By Bob Abelman | April 4, 2019
Chelsea Marcantel’s romantic comedy “Tiny Houses,” which is getting its world premiere via the Cleveland Play House at Playhouse Square, opens with a flatbed trailer on a patch of browning turf in the center of the Outcalt Theatre’s performance space.
On this spot, over the course of the next 100 minutes, a 200-square-foot prefab “tiny house” — whose physical minimalism is a 21st-century expression of a simpler, less-materialistic lifestyle made popular by Henry David Thoreau during the 19th century — will be painstakingly constructed. All the while, the relationships of the 20-somethings building it will undergo dramatic deconstruction and a radical reassembly involving a combination of different but better-fitting pieces and parts.
The builders include Cath (Kate Eastman), a New Yorker who has quit her lucrative, fast-paced job in finance to move to Northern Oregon with her new boyfriend, Bohdi (Peter Hargrave), a clueless but committed and likable fellow who embraces the philosophy that “the world gets big when you get small” and firmly believes — for now, anyway — that minimalism is the next stage of human evolution.
They are soon joined by the flamboyantly lovable Ollie (Michael Doherty), who sells possessed dolls on the internet and on whose land they are squatting; Bohdi’s doe-eyed and delightfully vacant ex-girlfriend, Jevne (Nandita Shenoy), who lives in the area and operates a podcast that functions best as a cure for insomnia; and Jeremiah (James Holloway), a serious-minded construction consultant who is brought in to help with the house-building project once things fall behind schedule.
Each of the idiosyncratic characters in this play is on a quest to find a place to call home and someone to share it with, which makes them immediately endearing and their journey absolutely engaging. And, much like Thoreau, they find meaning in stripping away the unessential, though nothing as transcendental or philosophical.
But much of their dialogue consists of the kinds of self-disclosing internal monologues that fill romance novels and, when spoken, can’t help but sound as if that novel was being read aloud. As such, there is an artificiality in the characters’ exchanges that keeps “Tiny Houses” from being a great play, supporting the adage that good things come in small packages.
What is particularly good about this play and this production of it is the very clever comedy that is peppered throughout the script, the emotional tension generated by fine performances and the creative direction by Laura Kepley that manages to make the actual building of the tiny house interesting but not the most interesting thing on the stage. The house was designed by Arnulfo Maldonado and constructed with the assistance of Cayla DeStefano, Andy Rowland and Kaleb Yandrick.
“Tiny Houses” received its first public reading at the Chautauqua Theatre Company’s New Play Workshop in 2016 and was further developed in CPH’s New Ground Theatre Festival in 2018, where the playwright received the coveted Roe Green Award. This production is co-produced with the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, where it will be performed from May to June.
