19, 2016 | 3/4 stars
Getting lost in the wilderness in order to find yourself is as old a story as storytelling itself, and New Colony’s production of Even Longer and Farther Away has taken up residence at the Den Theatre to deliver yet another iteration. Fortunately this one is well worth the price of admission, not because of its original spin but because it’s telling us a tale we already know and love all over again.
For a play centering on a son grieving his dead father, there’s also a lot of joy to be had during these two hours. Director Thrisa Hodits forces those of us in the audience to inhabit rather than simply observe this stretch of Appalachia. Trudy (Deanna Reed-Foster) ushers you to a table with a kerosene lamp at its center as soon as you enter the theater. You’re warmly invited, in other words, by this play’s anchor to spend the evening in a motel you’ll find on no map and where no one arrives by accident. Rest assured you get used to literally rubbing elbows with the actors.
The seating’s configuration effectively puts both everyone and no one at stage center, making the yarns Trudy tells from her rocking chair feel as relevant to you as to any character. Like it or not, you become one of the setting’s fixtures, putting you at greater odds for vicarious redemption in the process. In her mystical parlance, Trudy soon imparts her sense that the mountain itself has brought you here. Half an hour or so in, I almost forgot about my ticket and believed her.
The mountain functions as shorthand for both a wider spiritual perspective as well as Appalachia itself, and the scenic nods to the culture—the hickory furniture draped in quilts, the carvings adorning the fireplace, and above all the mountain music—provide a pleasure all the cozier for the Wicker Park static you’ve left behind. Eliot (Pat Coakley), the play’s protagonist, predictably wants none of this serenity, however. He alone seems immune to the atmospherics charming the audience, a fact that only reinforces the sense he’ll enjoy them as much as we do once the play is finished. This is another way of saying a predictable plot arc is at work here, one that ultimately serves as this play’s strength, not its weakness.
