Shayla (Abigail Hawk) takes a liking to Drew (Dominic Fumusa) in Grant MacDermott’s Jasper.
It is perhaps sign of these pandemic times that several Off-Broadway plays opening in the coming weeks all deal with severe illness. Manhattan Theater Club will stage Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living, featuring a character with cerebral palsy. At the Atlantic, Gracie Gardner’s I’m Revolting is set in a skin-cancer clinic, and next month the Roundabout offers a work by Noah Diaz with the on-the-nose title, You Will Get Sick. But first, the Yonder Window Theatre Company gives us Jasper, a thought-provoking drama in which a boy with a fatal illness tests the limits of his caring parents.
Playwright Grant MacDermott is concerned with some big questions—namely, when put in a position that requires selflessness, when is it O.K. to be selfish? And, when faced with a dilemma that calls for endless hope, when is it O.K. to move on? Finely acted under the sympathetic direction of Katie McHugh, the answers reveal themselves with minimal maudlin moments, one character’s habit of singing “You Are My Sunshine” notwithstanding.
Andrea (Jessica Pimentel) and Drew (Fumusa) find a tender moment.
It also helps that the action is constructed around a fresh twist on an old conceit. Instead of a cheating husband, no longer interested in his wife, who gets caught with lipstick on his collar, this husband still loves and is attracted to his spouse. And when he does meet an attractive other woman, his paternal instincts kick in and he falls for her child. When the wife ultimately finds out, it’s because his shirt is freshly laundered.
Jasper’s illness is never named, and he never appears on stage. In Act I, he is only a host of disquieting noises emanating from behind a bedroom wall in a working-class home in Queens. We do learn that he was not expected to live more than a year but has managed to survive for eight. His father, Drew (Dominic Fumusa), and mother, Andrea (Jessica Pimentel), have been through the wringer after years of clogged feeding tubes and unsuccessful cures. In their messy living room, they try to work out their messy lives, struggling to keep romantic flames afire despite bouts of guilt and feeling trapped:
Drew: We used to see late movies. And we could have drinks and sleep through the night without being scared to death. … We used to have friends. Friends that didn't have sick kids too.
Then, one morning as Drew takes the subway to his construction job downtown, he makes eye contact with a youngster in a stroller and is instantly cheered. The boy’s mother, Shayla (Abigail Hawk), is at first too busy on her cellphone to see the interaction, but after a bit of slapstick train-riding misadventure involving spilled coffee and tumbling bodies, the two adults are in full flirtation. Shayla reveals that she is a single mom to 4-year-old Tyler. Drew admits to being married, though he denies having a child. Soon enough he is neglecting both his work and family duties to meet Shayla and Tyler for outings at the park, basking in the normalcy of a healthy and active boy. For her part, Shayla tries to be cautious in letting this stranger from a train near her kid, but has trouble saying no to a strong man with keen parenting skills.
When the inevitable occurs, Andrea sniffing out an unfamiliar detergent on Drew’s shirt, and an unknown name in his phone contacts, it coincides with an upswing in their sex life but a decline in Jasper’s condition that will nearly tear their marriage apart even as they both come to accept their son’s dire fate.
Drew (Fumusa) and Andrea (Pimentel) face a crisis. Photographs by Russ Rowland.
Pimentel knows a thing or two about portraying confinement from her days on Orange Is the New Black. Her Andrea is both compassionate and biting. Fumusa is equally skilled in portraying a conflicted husband tormented by the fact he will never play catch with the right son. MacDermott intends that neither boy be seen, but the play suffers for the lack of an onstage Tyler, with the actors having to pretend he exists just offstage or across the fourth wall, an occasional toy car or ball rolling in from the wings as proof of life. The playwright also tends to err on the side of redundancy to drive home crucial points and perhaps has not spent enough time on the IRT to know that a meet-cute like Shayla and Drew’s is not really feasible. But he is successful, nonetheless, at breathing life into an encounter with death that is all too believable.
The Yonder Window Theatre Company production of Jasper runs through Oct. 6 at the Pershing Square Signature Center (480 West 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and at 8 p.m. Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. For tickets, visit yonderwindow.co/jasper.
