[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of BROOKLYN’S WAY, a world premiere production by critically acclaimed playwright Sam Henry Kass, directed by Ronnie Marmo and running through October 13, 2024.
With moments and mirages that can only have been wrung from truth and a broken heart, Brooklyn’s Way is a story about love, loss, blame and regret. But it’s also a stunning and brutally poetic reminder that choices made, for whatever the reason, can wreck, ruin or release us. Often, all at once, and the people we collide with in our lives, leave scars…and sometimes those scars are beautiful.
The story revolves around two writers. One just starting out as a writers assistant and the other older, brilliant but jaded. Looking for a way out of his creative culdesac as a writer on a hit show manipulated by producers and well passed it’s due date, Scoot falls hard for Brooklyn and her “way.” She’s a mirror to him. But not a harsh one. When someone loves as deeply as this they shine with it, altering the very air around them. Charging the atmosphere and pulling the object of desire hopelessly toward them, how can you ignore that? How can you live without it and if you choose to, how can you then ever forgive yourself?
I was very fortunate to see a stage reading of this gorgeous, funny and heartbreaking show a couple of years ago while Sam Henry Kass was developing it. It was incredible…with two actors on a stage just reading it. Imagine how it is now then, fully fledged. Simply staged, with Ronnie Marmo’s direction expanding on this heavenly footprint, this play teases the audience from the very first line. It toys with honesty. Like a memory of a monumental moment, we see only what a mind chooses to remember. So this play becomes a litany of pivotal moments in a relationship doomed from the start. But there’s nothing cliche about Brooklyn’s Way. It unfolds like a Radiohead love song. “A job that slowly kills you, bruises that won’t heal.”
Honestly, I’m a bit biased about Sam Henry Kass. I’ve seen many of his plays produced at Theatre 68 over the years and he is an incredibly gifted innovative writer.
The characters he creates are weird, loud, broken and real. He has a magical ability to imprint tenderness on the toughest of skins. He unlocks characters with the pressures of life and we watch, unable to look away as the unrelenting dissection reminds us over and over again of our feeble, hapless and ultimately incandescent souls.
Sam Henry Kass loves the world and all who inhabit it even as we destroy ourselves and each other and even as he brutally breaks open stories within us and examines the flaws and the foibles and our irritatingly incessant self-destructive habits. Brooklyn’s Way is deeply romantic as it marks the arc of love and leaving. But it’s written by the mind of a man who plays with cynicism and denial as one might play with a kitten. So the romance is caught between the two lives lived. One real and one imagined. There’s a lot of breaking the 4th wall and in some ways the 5th and the 6th (whatever they may be)…but none of it feels contrived or heavy handed. The characters merely reach out to us, sometimes for a laugh and sometimes because they need to diffuse the intensity of what is happening to them. And sometimes to help us see that you can love like this and leave it without breaking apart. Loving someone completely and forever can sometimes mean you don’t have to burn everything down around you.
These two truly fine actors have an extraordinary and magical connection. There’s an awful lot of dialogue in all of Sam Henry Kass’s work and Brooklyn’s Way is no exception. You have to pay attention. You have to keep up. But the barrage of poetic heat-fused repartee is achingly good and so incredibly worth every second of your attention.
Amye Partain plays Brooklyn with a depth and a vulnerability that belies her yearning for the love of Scoot and Jonathan R. Freeman is her willing beautifully perceptive foil. Brooklyn’s Way is utterly irresistible. How do two people love each other so much it changes the course of of their lives, the source of their strength and even the substance of their souls?
It is better to have loved and lost than ya-de ya-de ya…but really? Is it? I suppose we can most of us recall the distress of love. The madness of it. The blind, deaf dumbness of it and still long for those first few minutes, moments, weeks of sweetness before the fall. Sam Henry Kass give us that with this play and so much more. He mixes the longing with the despair. The falling with the final impact. The flush with the fate.
It’s a beautiful hilarious profoundly wrought piece that has been explored without fear by the actors, the writer and the director, all coming from their own unique perspectives and all bringing with them the delightful baggage of understanding…as do we all when it comes to love.
I highly recommend Brooklyn’s Way by Sam Henry Kass…miss it at your ultimate peril!
When:
Through October 13
Friday and Saturday @ 8pm and Sunday @ 7pm
Where:
Theatre 68
5112 Lankershim Blvd., NoHo Arts District 91601
Tickets:
https://www.onstage411.com/newsite/show/play_info.asp?show_id=7151