Soaring Above the Other Stars
High, the new
Broadway play starring Kathleen Turner as a recovering alcoholic nun, is
something of a prolonged magic trick featuring an assortment of magicians, an
appropriate enough choice for a play about religion and faith. Watch as David
Gallo’s minimalist set appears and disappears! Marvel at how director Rob
Ruggiero keeps Matthew Lombardo’s overwrought story in check! And gasp at
Turner herself, as she subsumes all of the husky-voiced, movie star glamour we
associate with her into her performance.
That Turner, one of the last seemingly intellectual sex bomb
leading ladies, can contribute a performance this deglammed is a tribute to her
skills—and her lack of vanity. Gone is the coltish figure of Body Heat, replaced by something more
human and middle-aged; her star dust is now liberally mixed with grit. Even the
famous voice has dropped, indicating a life less fraught with sexual promise
and more indicative of a woman who has already lived. All of that comes to bear in her turn as Sister Jamison, a
counselor for addicts at a Catholic church who meets her match in a young gay
junkie named Cody Randall (played by Evan Jonigkeit with scenery-chewing
relish), recently discovered in bed with the body of a 14-year-old who OD’d
under mysterious circumstances.
Sister Jamison has her own demons chasing after her, but
she’s running out of breath trying to outrun them. Her style of counseling is,
to put it mildly, confrontational, and after a few sessions with Cody, we get
the feeling that she’s not just furious with his resistance: she’s furious with
her own weaknesses. In a series of soliloquies—many of them laced with
profanity that could, in lesser hands than Turner’s, feel like cheap shock
tactics—Sister Jamison’s past is slowly, teasingly unveiled, so that her final
failure feels both unavoidable and all the more devastating for it.
Lombardo, who gave us a revisionist facile, factually
suspect Tallulah Bankhead bio play Looped
last season, here displays both a restraint and a lavish emotionalism. Faith is
discussed in ways that are rarely seen on stage; these nuns and Catholics
aren’t mere fodder for jokes, but real people struggling with their own
interpretations of what God is. For Sister Jamison, God is something of a
withholder, unwilling to help anyone who won’t ask for it. For her priest
(Stephen Kunken), God is more benevolent. And for Cody, God is someone who has
punished him with the life he has.
As these three speed along on a collision course that’s
visible from the play’s first moments, Ruggiero and Turner keep the show
grounded in a dogged realism. When Jonigkeit ends up naked and gnashing his
teeth during a relapse, only Turner’s terror and fury keep the scene from
feeling like a retread of the usual junkie writhings. In season glittering with
star power, Turner and High prove
that name recognition and genuine, transformative talent are not mutually
exclusive. Ultimately, the only magic Turner is weaving here is pure,
unvarnished emotional truth—and that’s something worth getting high over.
Through April 24, Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St. (betw. 7th &
8th Aves.), 212-239-6200; $61.50–$111.50.