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    Review: Red Herring’s Haunting, Thorny ‘The Children’

    Red Herring continues their 2021 season with a gripping production of The Children, Lucy Kirkwood’s Tony-nominated look at what we pass on to the people who come after us and what we owe one another, directed by Michael Herring.

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    The first sign something’s going wrong in the world of The Children – a well-appointed mid-century apartment, the subtle and evocative set also courtesy of Herring – comes with a smear of blood on Rose’s (Nancy Skaggs) top. Hazel (Josie Merkel) races into our line of sight with the frantic half-apologies that Rose surprised her, both because Hazel and Robin (Harold Yarborough) are secluded with few visitors and, as Hazel says, “We heard [Rose was] dead.”

    That specter of death – and unlikely, sometimes unwanted resurrection – drips off of every scene in The Children. Rose’s return after over 30 years in America forces this triangle of retired nuclear engineers to face not only the reverberation of a horrific accident at the power plant they once helped stand up – electricity rationing, an evacuation zone – but the cracks papered over in the foundation of their dynamic.

    I don’t want to say more about the plot beyond that point – for a play that’s such an incisive, devastating character study, there are brilliant, well-executed twists that left parts of the audience gasping at the matinee I saw. The Children revels in one mood I most want in live theater and rarely get: the messy, ambiguity of life. 

    Red Herring’s ‘The Children’ – Photo courtesy Jerri Shafer, JAMS Photography

    Poison-tipped-dagger wordplay, of the post-Pinter variety, circling around what they mean to say because directness hurts too much, flashes throughout this production. Big, shocked, pitch-dark laughter punctuates stark confessions about how each of us faces – or doesn’t – what Robin calls “The decline to the grave.” 

    The Children ripples with fraught, timely shadows. At every level, the characters face snowballing consequences of thoughtless choices, wounds never disinfected, from the contaminated water flowing in the power plant to old slights among each other, and have to deal with what they owe the next generation up to and including their use as sacrificial lambs.

    Dancing with the sharp dialogue, Herring deploys subtle visual metaphors for the precarious state of the world we’re seeing and the ugly, sometimes embarrassing, choices the characters are forced to make: an overflowing toilet, bloody discharge, a character’s cancer.

    This heavy, one-room drama lives and dies by its cast and it’s hard to picture a better collection of performances as this trio. Nancy Skaggs’ revelatory, kaleidoscopic turn as Rose shifts from sly seduction to brazen righteousness; layering the sense that time should have healed all wounds with the rage that her own pain never got a full hearing, always bursting with colors but never showy. 

    Harold Yarborough’s Robin is a masterclass of restraint, making his rare explosions singe eyebrows in the room. His subtle hints at the rituals he performs when he leaves the house click into place with a devastating crash.

    And Josie Merkle’s breath-taking Hazel is impossible to take your eyes off, even when it hurts; the bruised and beating heart of the play. She deploys her well-known sense of physical comedy with scalpel-like precision, getting the most out of angrily cranking a radio, shaking a bottle, tearing lettuce apart to make a salad. As her character’s desperation to stay fit enough to enjoy a life that might already be too far from shore reaches a fever pitch, it’s like watching a symphony of open wounds.

    Red Herring’s ‘The Children’ – Photo courtesy Jerri Shafer, JAMS Photography

    For as heavy and oppressive as the subject matter can get, this production never reduces itself to something monochromatic. It makes the most out of the lightness Kirkwood sprinkled throughout the script.

    Herring and cast remind us of the real affection that binds these characters, most prominently in a delightful, shaky tread through a line dance to “Personal Jesus” Hazel taught them in happier days, without letting them off the hook for how they’ve treated one another.

    Herring’s production of The Children is audacious and unapologetic in its raising of more questions than it could ever answer and its deep faith in the vital symbiosis between text, cast, and audience. It brought me to tears and left my head swimming with themes and concepts on my trip home.

    The Children runs through September 12 with performances at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and more info, visit redherringtheater.org.

    Red Herring’s ‘The Children’ – Photo courtesy Jerri Shafer, JAMS Photography
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    Richard Sanford
    Richard Sanfordhttp://sanfordspeaks.blogspot.com/
    Richard Sanford is a freelance contributor to Columbus Underground covering the city's vibrant theatre scene. You can find him seeking inspiration at a variety of bars, concert halls, performance spaces, museums and galleries.
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