BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI ARTS

A review of 4,000 Miles by Amy Herzog, now running through June 1 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Unicorn Theater, Stockbridge. Cast: Evan Silverstein (Leo), Gabriela Torres (Bec), Alison Ye (Amanda), and Maria Tucci (Vera). Directed by Lizzie Gottlieb. 1 hour, 50 minutes, no intermission. Box office 413-997-4444. BerkshireTheatreGroup.org. PLANET RATING, 0 to 5 stars: ****1/2

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY MAY 20, 2024) — Family.

Talk about a loaded word.

Everyone has one, comes from one, has one to embrace or escape. Family is the bind that ties, an adaptable stricture that can be a straight jacket of meddling or provide safe harbor to keep one from drifting. Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles presents a family as both. Can there be any other truthful depiction?

Twenty-one-year-old Leo Joseph-Connell (Evan Silverstein) knocks unexpectedly on the door of Vera Joseph, his 91-year-old-grandmother (Maria Tucci). It’s 3 a.m., and he’s just completed a 4000-mile bike trip from Seattle to Vera’s NYC apartment in the West Village. The lad has lost his best friend, is in the middle of a romantic breakup, and estranged from his suffocating mother, Vera’s daughter. Leo is where so many of us are, were, or will be at 21–in the middle of a whirlpool, lost in a confusion of identity and an ebb-tide of love and loss whose tidal pull threatens to drag him out to sea, where he will hear distant voices and drown.

———- ooo ———

Maria Tucci as Vera. Photos courtesy of BTF.

Leo arrives for the most pragmatic reason: He has nowhere else to go. As Robert Frost observed, home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. He tells an irritated Vera he only plans to stay the night, but his grandmother, quickly softening up to her unexpected visitor, has other plans. She “goes full grandma” on him, washing his clothes, giving him money, feeding him. It’s a welcoming he can’t refuse. The one night turns into a month, a transformative four weeks where the 70-year age gap proves as distant and as near, as sad and fulfilling, as his 4,000-mile Via Dolorosa, a trip begun as a get-away from his mother in St. Paul and ending in the West Village. On the journey, he’s lost his best friend in a horrific road accident with a truck.

Leo’s alone but not more so than his feisty grandmother, whose years of isolating widowhood have left her with the worst kind of self-sufficiency, that of a survivor’s resignation. This solitary woman has settled into the fugue state of routine, distanced from the world by old age and the outside’s headlong rush toward the technocracy, where pace knows only one state: faster.

While Vera has stayed still, the world has gotten itself in a blurring hurry. She has a Mac laptop but doesn’t know how to use it. There’s no smart phone in the apartment. Instead, we see a ’70s-era wall phone in Partridge-Family olive green. Only the orange countertops are missing. Leo gets the computer going and Vera as well. He knows the password for both. Confessions of loneliness bring this odd couple together, and we witness a mutual healing based on openness and vulnerability whose intersection defines trust.

———- ooo ———-

4,000 Miles is what THE PLANET calls a “casting play.” Sure, all theatrical productions live or die in the acting, but the focus on performance intensifies in what is essentially a two-person play. It’s first-rate writing that can be acted badly. Having a drama hang on the relationship between a 21 year old and a 91 year old looks good on paper, brimming with possibilities. There’s no room for mediocre, serviceable, or even good performances. It needs two lead actors capable of and delivering brilliance.

Fortunately, Gottlieb has Tucci and Silverstein. She knows what to do with them.

4,000 Miles, an intimate exploration of relationships and healing, finds a perfect setting in the closeness/nearness of the Unicorn, at the top of THE PLANET‘s list of local venues. The 70-year age difference alone sets up a few ripe, low-hanging situations, and Gottlieb picks every one–shattering, comedic, nostalgic, bruising, argumentative, consoling.

Evan Silverstein as Leo.

Tucci, an old pro’s old pro with 14 Broadway credits, at 83 has to punch 8 years above her age. No problem. She squeezes every stiff movement of its aches, turns each step into a shuffling walk, and parses the idiom out of each syllable and phrase. What remains hangs as an atmosphere, a redolence, in the apartment set as a kind of prop in itself. Everything old stands in sharp contrast with the lithe moves of youth.

Silverstein, back for the second time at the BTF (The Goat or Who is Sylvia?), bursts into rooms, drops to the couch as if he’s doing a reverse belly flop. He doesn’t rise but catapults out of a chair. His Leo embodies impetuous, infuriating, intransigent, introspective, inundated, indubitable but ultimately invaluable youth.

