You don’t have to look very far to see the lengths to which theater has gone to attract attention in a media saturated world: Broadway-style spectacle, non-narrative performance, movie stars on stage. Thank goodness Milwaukee Chamber Theatre reminds us of the powerful connection that forms the core of dramatic storytelling. The Subject Was Roses is as simple as one can imagine: a couple, their son, two rooms, two acts. Frank Gilroy’s 1964 drama has us share the lives of three people over the course of 24 hours, and most of us will leave feeling like we understand ourselves a little better.
It’s not a particularly original play. You’ll recognize the James Cleary from similar family stories by Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller – the proud father who can’t seem to understand why the people around him don’t see the world exactly as he does. We meet Cleary and his wife the day after their son has returned from World War II combat, and Gilroy’s substantial achievement is revealing the dynamics of a family without heavy-handed exposition or immediate conflict. As a result, we get to know these characters in the same way we get to know people: by spending time with them in their world – in this case, in their modest Bronx living room and kitchen. Over the play’s two hours, we watch the Cleary family eat breakfast, get drunk, and, eventually, quietly implode.
It takes a great director and ensemble to make this kind of play work, and Michael Wright and his cast find terrific resonance in Gilroy’s dialogue. In a play where the subtext runs deep, it helps that the everyday chatter about coffee and baseball is charged with rhythm and music, and Wright’s actors capture the spark and fizz of the era. Beneath that surface energy, the tensions and emotions of family life slowly simmer. It’s a world where a waffle iron, a cup of coffee, or a vase of roses can become invested with two decades worth of fractious family history. And Wright and his actors bring deeply human resonances to the events of the play.
James Tasse plays Cleary with Irish spark and bluster, but you can see the slag of disappointment that has choked his soul over 20 years. Tami Workentin captures his wife’s emotional frailty with the nervous energy surrounding her domestic duties, but in her beautiful second act monolog, that agitation morphs into something profound and existential. And in Nicholas Harazin’s sunny smile and whipcrack optimism, you can feel the sunny mood of post-war America, which makes the final events of the play all the more poignant.
As anyone who will be carving turkey this week knows, families are hard. In The Subject Was Roses, Wright and his actors show both the struggle and beauty of shared lives, which is something to be thankful for.
