Putting the adult back into adultery, or "Why THIS?"

Why This?

We’re about to start rehearsal this evening, and I always think it’s good to reconnect with my motivations for choosing the play, and to remind myself of the story we’re trying to connect with before we get distracted by the minutiae of the individual performative moments, the finances of the design and the million individual mechanics of actually mounting a production. Every story wants to be told at a particular time, for a specific reason, and one of the questions we need to ask as a theater is why talk now, and about what?

So, “Why This?” which is actually a question I ask at the start of every rehearsal. (Even if it’s usually less italicized, more like “why this?”)

Putting the adult back in adultery

In This, Jane has been widowed for a year and is still reeling from the premature death of her husband at only 35. Her best friend, Merriil has invited her to the first party Merrill and her husband, Tom are throwing 12 weeks after after the birth of their first child. They’re joined by Alan, a longtime friend, and a new friend of Merrill’s, Jean-Pierre, an expatriate Frenchman who works for Doctors without Borders. Merrill thinks it’s time that Jane came out of her shell and starts dating the charismatic Jean-Pierre. But after a party game misfires, Tom and Jane admit to an attraction that threatens to unravel their entire circle of friends. And it’s all wrapped up in playwright Melissa James Gibson’s astonishing knack for smart, witty and--above all--human dialogue.

This depicts a circle of friends who are all passing through what I like to think of as a “pre-midlife crisis,” which I think is a generational characteristic. I think there’s a whole section of my peers (generation X, I suppose) who managed to elongate our adolescence. We all bopped around throughout our twenties and early thirties and then thought to ourselves, “Hmmm. Maybe it’s time I stepped up and bought a house/had a child/found a career?” “Maybe it’s time I was an adult...” Speaking for myself, I remember thinking (at 33) “Seriously? We’re going to be charge? We’re the responsible ones? I don’t feel responsible at all. I’m not ready; all this is way way too much for me. Shouldn’t some grownups be lurking around to step the fuck up?”

I actually don’t know why this is, but tons of my friends (and not just those in the arts) followed a similar pattern. My daughter’s preschool is filled with Moms in their late thirties/early forties, which is an interesting bump in the demographic curve. I’m not sure that, as a generation, we’ve embraced adulthood with any particular vigor. I think we have been slow to mature, by and large. Life and time have their inexorable effect, and at some point, life has presented us with forks in the road that many of us considered the “last chance” so we had to step up. We are now, surprisingly, the grownups in the room much to our astonishment and faint dismay.

Gibson is a perfect playwright for this moment. Her first big hit, [sic] visited my generation a decade ago to hilarious effect. In This, she turns her considerable knack for comic insight to a play that’s far more than a nominal tale of adultery. This is a story about Generation X-ers acknowledging that responsibility can no longer be passed. And how are we to manage all this: this child, this marriage, this friendship, this career? This life? Jane’s affair and it’s repercussions are all about how the essentially messy reality of life tempers us, and makes us grow. Sometimes, with luck, we grow into ourselves.