Perfectly In Place

Did Booker come after you also?

Pay attention to what Julianna chooses to divulge in the twisty thriller The Other Place. She has a tight grip on the narrative she wants to convey, but her words and turns of phrase often betray her intentions. "Have you always been this elusive?" someone asks her. The answer, as teased out by playwright Sharr White in his New York debut, is both yes and no.

At the medical conference on St. Thomas that opens the play, Julianna is making her sales pitch for a new medication that may be a neurological breakthrough. Among the sea of business suits and not-quite-sober doctors, however, Julianna spots a young woman in a yellow bikini. Before she can help herself, she begins taunting the woman from the stage, while wallowing in the flood of remorse that fills her almost immediately.

Interspersed throughout her speech are sudden, intentionally jarring shifts to Julianna fighting with her oncologist husband at home, and a female doctor interviewing Julianna about what Julianna insists on referring to as the "episode" that occurred during the St. Thomas presentation. "It’s brain cancer," Julianna keeps repeating like a mantra, while she struggles over the phone to reconnect with her daughter, who disappeared years ago as a teenager and has only recently reestablished tentative contact.

As the pieces of Julianna’s ragged narrative begin to fit together, the truth underlying her interpretation of the facts acquires an alarming cast. Seemingly taking the production’s tone from Eugene Lee’s set, three walls of overlapping window frames, some empty and some still holding dusty panes of glass, director Joe Mantello does some of his best work with White’s cerebral mystery, aided immeasurably by a hair-raising performance from Laurie Metcalf as Julianna.

Metcalf embraces the character’s bottled rage, usually expressed via a tight smile but erupting with increasing frequency as her belief in what she considers to be the unassailable facts of her life begins to loosen. Her husband (Dennis Boutsikaris) refuses to believe that their daughter has reappeared after years of silence; her doctor (Aya Cash, in one of multiple roles) keeps surreptitiously testing Julianna throughout their interviews, a fruitless enterprise, Julianna claims, since cognitive testing won’t help her cancer.

White juggles the various pieces of his play with a skillful hand, folding them together with an uncanny ability to know exactly how much to give away and when.

As the truth of Julianna’s story begins to take shape, Metcalf’s smile gets a little more lopsided, her voice a little louder until the final, heartbreaking scene at the Cape Cod home she and her husband sold years before, "the other place," as they call it. By then, Julianna’s fate seems inescapable, until White includes a gently redemptive epilogue, one that embraces the humanism that Julianna struggled to access throughout her scramble to reassemble the pieces of her life into something less painful.

With The Other Place and Lincoln Center’s Other Desert Cities, Mantello is proving his adeptness at family dramas that could slip into melodrama with a less sure directorial hand. He shows an affinity for the complex relationships that grow and develop over the course of a life lived, and the ways in which we can hurt and betray both ourselves and the ones we love most. In Metcalf and Mantello’s hands, Julianna’s lashing out is both an indicator and a disguise, affording an actress at the top of her game with a career-redefining role—and audiences with a valid reason to actively engage in a play, rather than sit back to be merely entertained. 

>>The Other Place

Through May 1,

Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St. (betw. Bleecker & Hudson Sts.), 

212-279-4200; $20–$95.