Wednesday 12 August 2015

#12. Mysterious Skin

Mysterious Skin by Prince Gomolvilas, based on the novel by Scott Heim
Premiere: New Conservatory Theatre Centre, San Francisco (2003)

Peter Darney's production of Mysterious Skin was first seen at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010, and has gone on to several further award-winning productions around the UK. It is now back at the King's Head for only a week, and is really worth catching. The production is a bit of a tricky one to write about, because while I want to highly recommend you go see it, it is not without its flaws. 

Perhaps best known for its 2004 film adaptation starring a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mysterious Skin tells the story of two late-teenage boys struggling with confused memories of something traumatic that happened when they were eight. Brian has nosebleeds and suspects an alien abduction, encouraged by needy fanatic Avalyn. Neil works as a hustler in New York and is unable to shift a sexual fixation with older men. The boys' stories exist in parallel, but finally come crashing together with both being forced to confront a painful truth. 

Brian is stuck in small-town Kansas, fascinated by UFOs and plagued by fragmented dreams that he is beginning to suspect may in fact be memories. He finds Avalyn, a thirty-something sci-fi enthusiast convinced of her own abduction, and she is desperate to help Brian decode the truth of his. He gradually reveals his own hazy memories to Avalyn, which she interprets as further proof; he has blackouts and moments of 'lost time' that he has no memory of at all, a kind of selective amneisa. Neil is living with Wendy in New York, an old friend with an unrequited crush on him. We learn that he has been hustling from the age of fifteen, but first had sex at the age of eight - an experience he remembers strangely fondly. 
The two central performances, from Nick Hayes and Bryan Moriarty, more than make up for shortcomings in other areas of this production.
The characters are extraordinarily contrasting, and Gomolvilas does well to draw the characters further and further apart, it would seem, as the play progresses. Neil has a harrowing experience with a 'john' with HIV/AIDS and is beaten up by an aggressively dominant man; both experiences shake his swaggering confidence, while Brian and Avalyn discover a spate of brutally massacred cows that seem to have been more subjects of alien experiments. Of course, what is actually happening is they are getting closer and closer together. Brian inadvertently discovers that the boy in his recurring dreams was on his Little League team, and tracks him down. Neil arrives back in Kansas, escaping the difficulties of New York, to be confronted by a determined Brian demanding answers.

There are some gorgeous moments along the way in the performances from Bryan Moriarty as Brian, and Nick Hayes as Neil. They hold their own in their separate worlds as foundation stones for the piece. Moriarty ably plays Brian's confused reliance on Avalyn, while Hayes is magnetic as the swaggering Neil. Hayes performance is astonishing, really capturing the sense of fight in Neil; fighting to seem confidence, fighting to be beyond his years, fighting to be comfortable in himself. Beneath this, there is a beautiful sense of self-doubt that seeps through just enough to know that it is there. It is a wonderfully strong, precise, sensitive performance. 

It is a shame that the passing cameos of other characters are less sensitively portrayed and tend towards broad Americanised caricatures of overly camp rent boys and brainless hill billy's. These moments, if handled more deftly, would be comic but also contribute to the taught psychological drama that Gomovilas has constructed. Sadly they are somewhat reductive. I also missed having the dichotomy of age present on stage. The whole cast is charmingly youthful, but I feel this might be misplaced. It might be more effective to find the ghost of older men that hang over all the sexual encounters in the play to have an older man in the cast playing the older characters. This is sadly absent.

From the moment Moriarty and Hayes are alone on stage, the production ascends to a new height. Their chemistry is astounding; there is an electric tension between the two. They are brutally honest in their performances, unafraid to venture where the challenging material insists they must go. Hayes' Neil takes Brian back to the place where it all happened, a simple house that used to be owned by their Little League coach. It becomes clear that there were no aliens, no abductions, but the much more harrowing truth of human malignancy. Gomolvilas excels here; Brian needs the whole truth, and Moriarty portrays this desperation stunningly. Neil is forced to relive the experience, going into all the graphic, sordid details. The final touch of genius is that Neil does not relay this as rape or pedophilia or something wrong, but with the full child-like belief in his own love and admiration of their coach. He would do anything to make the man he loved proud, even if that was at the expense of Brian's innocence. Hayes' expertly portrays the disintegration of Neil's affected swagger as he almost becomes that little boy once again. The deeply damaging effects on both characters are not spelt out, but all too evident, like a great scar. The scene is haunting, disturbing, uncompromising and finally finds the razor-sharp poignancy, the raw, unsettling honesty of Gomolvilas' script. The alien, after all, is found in hopeless, mysterious humanity.

The production feels very intimate, staged in traverse at the King's Head, a tight space at the best of times. There is an appropriately bare stage, adequate to house the energetic playing of the story. There is a difficulty as the seating layout is rather off-balance, and the production has moments where it struggles to manage the challenges of playing to this audience configuration. 

The production makes surprisingly hard work of staging the piece in such an intimate setting; there are many jumps between locations and time periods, often with several co-existing in the space. The early scenes of the play feel rather frantic in terms of the directorial choices; there is a lot of rushing of actors to get from one spot on the stage to another, as if feeling the need to really spell out the transition to a different place. Combined with rather extreme shifts in lighting and a repeated clanging sound effect each time the characters enter a 'flashback' memory, all the rushing around seems unnecessary and eventually grates on one's nerves. The dynamism and pace that is perhaps being striven for actually just feels like the play is working too hard, and it becomes exhausting to watch (and in the heat of the studio, this is the last thing you need). 

The two central performances, though, more than make up for the shortcomings in other areas of this production. Gomolvilas' script has great resonance in a time where we are becoming almost desensitised to the increasingly common stories of pedophilia and rape popping up on a weekly bases in the news, and he channels the essence of the book into an admirable stage adaptation. A sorrowful, graphic but hopeful piece that is certainly worth seeing in a troubled and troubling production with outstanding performances.



Playing at the Kings Head Theatre until 14th August. Tickets available here.
Photos of 2011 London production

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