Class
Act
In Skylight, Shotgun Players engage the drama
— and romance — of social class.
By Rachel Swan
April 1, 2009
East
Bay Express
It's the most timeworn story in melodrama: A wealthy
patrician falls in love with a working-class girl
about half his age. He is a smart, cold-blooded opportunist;
she is beautiful, starry-eyed, and full of ideals.
He is her sugar daddy; she is his spiritual guide.
They begin a six-year adulterous relationship that
inevitably ends badly, after his wife sniffs out the
scandal. She packs up and moves off to a cold ramshackle
apartment on the other side of town; he pursues her
three years later, after his wife dies of cancer.
In the traditional version they would fall in love
anew.
No so in Skylight, the domestic drama by
British playwright David Hare which opens Shotgun
Players 2009 season. In Hare's play, neither Tom,
the well-heeled restaurant owner (played by John Mercer),
nor Kyra, his former mistress (Emily Jordan), seems
wholly sympathetic. Nor are they able to paper over
their differences. The play takes place over the course
of a single night in Kyra's flat, which has all the
tell-tale signs of a single woman living on a budget:
the space heater, the cactus on the counter, the place
under the sink where she stows plastic bags. During
that night, Kyra receives two surprise visitors. First,
Tom's eighteen-year-old son Edward (Carl Holvick-Thomas),
who complains about his dad's detachment and says
he misses having a maternal figure about the house.
Then the old man himself, who arrives in a chauffeured
limousine to say, "Baby, I want you back"
— with reservations.
In the hours that follow, Tom and Kyra try to iron
out the difficulties in their relationship. Kyra chides
Tom for his arrogance and his dissolute lifestyle;
Tom upbraids Kyra for refusing to leave her teaching
job and run away with him. Through brittle, naturalistic
dialogue, Hare brings to light all the dicey social
issues that prevent them from getting back together:
the generation gap, the disparity in social class,
Tom's elitism verses Kyra's populist sensibility.
(Hare couldn't resist making her a mouthpiece for
the underclass.) Of the two of them, Tom comes off
as more of the ogre and he's ultimately beyond recall
(he's also a better character). Nonetheless, Kyra
seems reluctant to let him go. Perhaps old passions
die hard, perhaps Kyra gets seduced by the idea of
being useful to someone. In any case, the line between
good girl and bad guy seems perilously thin.
Skylight requires great stamina on behalf
of its actors, who have to carry two hours of straight
dialogue with no scene breaks except for a single
intermission. Considering the gravity of its social-class
subtext, it's a play of relative inaction: A father
and son both visit the father's ex-mistress in the
course of an evening. The father's visit results in
a long, protracted argument. At the end, a decision
is made. The father leaves, forlornly, in a cab, asking
the ex-mistress to stop by one of his restaurants
some time. The son comes back with a lavish breakfast,
presumably from the dad's restaurant. It's a combination
of deft writing, forceful acting, and astute directing
— by Shotgun Players' artistic director Patrick
Dooley — that makes the play seem like a taut
drama rather than a rambling conversation. Jordan
and Mercer are saddled with enormous responsibility.
They have to tell the whole story of their affair
in flashback, and still make the dialogue crackle.
They have to oscillate from relationship mode to social
commentary mode without breaking character or making
the play seem too much like a class diatribe.
Most importantly, they have to reveal the emotional
lives of their characters in small ways. For Jordan,
this amounts to the harried way that she chops an
onion or grinds pepper into a sauce pan; for Mercer,
it's the punctilious act of picking an onion skin
from an already grimy floor and throwing it in the
waste basket. In one of the most freighted moments
of the play, the veteran restaurateur picks up his
mistress' cheese grater and tries to figure out how
to use it. He's been enlisted to grind a hard gray
lump of cheese that would never pass muster in his
own restaurant.
Named for the glass ceiling that hung over Tom's wife
when she died, Skylight is rife with symbols.
There's the reading material on Kyra's bookshelf —
classic novels and Internet manuals — that substitutes
for real-world stuff (she doesn't read newspapers
or own a television). There's Frank, the chauffeur
parked outside, waiting to whisk Tom back to his own
upper-class bubble. There are the hip-hop records
that Edward listens to, showing that his own class
pretensions are the opposite of his father.
Skylight is the type of drama that goes over
well in Berkeley. Tom's relationship with Kyra is
more paternal than romantic, and most parents around
here could relate to the problem of giving a child
all the trappings of your aristocratic lifestyle,
only to have her move off to some inner-city neighborhood,
opt for a low-paying teaching job, and acquire high-minded
ideas about socioeconomics and education reform. It's
natural to empathize with Tom but easier to side with
Kyra, and the poetic justice in the end — when
Edward and Kyra feast on the spoils of Tom's restaurant
enterprise — could never be lost on a Berkeley
audience. In her most endearing moment, Kyra delivers
a blunt summation of the play: "You fuck me first.
Then you criticize my lifestyle. ... Doing it the
other way 'round, of course, would be a terrible tactical
mistake."