Father-and-son actors Reed and Ephraim Birney play an anxious doctor and his imaginative patient in a compelling psychological mystery.
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — With every other row removed, reducing its capacity to 160 from 520, the auditorium at the Barrington Stage Company’s main theater here seems about as serious as a gaptoothed 8-year-old. Forget about leg room; there’s ample space for skis and luggage.
And yet the imagination is a wonderfully malleable, or gullible, thing. “Chester Bailey,” the company’s first indoor production since the pandemic began, is as striking as a sucker punch, too effective to let you keep an emotional distance, even if you’re at a social one. It quickly convinces you that its less-than-credible fictional world is not only vivid but real.
That’s crucial for a play about the human capacity to fabricate complete narratives from partial information. “Chester Bailey,” by Joseph Dougherty, is set mostly in a Long Island mental hospital in 1945, where its title character, a Brooklyn man in his mid-20s, is recovering from a horrendous attack by a fellow worker at a wartime shipyard. As a result, Chester (Ephraim Birney) is now blind, partly deaf and handless — only he doesn’t know it. He insists that his vision is gradually returning and that his hands are right where he left them.
Dr. Philip Cotton (Reed Birney, Ephraim’s father) is the anxious, bespectacled mope assigned to wean Chester from his delusions. In a series of bedside interviews, the doctor gradually figures out how the injured man’s brain pieces together sounds, social cues, phantom sensations, bits of previously acquired knowledge and an almost painterly imagination to guess what the world around him is like. Though sometimes wrong — he thinks there’s a van Gogh print on the wall of his room — he is right more often than you’d expect.
As Cotton begins to consider his own imagination (paltry) and his own perceptual disabilities (he’s red-green colorblind) in light of Chester’s, you may find yourself thinking: “Where have I seen this ‘Physician, shrink thyself’ trope before?” Perhaps you will alight on ’40s weepies, like “Now, Voyager” and Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” that feature hero psychiatrists, or plays, like “Equus,” in which a patient with a knotty problem turns out to be the perfect provocation to a doctor with a parallel one.
Like those works, “Chester Bailey” is deftly plotted; Dougherty’s experience as a television writer on series including “Thirtysomething” and “Pretty Little Liars” serves him well here. No detail is left dangling; if the hospital is named for Walt Whitman, the Good Gray Poet will eventually, and a bit laboriously, be woven into the material. (Recall that Whitman was a wartime nurse.) Even Cotton’s colorblindness becomes a crucial plot point.
To call “Chester Bailey” a well-made play, though, is to accept that well-made plays are always something of an illusion. To create the unified, airtight feeling characteristic of the genre, they often rely on surface cohesion instead of a full exploration of the mess underneath. For a play set in a mental hospital, the psychology here is thus rather thin, which you discover only when your mind wanders during the occasional longueur or you recap the plot during the car ride home.
It’s then you notice how the impact of the story depends on the form Dougherty has given it, instead of the other way around. Letting more than a third of the play’s 90 minutes elapse before the two characters have a real scene together is a way of manipulating information that might otherwise have given away the game too soon. To fill the gap, we get alternating snippets of monologues that must be jury-rigged into drama by the audience’s persistence of vision, which the playwright assists by linking them thematically. If Chester speaks of romance, Cotton will too. But despite key words and ideas that seem to connect, they are skew lines of inquiry.
Though that diminishes the play’s takeaway, such quibbles rarely rise to the surface as you watch. In fact, the play’s tactics annoyed me only once, near the end, when one of its mysteries was resolved with a distasteful device: an all-too-familiar monster ex machina. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that the Hitchcock film it recalled for me was “Rope” — not a good look in 2021.
Until then, everything in the production, directed by Ron Lagomarsino, conspires to keep you eagerly tied up in its yarn. The set — a series of industrial archways by Beowulf Boritt — does a lot of thematic work, variously suggesting the steel girders of the old Penn Station, the skeleton of a warship and the receding depths of the human imagination. The lighting, by Peter Kaczorowski, is aptly moody while cluing us in to the play’s many kinds of reality. Sound, costumes and staging are all top-notch as well.
None of that would matter without fine performances, and the father-son casting, which in the abstract seemed gimmicky, turns out to be highly effective. Though the Birneys do very different kinds of work, as they must because their characters are so different, their strong familial resemblance underlines their connection and holds them in the same universe.
Ephraim Birney has the showier role, finding a vivid spoken life within a constricted physical one. Facing the opposite challenge, Reed Birney, as may be expected at the height of a distinguished career in difficult drama, is exceptional. Tamping down any vocal dramatics and letting his body speak for him, he finds a way to express the envy, doubt, deviousness and even sexual pride that Cotton can hardly put into words by putting them into postures instead.
His performance reminds you that acting, too, is a form of delusion, not so different from the kind in the play. What we call a role is merely a collection of often conflicting clues, assembled by the imagination to create the impression of something whole.
And now I’m speaking not only of the actor’s imagination, but the audience’s. For Cotton, deciding whether to rob his patient of the thing that sustains him throughout his ordeal is an ethical question; Chester, he says, with some awe, is “the author of his own mercy.” The same goes for us in the audience: We write our own plays in the theater, and it would be awful to take that away from us now that we can once again be there.
Chester Bailey
Through July 3; barringtonstageco.org.
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