Leo’s not the child he used to be, but he’s yet to become the adult that lies in wait. He possesses a treasure, youth, of which he cannot be aware, for at each moment, he’s literally the oldest he’s ever been.

What at first might pass as nuance turns out to be the shifting positions of his rootlessness. He’ll go. He’ll stay. He doesn’t want money. Oh, okay, he’ll take some cash. That’s evidence of Silverstein’s astute penetration into the character he’s portraying. Tucci’s Vera is there for him as a fixed point, a kind of North Star from which Leo will ultimately find not just the other three directions but his direction in life. He will find his Self himself.

———- ooo ———-

As the play works through its 110 minutes, Tucci and Silverstein carve out of their contrasts a yin and yang that by play’s end forms a perfect circle. Her forgetfulness borders on dementia. He fills in the blanks. His rootlessness approaches being cast adrift. She serves as an anchor. Technology has left her behind. He’s been so immersed in the blasted stuff that he’s okay if he goes screen-less for the rest of his life.

Gabriela Torres and Maria Tucci.

The play’s most affecting moment comes when Leo unburdens himself to his grandmother. Tucci sits on the couch saying nothing while Silverstein delivers Leo’s soliloquy of woe. Through a downward expression of wistfulness, not just of knowledge but of Knowing, Tucci makes one realize that she’s doing the talking. It’s her grandson, with his word salad, who’s doing the listening. What a great moment.

Through osmosis, you get the feeling that she’s absorbing the energy of youth’s crazy optimism while he’s taking in her stoicism and the ability to endure. Thus, when Leo’s on-again off-again girlfriend Bec (Gabriella Torres) tells him they have to break up, the kid can handle it in an adult manner.

Torres’ Bec torments Leo with her relationship complaints. Silverstein’s look of “men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus” bafflement steals those scenes. Every guy who’s ever had a girl knows the feeling.

Torres does a good job, except for the need to slow down. The young actress seems to equate anger with speed, leading to a delivery of lines at times robbed of fullness and, at times, indecipherable. It might be a case of nerves, but the edginess can shoehorn in with her exasperated tone. It’s a tight fit.

Allison Ye.

One night Leo brings to the apartment a pick-up, Amanda, adeptly played by Allison Ye just short of over the top. She’s an oversexed ditz with the depth of a communion wafer and the appeal of a fantasist.

Amanda too is the playwright’s lament on how far the world has come (pun intended) since Vera’s days at a late teen. Being a 19-year-old girl in 2007 (the play’s time period) and 1937 alludes to an enormous gap in morals into which the old way of life tumbles and falls to the canyon floor, like Wile E. Coyote, with a splat.

The plunge gets delightful treatment when Vera enters the living room while Leo and Amanda are just about to “do it.” She bids a hasty, self-conscious retreat. It’s one of the play’s several comic moments.

Ultimately, Amanda rejects Leo because he may be a communist. See, she finds a communist tract in the bookshelf, and, upon grilling, Leo admits his grandparents were once fellow travelers. Yes, that’s Amanda’s “depth.”

Perfect length, a brilliant cast, a touching and thoughtful play. THE PLANET highly recommends this engaging production.

—————————————————————–

“Memory, where is thy youth, that used to say that love is truth?” — Thomas Hardy.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

Copyright (c) 2024 By Dan Valenti, PLANET VALENTI and EUROPOLIS MANAGEMENT. All rights reserved. The views and opinions expressed in the comment section or in the text other than those of PLANET VALENTI are not necessarily endorsed by the operators of this website. PLANET VALENTI assumes no responsibility for such views and opinions, and it reserves the right to remove or edit any comment, including but not limited to those that violate the website’s Rules of Conduct and its editorial policies. Those who leave comments own all the responsibilities that are or can be attached to those comments, be they rhetorical, semantic, or legal. Such commentators remain solely responsible for what they post and shall be and remain solely accountable for their words. PLANET VALENTI shall not be held responsible for the consequences that may result from any posted comment or outside opinion or commentary as provided in, but not limited to, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and this website’s terms of service. We serve as a marketplace of ideas, without prejudice and available to all. All users of this site — including readers, commentators, contributors, or anyone else — hereby agree to these conditions by virtue of this notice and their use of/participation in this site. When PLANET VALENTI ends with the words “The Usual Disclaimer,” that phrase shall be understood to refer to the full text of this disclaimer.