The Pavilion

‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ said Thomas Wolfe.  True, but the wistful wish - or the overwhelming desire - that this not be true has fuelled many a story.  The Pavilion is another.  If only we could go back and take the other path.  Go back and make amends.  Have a second chance.  ‘If only…’ is an irrational but irresistible hook.

Craig Wright sets his story at a high school reunion in Pine City, Minnesota.  Welcome back, Class of ’95.  What better milieu: a venue filled with the cross currents of bubbling regrets both minor and major.  The pavilion of the title is the venue itself.  We learn it will be destroyed this very night to make way for a mall and parking lot.  Shades of Joni Mitchell’s ‘you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone…’

Mr Wright employs only three actors.  His central characters are Peter and Kari – the once-were-a-couple, the ‘cutest couple’ in their year.  But that was twenty years ago when they were seventeen.  Kari fell pregnant and Peter left town for college – without a word and he never came back – till tonight.  Now he’s a psychologist in LA with a couple of failed relationships behind him.  Kari, left behind in Pine City, let herself be ‘rescued’ by Hans, the local golf pro.  Deliberately childless, she works in a bank basement as a safety deposit box attendant.  Clearly the playwright did not choose these professions arbitrarily.  Peter is ‘romantic’.  Kari is matter of fact.  And the salient facts are that Peter abandoned her and that she’s married - unhappily maybe, but married. 

In this production (apparently the play has been done many times in the US since its first appearance in 2000), director Byron Bache trusts the text and his cast enough to eschew gimmickry.  Nick Casey’s design and Matt Osborn’s lighting work together to create a simple but suggestive look.

Much audience engagement and comic relief falls to the third cast member: the Narrator.  Claire Pearson handles this task extremely well.  It doesn’t seem to do any harm that the role was written for a male actor.  She might garble a little, but she attacks the overwritten narration with great brio.  There’s too much of that American faux poetic, faux philosophical guff, mostly in the service of stating the obvious: time keeps moving relentlessly forward, you can’t go back and the universe doesn’t care anyway.  However, Ms Pearson is fun and she gets a lot of laughs.  She often breaks the fourth wall – requesting sound effects and, in the second act, creating shooting stars by literally throwing them over the heads of Peter and Kari.  Best of all, she drops in and out of glimpses of Peter and Kari’s clearly delineated class of ’95 classmates – who all have their problems too.

Part of the reason the Narrator is so appealing is because she isn’t Peter or Kari.  They are pretty downbeat, not to say a couple of sad sacks.  We might invest more in them becoming a couple once more (surely what this sort of story invites us to hope for) and there’d be more dramatic tension if we didn’t guess so early that Peter’s quest to win Kari back is hopeless.  In the second act, it’s a little surprising that when Peter has as good as given up, Kari invites him to stay a little longer.

On the one hand, Peter doesn’t really acknowledge that what he did twenty years ago was all that bad.  He just wishes he hadn’t done it and he assumes Kari will forgive him because that’s what he wants.  There’s a noir-ish note here: Peter believes – fervently – that Kari will save him.  On the other hand, Peter is a whiner – and there’s no greater switch-off than self-pity – so we never believe Kari could save him.  These difficulties might be overcome if there were some chemistry between the actors – the sine qua non of a love story on stage or screen.  Tim Constantine, as Peter, comes across as a nice enough guy, but there’s no spark.  We never feel that if he just said the right thing, or touched her hand, she’d throw herself into his arms despite everything!  Katherine Innes as Kari is attractive in a cool and steely kind of way – an impression enhanced by Nico Wilsdon dressing her in a very straight, plain frock.  She might be resigned to her lot, but she exhibits a kind of strength that lessens Peter’s chances even more. 

But all that said, what saves The Pavilion from a trite and sentimental ‘happy ending’ is its unsentimental honesty.  Craig Wright (an alumni of such television shows as Six Feet Under and The United States of Tara) has written an unromantic, indeed anti-romantic, story.  Of course a guy like Peter won’t get Kari to run away with him that night or any other.  But even better, Kari doesn’t dismiss or diminish the happiness the two of them had when they were seventeen.  That’s why she delays his departure: to tell him that.  It’s a scene from the past that you can see in her words - a lovely and moving speech.  It’s just that Peter and Kari are not seventeen any more.  Excesses aside, The Pavilion is a subtle piece of writing that takes you quite deliberately, but believably and inevitably, to a tougher destination.  Truly, you can’t go home again.

Michael Brindley