If you’ve ever felt like your family was a shoo-in for the dysfunction grand prix, Ninth and Joanie ought to set your mind at ease. After spending a few hours with Brett C. Leonard’s traumatized, tramautizing brood, your clan will look like the Cleavers.
Not that there’s anything easy about this slow, brutal drama, a world premiere from Labyrinth Theater Company. Eons seem to go by before we even hear words pass between two men in a darkened living room: the older (Bob Glaudini) brooding with a cigar, the younger (Kevin Corrigan) fidgety and covered in bruises. Something horrible happened to them a few days before, which is related to the terrible thing that happened 15 years before that—and the even worse thing that is about to happen.
Leonard gives the audience very little establishing information, so I’ll take his lead and spare you the details. The content of the story is almost secondary to the mood anyway—one that is vividly, ponderously created by Mark Wing-Davey. Silences seem to go on for days, and when things do happen, they happen fast, and they hurt.
Labyrinth’s fully committed performers speak entire histories with their body language, and Leonard’s borderline-melodramatic dialogue feels lesser by comparison. Wing-Davey’s production is a study in contrasts: silence and screaming, shadow and light, stillness and chaotic movement. There are no in-betweens, and that makes the play hard to watch; but it’ll definitely leave a mark.—Jenna Scherer