4000 Miles

Vera is a 91-year-old ex-hippie Marxist. Leo is her grandson, who has just completed a bicycle ride across America. He arrives at Vera’s Manhattan apartment at 3am, unexpected, exhausted, smelly. It doesn’t seem like the beginning of a play that would win awards and be playing across the world within a year, but the relationship created between these two beautifully drawn characters, and the depth of the ground they cover, proves Amy Herzog to be a playwright of immense talent and perception.

Combine this with a sensitive director such as Anthony Skuse, who guides his cast to find the subtlety and strength in Herzog’s characters, and you have a production that is at once heart-warming and funny – and completely memorable.

Vera and Leo, played by Diana Mclean and Stephen Multari, establish, from the moment their eyes meet across the stage – he with bike and backpack, she in nightdress and no hearing aid – an electricity that sparks and connects throughout the play. Here are two characters that, despite their double generation gap, are very much alike.

Leo is a bit of a rebel. Rather than going to college, he’s achieved the altruistic ambition of riding across across America, celebrating the 4^th of July right in the centre of the country. But he’s carrying the burden of something horrific that has happened along the way. Multari, under Skuse’s deft direction, finds all the intricacies of this young character – suppressed angst, optimism, underlying ambition, warm understanding, and total joie de vivre – expressed through tightly controlled physicality, telling pauses where his eyes, playing out to the audience, show the depth of his immersion in the character.

Vera was a rebel. She still surrounds herself with the Marxist books of her hippie days. She understands Leo – and provides a haven for him to regain some equilibrium. Diana Mclean creates a very real and lovable Vera. From the moment she walks haltingly on to the stage she establishes an old woman who won’t give in to frailty. She is ‘with it’ despite the fact that she ‘can’t find the word’ and needs a hearing aid. Mclean finds all the compassion and humour of the character that Herzog has very lovingly and carefully created in Vera. She is sensitive to the nuances in the dialogue. Her hesitations are just long enough; her eyebrows rise just far enough; her wry facial expressions perfectly match the throwaway dialogue so typical of the character, and so tellingly funny.

Eloise Snape, plays Leo’s girlfriend Bec. It is a small role, but she finds the despair and estrangement Bec is feeling.

Aileen Huynh obviously revels in the gift of a role that Herzog has created in Amanda, a young Chinese New Yorker who Leo meets and brings home after a night out. She plays the tipsy, over-the-top character with amazing dexterity following Skuse’s very clever and carefully choreographed direction. This character could become a caricature, a stereoptype, but in this production she is a lovable young woman, slightly the worse for drink, but very real and feisty.

There is so much more that could be said about the play, the writing itself and the direction of this production. There are some very deep scenes some very funny scenes, some very clever directorial decisions, some very memorable performances. But they need to be seen to appreciate them properly. Try and get to see this production! You’ll be glad you did!

Carol Wimmer

Images: Diana McLean and Stephen Multari. Photographer: Gez Xavier Mansfield.