ALL KINDS OF ADMISSIONS
A peculiarly persuasive puzzle play, Daniel Pearle’s resonant A Kid Like Jake strategically omits the title character from the cast of characters. That’s very right: This four-year-old is a work in progress who alters as we hear his parents’ very different reactions to a boy who may well want to become a girl. Adding to their telling confusion is the caught-in-the-crossfire plight of an admissions counselor who’s trying to fit the toddler to the right school for the best future.
About Face’s Chicago premiere, cunningly staged by Keira Fromm, is all about mirrors and projections. It examines how gender-based norms can become self-fulfilling expectations or fail before the facts. You’re bound to take sides in this tug of war for a little kid’s very uncertain future. That only proves how much this one-act grabs you from the get-go.
Pressure parenting is on the line as unfledged Jake transitions from pre-school to kindergarten. Immediately he and his parents plunge into the competition for the right Manhattan pedagogues to tap his talents and launch a career in advance. For Judy (Cindy Gold), a lesbian guidance counselor, Jake’s parents, ex-lawyer Alex (Katherine Keberlein) and therapist Greg (Michael Aaron Lindner) are driven clients, intent on giving Jake the best start possible. Unfortunately, their concepts of their kid differ dangerously—and somehow Jake got lost in their mixed messages.
Alex has a lot on her plate—her guilt over failed births, rich parents who spoiled her and threaten to do the same to their grandson, and chronic denial that Jake isn’t just like other over-achieving, artistic, imaginative, self-esteeming and creative applicants for the preppiest day schools possible. (In this maddeningly micro-managed admissions process, a kid can lose points for being anti-social, for not fitting in, for not providing the right anecdotes for the application, for refusing to communicate or collaborate, for, well, just being himself.)
But the comparatively grounded and considerate Greg sees a more complex Jake. This kid produces violent artwork, identifies with and dresses like Cinderella, fights with his fellow rug rats, and doesn’t see why boys can’t wear dresses to the ball. He tells tales of “a princess who doesn’t know she’s a princess”—and so Greg fears that Jake’s mind is trapped in the wrong body.
Both parents fear failure, though Alex takes Jake’s normative variations much more personally, enough to warrant good advice from the nurse (Jessica Dean Turner) who deals with her panic attacks and pregnancy. Wanting him to fondle guns instead of doing “dress up” decorating, Alex is in denial because Jake’s screw-ups could prove her own, so certain is she that the apple can’t fall far from the tree. Greg, less willing to judge and more eager to treat, wants the boy to see an expert. It’s not so he can place well in social tests but for the sake of simply growing up real. Inevitably, blame-throwing and recriminations turn a marriage into a minefield. By play’s end Jake’s future is as undetermined, if not undermined, as his sexuality.
Like other plays that stick with you because they won’t let go, A Kid Like Jake raises far more cogent questions than its lack of answers can hinder. Is anatomy really destiny? How much tolerance do parents possess in the first place to cope with childhood’s changes and their perverse penchant to mold a kid like a pot? Do schools reinforce inequality by pandering to privilege? Can a kid like Jake make a distinction between knowing he’s not gay and feeling he’s not the gender to which he was born? Just when does the “reassignment” begin and is it always right and lasting? We may not see Jake but the provocation he presents couldn’t be clearer or his outcome more intriguingly unsettled.
Fromm does a fine job of stirring the pot that Pearle provides. About Face’s acting quartet is focused like lasers on every nuance in a volatile script. This is a hair-trigger play that fires off a ton of forensic shots in a mere 105 minutes. It’s good that About Face offers Sunday symposia with developmental experts following the matinee: Patrons are bound to have questions that Pearle rightly refuses to confirm or deny.
photos by Michael Brosilow
A Kid Like Jake
About Face Theatre
Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Thurs and Fri at 7:30; Sat at 3 & 7:30; Sun at 3
ends on March 15, 2015
for tickets, call 773.404.7336 or visit www.aboutfacetheatre.org
for more info on Chicago Theater, visit www.TheatreinChicago.com