You’ve seen this situation before: A father lives alone in the house he and his family used for years. His wife has been dead for some years and he is dying of cancer, but his two adult kids don’t know this. They just want to be able to keep using the beautiful, woodsy house in the exurbs of New York City.
The father, Walter (Tom Stephenson), lives in the house with son Prince (Justin Lang), an actor hoping for the big break, who has just brought young girlfriend Sylvie (Maybelle Shimizu) in to help out with the aging patriarch. Walter hasn’t exactly despaired of Prince, but does wish he’d just get a good job and settle down.
Walter’s daughter Beth (Leigh Akin), self-possessed and married to inebriate Jack (Durwood Murray), covets use of the house as well. She thinks dad belongs in a home for the elderly, where he could get 24-hour care if needed.
Family used to be a notion we all understood, a solid place, a refuge, a home. Or as my family used to say, home is where you go when nobody else will take you in.
But the world has been turned upside down more than once in the past two or three years, and every day brings news of something else we thought we’d never see. Is family a fantasy, just changing, extinct or none of those?
These characters seem normal enough, but they all have secrets. Fasten your seat belt. Will Cooper, resident playwright of scrappy little Roustabouts Theater Company, offers “Book of Leaves,” his latest effort, through Oct. 10 in a reading filmed by multiple Emmy Award-winning Mike Brueggermeyer.
Walter has gathered the family together to tell them that he is “getting his affairs in order” and planning what to do with his assets.
Stevenson is brilliant as Walter, modeling calmness and the acceptance of inevitability despite the pain underneath, and warmth in his interactions with others. His face tells all.
The titular book refers to Walter’s habit of having the kids each keep a “book of leaves,” in which they were to pick a leaf each year that they liked, put it in a scrapbook and write about why they picked it. He also planted a sapling for each, to atone for those that were felled in his job as a builder.
After these reveals (and the one about how Walter’s wife died), the ending comes pretty quickly.
This show was filmed in April against greenscreens. It’s astonishing how well Mike Brueggermeyer filmed this, and how well the actors managed to be in the right spots at the right time, when two were never in the same room. Though Director Kim Strassburger teases the best out of each performer, I would love to see the show again live.
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