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Rain pours down and thunder echoes throughout Jim Grimsley's surreal suburban drama The Borderland, presented by the Kansas City Repertory Theatre (on the Copaken Stage), which opened on April 10th.

Along with the convincing sound effects, the ominous lighting creates a chiaroscuro effect, which matches the playwright's writing; privileged ideas and long-held beliefs by characters that appear initially to be black or white are, by the play's violent end, marked by shades of grey. As in so many of the Rep's productions this season, the behind-the-scenes crew again does a marvelous job of creating a world within our world. When the actors took their bows, I wished the lighting director, Victor En Yu Tan, the sound designer, Eric Sefton, and the set designer, Meghan Raham, could have joined them for the well-earned applause.

Atmosphere is everything in a work like The Borderland. Cleverly, even as the audience is taking its seats, two of the play's actors, Carla Noack and Matthew Rapport, appear casually onstage: Rapport reads a newspaper while his co-star wanders around the living room set, as if in search of something. The play begins when the lights dim, but we have already been eased into the play's other world. The rain and the thunder outside the open windows lull the audience into a dreamy sleepy state, and Grimsley acts upon that effect to gradually open the audience's eyes wide, sometimes with fear but ultimately with an awareness of how others may know us better than we believe we know ourselves.

Noack and Rapport play Helen and Gordon Hammond, a successful, married couple who have moved from Atlanta to an out-of-the-way home, abutted by cornfields and trees-and, within view of their windows, a "shack," in Gordon's words, a run-down house kept, barely, by a couple about whom they know very little and Gordon, at least, thinks of equally little. Helen's persistence in standing in front of the bay windows-the spark for an argument that reveals how the couple's happiness itself is a form of décor to match their lovely living room-permits her to spy a figure running across the field separating their home from their peculiar neighbors'; and when that figure turns up at their door, wet and bruised, the drama begins properly.

Eleanor Rollins (Angela Cristanello) has run from her husband, Jake, after a fight: he is searching for her, while she has left their five small children alone in the house. Earlier, Grimsley sketches the neighbors' profile through another argument between Helen and Gordon, based on her brief encounter with Eleanor and Gordon's second-hand information from the local grocer. He thinks they are white trash and their troubles are their own, while Helen defends Eleanor, though she knows her only a little. Thus, we are prepared for trouble, and when the knock at the door comes we sense that the foul weather outside is making its way inside.

Of course, Jake (Matthew Brumlow) soon follows his wife to the Hammonds' front door-it is the stuff of Sam Shepard plays and Hollywood movies, and even of Greek myths. Trouble comes a-knocking in all forms; as the opposite couples begin their dramatic duet, in which Jake's neighborly politesse falls away in lieu of menacing profanities and threats and Gordon's assumed civilities turn to pompous lectures (and a gun), the playwright's themes emerge fully. They touch on Family and on the sense of  "the land," the presumptions we make about both-Jake says late in the play that he and his father used to hunt on the lands around them, long before the Hammonds' "shitass brick house" was built-and the proximity between wish fulfillment and a truly fulfilled life. (It is the borderland of the title.)

The opening scene's argument turns on the surprise that Helen's pregnancy is not happening, and further that the issue is not hers but Gordon's. Using that to illumine Gordon's preening self-judgments, Grimsley builds on the non-pregnancy as a metaphor for the shell life that the Hammonds live. At one point, Eleanor makes a joke about her five children, inferring that Jake has no difficulties in the baby-making department; while throughout, Jake calls his wife by the endearment "baby," which is demeaning yet also another subtle dig at Gordon's inability to come across as a successful husband and father in addition to his success at business. Jake and Eleanor's marriage appears to be a train-wreck, but then, once revealed, perhaps so is Helen and Gordon's. Would you choose brutal honesty over nicey-nice self-delusion? Eleanor, for all her horrible problems, is much more at peace with her marriage than Helen. Jim Grimsley's play, which seems at first to be about the commandment about coveting thy neighbor's wife, turns out to be about coveting thy neighbor's life. The surprise is that it is Jake and Eleanor's life together that anyone would possibly desire, even if they do not realize it.

For all of Grimsley's sureness in developing the thriller aspect, I would have hoped for some fewer jarring touches. Jake's role is the archetypal lead-footed monster of pulp fiction, however much he ideally represents the monster of our unconscious. Though his dialogue alternates between the high and the low, like Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lector, to make the audience engaged even as it is enraged, Jake's he-man philosophy is too cliché-ridden to win us over. When, alone with Helen, he presses her up against a wall and begins to fondle her, with the barest intimation that she might accept his manly approach after her husband's infertility, it is both the natural follow-through of the playwright's storyline and too predictable to take seriously. It works only because of Gordon's stumbling bloodied entrance-out in the field, he shoots himself with his own gun. It is a joke worthy of any black humor of Edward Albee's and an active metaphor.

Delicately constructed plays like The Borderland need a master hand, so as not to overplay the dramatic hand. Jake is not Freddy Krueger, nor is he Stanley Kowalski, necessarily, but a writer's messenger; as such, his specifically written role needs a performance that does not come charging out of the gate like a horse at the Kentucky Derby. Matthew Brumlow (who has played Stanley) does not always find something fresh to evoke from his cracker character, but the Rep's Assistant Artistic Director Kyle Hatley's steadying direction keeps Brumlow focused in a sneaking Iagoesque manner without too many mannerisms. At the other extreme, Carla Noack is both so natural and so persuasive at Helen's role that she might be Helen; to discover that this tall, self-possessed woman is mousy in real life would be a shock. We always hear about Meryl Streep's acting genius and how she can adapt to any accent or part; but like The New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael who felt Streep acts, consciously, with every pore, I prefer an actor like Noack, who makes you forget who she is, much less whom you are.


REVIEW:
The Borderland
by Jim Grimsley
Runs April 3-26
Call or visit the website for performance times.
Copaken Stage, 13th and Walnut, Downtown Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-235-2700 or online at www.kcrep.org

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.