In William Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, closing this weekend at Nimbus Arts Center, the heroine declares that names don’t mean much. A block west at Art House Productions (354 Marin Blvd.), a somewhat less famous playwright comes to a different conclusion. In Stephen Kaplan’s Tracy Jones, directed by Alex Tobey, names carry weight. A name is an anchor for identity, or an item to purloin, or something to salvage after a flood of grief.
This bittersweet comedy, which opened on Thursday night and continues at the new black box theater in the Arts District until November 5 ($45; $35 for seniors and students), is quite funny. But as giddy as it can sometimes be, it confronts a serious topic — the growing problem of American loneliness. Tracy Jones dramatizes a meeting between three stranded modern subjects searching for self-definition and human connection. Their awkwardness is exacerbated by the place where the action unfolds: a generic (and gastronomically questionable) chicken wing joint picked by the protagonist for a “personal party” that’s doomed from the start.
The Jones Street Bar and Grill location engenders most of the physical gags in Tracy Jones, and it generates quite a bit of the cringe comedy, too. By the end of the play, all the characters will be slimed by one sauce or another.
The (mostly) accidental food fighting is an externalization of the messiness these people feel — self-loathing that comes directly from social isolation. Like so many of us, these people have spent too much time on their own, and their interactive skills have gotten awfully rusty. They circumlocate, they overshare, they hesitate, they leave their sentences dangling. Rarely do they pick up on each other’s discursive cues. Jillie, their gung-ho, optimistic young server, played with unearthly perkiness by Ciara Chanel, argues that grace returns with practice. Kaplan seems to believe this is true. Nevertheless, his characters have a long struggle in front of them.
The title character, a middle-aged bank manager tormented by feelings of irrelevance, is shrewd enough to recognize that no one is going to throw her a lifeline. Thus, she takes the initiative and creates one for herself. She invites every woman in the world who shares her ordinary sounding name to a get-together, and ennobles her common handle by spelling it out on the wall in silver mylar balloon letters. Helen Coxe gives her Tracy Jones manic intensity and evangelical zeal, and her planning for a party that’s plainly going nowhere is so meticulous and earnest that it’s tough not to sympathize with her, even as we know that she’s deluding herself.
We’ve met people like this: office workers going mad in white-collar solitude, pale and slow-fading Bartlebys, talking up a storm to remind themselves that they still can make some noise. We know their aspirations don’t match their capacities. They desire things that they’ve unlearned how to get. Tracy Jones nails the pathos of the small-time event-runner, surrounded by trays of food nobody will eat and baskets of door prizes no one will receive, constantly checking the door for a crowd that may never come. Anyone who has ever hosted a shindig — or played an independent rock show — will nod in sad recognition.
When guests do arrive, they don’t quite fit. Tracy #2, given psychic wounds and a kind heart by Therese McGinn, harbors a secret. Tracy #3, played with endearing discombobulation by Fernando Contreras, has a secret too, frustrating Tracy #1’s desperate desire to find someone she can identify with. Once they’re gummed up in the gooey backroom of the Bar and Grill, extrication is not so easy. The players have powerful incentives to keep their new acquaintances around, even if it’s just to have somebody to talk to.
If this all sounds like No Exit in a Buffalo Wild Wings hellscape, Tracy Jones does indeed have a bit of a Jersey fast-food existentialist feel. But in practice, it’s more of a callback to the single-set situation comedies of the late ‘70s that featured lonesome characters struggling to make meager marks for themselves: Taxi, for instance, or Alice.
Much has changed since the Carter Administration. Flo, or Jim Ignatowski, could find camaraderie in the garage or the diner. In the twenty-first century, menial laborers and bit players in society are likely to spend their working days alone. Get people like that together, and they’re more likely to ramble than wisecrack. Even the waitress, a natural social facilitator, has had her impulses drilled out of her by a company scared of litigation. Her youth and her compassion save her soul — though maybe not her job. The other characters in Tracy Jones mean well, but they haven’t been teenagers for a long time. Can they defy expectations (and their own tendencies) and make a few adult friends?
Glamorous this drama is not. There’s not much stage glory in Tracy Jones. But if we’re willing to look, there are traces of heroism lurking beneath those grubby wing trays. The protagonist knows what she wants, and she’s even got an inkling about how to get it. She’s going to fall on her face, and we’re going to watch — but not without recognition.
Set designer Jacob Brown heightens the gritty foodservice realism with scenery that’s liable to give PTSD to anybody who has had to suffer through a dreary party in a chain eatery, and lighting designer Sarah Woods illuminates it all with merciless strip-mall clarity. These characters have nowhere to hide: not from us, not from each other, and not from themselves.
It is ironic, and brave, for Art House Productions to open their new theater with a play that makes insecurity about turnout a major plot driver. Likewise, it’s gutsy to choose an inaugural heroine whose defining characteristic is a magnetism deficiency. Yet in her gruffness, her industry, her sense of occasion, and determination to make the best of a bad hand, Tracy Jones fits the mood of a strange moment — one where we’re all refamiliarizing ourselves with what it means to be social beings. Call it an honest reintroduction from a theater company that has always spoken to us in a forthright manner. Hope for the best for these characters, and your real-life neighbors, too. We’re all going to need it.