Oh, how I would love to be happy all the time! Wouldn’t that be wonderful? For that very experience, vacationers spend thousands of dollars to visit the happiest place on Earth, Disney World. In so many ways, they leave the real world to enter an entirely different one, filled with multiple resorts, attractions, countries, malls and, yes, the Magic Kingdom, where every night is New Year’s Eve and ends with fireworks.
Yet Disney World is an illusion, as all those same vacationers discover when they realize just how many thousands they spent for four days and three nights hotel, food, park admission, airfare and all the other requirements to divorce themselves from life in order to become intimate with Mickey. Disney World is the fantasy life we can buy; it is an escape from the heartache, failure, sadness and loss we face in our daily real lives. This conflict between the fanciful dreamer and the cynical realist lies at the heart of The Public Theater’s current production Wild With Happy.
Colman Domingo’s play focuses on Gil, a 40-year-old gay struggling actor with a degree in English literature from Yale who lives in New York, slightly estranged from mother. He calls her by her first name, Adelaide. After a short prologue during which Gil (also played by Domingo) explains why he has renounced church, we learn that Adelaide has died, somewhat (but not 100%) unexpectedly. The rest of the show focuses on Gil’s attempts to deal (or, more accurately, not deal) with this loss.
Adelaide’s brash, loud, opinionated, velour-jumpsuit-and-fanny-pack-wearing sister Aunt Glo (Sharon Washington) is Gil’s foil. Her determination to follow tradition in burying and memorializing her sister is matched only by her casual demeanor as she co-opts everything in Adelaide’s closets for herself. Glo will not allow Gil to rush through his familial responsibilities and return to New York without a fight, and even once Gil makes a fateful decision about the body and the funeral, Glo won’t stop berating him for what she considers is his poor judgment.
Wild With Happy does more right than not, but the play’s 105 minute runtime feels longer than it is or even than is necessary. Domingo nails the guilt-infused confusion Gil feels from knowing that he wasn’t there when his mother needed him most; even as he shows us Adelaide protecting him from her own dispiriting reality. Gil has difficulty coming to terms with his own life; fitting his mother’s death into that same equation is understandably challenging.
Adelaide loved fairy tales, though, and Disney World features prominently in the final third of the play. The overall show might have been much more successful if it brought us to that final third sooner. The first hour-plus of Wild With Happy has its moments, but much of the storytelling feels repetitive. Little happens as we watch Glo and Gil essentially reprise the same argument. Some scenes play too long, seemingly just to retain a clever line or humorous moment, but I regularly found my attention wandering from the stage almost as often as the action grabbed hold and wouldn’t let me go.
The relationship between Gil and the young funeral director, Terry (Korey Jackson), proves least successful. Throughout the play, Terry’s prominence makes absolutely no sense; every action and choice seems out-of-nowhere, and only at the show’s conclusion does his very presence reveal itself as a way to provide payoff to a big fairy tale-themed joke … that isn’t all that funny.
The structure of the play is also inconsistent, and I’m not sure how director Robert O’Hara avoided seeing this problem throughout rehearsals. Gil narrates the beginning of the show, speaking directly to the audience in between the first several scenes. And then, as the audience reaches the real meet of the story, the play abandons this narrative device. The story also shifts in time during that first section, jumping between the past (before Adelaide died) and the present, primarily to provide simple exposition. But that element also vanishes save for one important – and well-executed – moment right at the end.
The very talented cast and the creative set design provide the main highlights of Wild With Happy. The latter ingeniously utilizes a set of four caskets at the funeral home to become several other items – ranging from a closet to a park bench to two cars. The transitions between scenes prove to be some of the more fun elements of the production.
Domingo, Jackson and the fourth member of the cast Maurice McRae all perform valiantly, but the star here – even outshining the set design playing double-duty as Adelaide and Glo – is Washington. As Glo, Washington brings an energy to the stage that constantly pushes threatens to become over-the-top caricature but never quite runs off the cliff. Her Adelaide is softer and more subdued, and during one climactic sequence in which she must switch between the two, it’s almost difficult to believe two actresses aren’t on stage.Wild With Happy contains the main ingredients for a wonderful piece of theater, mixing laughter and tears with an entertaining storyline that manages to discuss relatable and profound themes. But too often, Wild With Happy tries too hard, forcing me to leave the theater happy but not wildly so.
Out of Focus 