“The Reservoir” at Atlantic Theater Company (Photo: Ahron R. Foster)
Isn’t it funny that within weeks of each other, there are two new Off-Broadway plays about addiction and recovery with ensemble casts full of New York’s finest actors? But wait – what if I also told you the playwrights are named Jake and Jacob?
Last week, I reviewed Jacob Perkins’ The Dinosaurs at Playwrights Horizons, a gentle, time-eliding look at the lives of six women in a recovery meeting. This week, Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir opened at Atlantic Theater Company and, though it shares some DNA with The Dinosaurs, it could not be further from its midtown cousin.
Josh (Noah Galvin) wakes up in Colorado and isn’t sure how he got there. The last thing he remembers is getting kicked out of rehab in Miami, yet here he is on the bank of the Cherry Creek Reservoir with an inexplicable wound on his forearm. His mother (Heidi Armbruster) is certainly also surprised to see him, considering the thousands of dollars she’s paid for his treatment.
As Josh makes a go at sobriety, he gets a job in a local bookstore and spends time with his four grandparents. Hank (Peter Maloney) and Irene (Mary Beth Peil) have recently moved to an assisted care facility as Irene is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s, which comes as a shock to Josh. He’d been too consumed with his own trials to learn that his grandmother was sick. His other grandmother, Beverly (Caroline Aaron), is a ball-busting, tough-love type, long divorced from his grandfather, Shrimpy (Chip Zien). As Josh attempts a better life for himself, he develops an obsession with improving the lives of his grandparents, too – perhaps as a distraction from his own troubles.
The Reservoir is an against-all-odds comedy. There’s alcoholism, there’s Alzheimer’s, there’s a fractured family, but it’s still so goddamn funny at every turn. It’s incredibly sweet, too, but not in the usual way where you want to sigh and roll your eyes. It’s sentimental, yet remains dramatically taut and, at times, harrowing. Brasch has created a family of characters you can’t help but love, each of them a little kooky, each of them with an enormous heart. That’s the real feat of Brasch’s writing: the subject matter is tough, but the play is infused with optimism – not in a blind way, though. It’s cautiously hopeful.
Director Shelley Butler’s production is set amidst a series of blue fabric panels representing the titular reservoir and, more potently, the “river of thought” that is constantly flowing through Josh’s brain. Takeshi Kata’s design evokes that well, but the set does feel a bit empty and a motorized platform that occasionally brings on furniture sticks out in the production’s overall ethos. Butler, Kata, costume designer Sara Ryung Clement, and lighting designer Jiyoung Chang have embraced color – and lots of it. This world is far from drab and depressing, it’s vibrant. The physical environment is in keeping with Brasch’s play: we’re talking about serious things here, but we’re not letting that define us. It’s full of life.
Each of the grandparents is well cast and they’re all game for the sometimes ribald humor in Brasch’s dialogue. Armbruster again proves that she’s one of the most underrated actors on the stage and Matthew Saldívar is excellent in a variety of supporting roles.
But it’s really Galvin’s central performance that makes the play. Galvin’s Josh is kind of weird, kind of goofy, and intensely magnetic. He’s unafraid to take a moment to process what’s happening, to search for what to do or say. He’s lost – he knows it, we all know it – and even surrounded by people who have fostered him with, apparently, nothing but love, he still finds himself without answers. Josh narrates to the audience throughout the play and Galvin finds a way to play this direct address without the kind of oratory overtones a lesser actor would fall into. His Josh is casual, easy to listen to, easy to believe. It’s one of the most assured, confident performances I’ve seen in a while.
The Reservoir wisely skirts the kind of teary, chest-pounding drama it could easily have fallen into. Instead, it leaves those tears to the audience. Brasch wins us over with humor and heart and then lets us also feel the loss when it arrives. Josh loves his family, Brasch loves his characters, and I love this play.