When confronted with an unspeakable event, some of us face it head on, while others—most of us, surely—retreat. We settle into a cocoon of avoidance and denial. We watch too much news or none at all. The most extreme of us abandon our lives and careers, move into cabins in the woods and commune with feral cats, at the risk of becoming feral ourselves.
This is how Audrey Batten (Elizabeth Dimon) reacts to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in Bruce Graham’s teachable new play “The Duration,” which is earning a powerful and often transcendent premiere from Palm Beach Dramaworks. A college professor exhausted, she says, of always “waiting for the copier” to be free at her elite university, one day she just packed up and left, moving to a rental cottage in rural Pennsylvania, an enclave of Confederate flags and fetus bumper stickers.
It isn’t long before she begins to adopt at least some right-wing ideas herself, as anti-Muslim hate crimes increase and a drumbeat for war intensifies. She starts putting on Fox News occasionally, then seemingly all the time, and reads The National Review—heresy in her former life—alongside Newsweek. An atheist liberal historian from New York, Audrey is seemingly the last person anyone would expect to burrow into a media diet of misinformation and reactionary politics. But 9/11 was a great cultural disrupter, scrambling the signals for millions of us. And as Graham peels back the layers of this fragile onion, we learn that her reasons are more personal than ideological.
The opposing perspective is offered just as forcefully by her daughter, Emma (Caitlin Duffy), a poet who divides her time between her mother’s experiment in isolationism (at one point, she fears her mom is becoming the Unabomber) and a grieving-families support group in Newark. In both places, she offers a clear-eyed critique of the U.S. government’s response to the attacks and the divisive jingoism that surrounds it (“This country reacts like a 4-year-old throwing a tantrum”), decrying the rebranding of “freedom fries” and cautioning her group about the Orwellian implications of the Patriot Act. She decries the widespread abuse of anyone appearing Middle Eastern in this country, predicting that the xenophobes will eventually find a different Other to hate: “Jews, Canadians …” This is Graham on his high horse, writing with the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, but the sermons are so urgently, compassionately delivered by Duffy that they resound in our bones.
Though shaped by tragedy, “The Duration” is not without its humor. Dimon, always the caustic professor, embodies Audrey’s sardonic bite and world-weary skepticism even when her character seems hopelessly entangled in a web of questionable “research.” Convincingly bisected between two worlds—the former life shared with her daughter and her adopted new one in the conspiratorial fringe—her tragicomic, lived-in performance is a wellspring of complexity.
Duffy is ever her equal, effectively exposing both the righteous surface of her character and the buried vulnerability of a person who is just as emotionally scarred as her mother. John Leonard Thompson, as the department chair of Audrey’s university, delivers a calibrated, understated performance in his one scene, playing, like Duffy, the cerebral counterbalance to Audrey’s gut-driven opinions.
Resident scenic designer Michael Amico crafted the production’s rustic cabin set, with its leaf-strewn pathway and functioning sink and patio door, the latest of Dramaworks’ admirable accommodations to verisimilitude. And Roger Arnold’s sound design brims with marvels, from startling gunshots to cats that seem to meow in stereo to the subtle drip of a coffee maker, the low whine of a teakettle, and the ambient twitter of songbirds. The TV volume even decreases when Audrey leaves the cabin and the earshot of the news anchors.
There is, finally, much credit to the production’s invisible hand, director J. Barry Lewis, who has guided his actors into what feels like a lifelong mother-daughter relationship, the authenticity of which surfaces with nuance, feistiness and finally tenderness. And when the two of them finally go head to head, the scenes play out, respectively, with an almost unbearable tension and an irrepressible crackle.
The macro impacts of 9/11 have been documented in innumerable projects over the past 22 years, but “The Duration” is one of the smartest, soberest and most deeply felt examinations of the micro shrapnel that embedded itself in countless families. I expect it to have a long shelf life after this world premiere.
“The Duration” runs through March 6 at Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Tickets cost $79. Call 561/514-4042 or visit palmbeachdramaworks.org.
For more of Boca magazine’s arts and entertainment coverage, click here.
