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“Dialogue,” novelist Elizabeth Bowen once said, “is what characters do to each other.” In Will Eno plays, most of what happens is what is said, and how. And yet there is always a specific context. That factor — where talk takes place — is perhaps more important in The Plot, in its deftly witty world premiere at Yale Repertory Theatre, than in Eno’s other plays.
The Plot, directed by Oliver Butler, runs through Dec. 21.
Eno’s debut at the Rep was the excellent The Realistic Joneses in 2012, which won the 2014 Drama Desk Award for its Broadway version. His plays’ comedy isn’t showy or silly. It has the texture of off-hand wit and of things being funny because they sound that way. In The Plot, the characters overhear themselves at times and are amused — and amusing — in registering how what is said strikes them.
To the plot of an older and a younger couple meeting — which sustained The Realistic Joneses and which The Plot replays with a difference — is added a fifth character, Grey (Jimonn Cole), a kind of onlooker/commentator, and, most important, “a plot,” or several. The literal plot is the kind found in a cemetery, which an old guy named Righty (Harris Yulin) has bought as his last resting place to the consternation of his wife Joanne (Mia Katigbak). She sternly reminds him of the double plot with nonrefundable deposit they secured in the town’s newer cemetery. Righty speaks with the wandering thought patterns of early onset Alzheimer’s and, Joanne says, writes Post-It notes to identify various objects. On a can of bug spray he writes “I love you.”
There’s also a plot about what will become of the “bucolic” cemetery Righty treasures as a place he feels calm. Bristly developer Tim (Stephen Barker Turner) and Donna (Jennifer Mudge), his can-do Gal Friday — on the job and off, sometimes — need to buy off the old couple to get on with a plan to turn the place of rest and nature into a place of business and commerce. There’s another plot going on too, which makes for two reveals. One happens almost between the lines; the other is the kind that tilts what we’ve been watching slightly off its axis and makes the world of the play almost as duplicitous and slippery as the real world. “The world is the world,” Tim says, as a palliative (maybe) while pausing in the act of asking his girlfriend to book a dinner date for his wife and him. He repeats it as the kind of epigram that can’t be improved upon. It is what it is.
Onstage, the cemetery, as realized by Sarah Karl’s beautiful set, takes on a special status. All the action takes place there and the transitions between scenes, with lighting by Evan C. Anderson, projections by Christopher H. Evans, and sound design by Emily Duncan Wilson, let nature take a breath, letting us experience the scenery as something other than a setting for human interaction. Those pauses are key to the play’s experience, as Eno and Butler find a way to suggest the pleasures of a place, and how some people are immediately sensible, and some have to come to it by degrees. We see the effects of the place on each character and the cemetery’s meaning — as a place where the living contemplate the dead or death — both undermines and inspires activity. Tim and Donna are part of “progress,” driving its cart over the bones of the dead. Righty and Joanne are just trying to get to the end with dignity. Grey spends most of his stage time painting a view of the space the audience occupies.
The plot about what will become of this lovely spot is intricate, like any number of business deals. Matters are complicated by the pressures of sentiment. Much of the play’s speech is designed to bring out the fault lines of feeling that the characters may be unaware of until they articulate them. “Moss makes me sentimental,” Tim says, a very unsentimental guy giving an offhand excuse for his sudden aria about “Anywho,” a generic being who runs from birth to death with little purpose except to end up in the ground, where, Donna tells us, there are 14 dead for every person now alive. Haunting the play in fairly subtle ways is the fact of life and death. The earth, we always supposed, stands for life, unless we kill it. But living beings are ephemeral, unless remembered. Which is the point of tombstones, and that’s where this play begins: when we realize a man is sitting on his own tombstone.
Righty loves the place; Joanne doesn’t. The couple agrees to agree to Tim’s deal, but there are complications and chicanery and abrupt changes of mind on both sides. Donna now wins, now loses, sparking an interest in Grey. Tim, desperate to win her back and drunk, renders a rambling message to her phone and receives a harrowing fright in the cemetery. Joanne sits upon the plot her husband bought and she and he sold, flipping through a series of disconnected memories, her own odyssey of Anywho. I thought the play might end there, leaving us with many matters of plot undecided or loose. But no, Eno gives us a happy ending where the bastards get some payback and the good folks are maybe better off or getting better. Or at least that’s the plan.
The cast is uniformly excellent. Mia Katigbak renders a stoicism in Joanne that makes her the least cluttered or most realistic. Harris Yulin’s Righty is a masterful performance, a character who uses language to naturalize very deep insecurity. Donna, always bright and new in each scene, is made to seem that way by April M. Hickman’s tasteful costume designs and Cookie Jordan’s hair design, and by Jennifer Mudge’s capable way of playing the part of a woman who capably plays at being efficient. Jimonn Cole’s Grey is the most reflective, getting to talk about his love of those places where human effort and natural beauty makes something neither could have done alone. He often fades into the background but his gift for neutral comebacks adds a needed touch. “You don’t look surprised,” Donna says to him at one point. “No, I’m surprised,” he says. “But maybe I’ve looked surprised the entire time you’ve known me, so you don’t really have a baseline.” In fact, he never does seem surprised. Who is surprised, in mostly unpleasant ways, is Tim, and Stephen Baker Turner plays him pitch-perfectly. He speaks with the casual authority of the most powerful person in this ad hoc group, but his putdowns and asides have the flair of a constant duel with his sense of how little he can control, including his own thoughts. It’s like there’s a plot against him.
Or maybe it’s just that, as Frost observed, “something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” or a stone or a cold storage facility.
“Life is getting rid of dead stuff to make room for living stuff,” says Tim, but he’s undone by a form of life he hadn’t considered worth making room for. As Joanne says, near the end, “Aren’t we mysterious creatures? Where does it all come from?” The Plot, with laughs and sharp dialogue and a great design, gets us to see that we don’t really know, nor where it all ends up. In between, we are where we are.
The Plot runs at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., through Dec. 21. Visit Yale Rep’s website for tickets and more information.