'Sixty Miles to Silver Lake'
A Page 73 and Soho Rep presentation of a play in one act by Dan LeFranc. Directed by Anne Kauffman.
Ky - Joseph Adams
Denny - Dane DeHaan
Nothing -- and everything -- happens in the hourlong car ride on a California highway depicted by Dan LeFranc in "Sixty Miles to Silver Lake." Time marches onward (and jumps backward) in this painfully honest two-hander about the fragile relationship between a divorced dad and the son he picks up every Saturday after soccer practice and drives to his home for the weekend. But to this alienated pair, it's one endless ritual of loving and hating and hurting. Joint production of Page 73 and Soho Rep is playing an Off Broadway contract, but a larger house would accommodate more weekend fathers and sons.
LeFranc has a golden ear for the inane conversations conducted by men in cars: those awkward attempts by fathers to talk like pals to their sons. Those infuriating nonresponses from kids who know exactly how to wind up the old man. The goofy jokes. The food demands. The fights over sports. The standoffs about music. The needling and wheedling that never, ever quits.
Scribe nails all this in the first scene, which tells us a lot about Ky (Joseph Adams) and Denny (Dane DeHaan).
Ky is bigger, so he must be the dad, although Adams turns in such a dead-on perf that he doesn't neglect the little-boy side of Ky's essentially immature character. From the too-broad grin and too-boyish shock of hair to the desperate looks darting from his sad eyes, this is one helluva well-made performance.
Denny is the kid, and isn't he an annoying brat in DeHaan's shrewd perf. Nose pressed against the window in full retreat from his blundering old man, Denny counters Ky's dumb questions and intrusive parental orders with every teenage weapon at his command: squirming, whining and making impossible demands. DeHaan saves the kid's bacon by preserving the intelligence LeFranc gave him and by allowing glimpses of the emotional need fueling his hurtful anger.
With helmer Anne Kauffman ("The Thugs") calling the shots, Adams and DeHaan seamlessly go through the ritual moves. Ky heavy-handedly interrogates Denny about his mother, her boyfriends, her spending habits. Denny claims ground by reporting all the bad stuff his mother says about his father and by demanding everything under the sun from videogames to junk food.
But most of all, and most persuasively, Denny keeps asking Ky to take an interest in his soccer-playing efforts -- a plea that goes over his distracted father's head. And right away, we know this relationship is doomed to be another painful case of mixed signals and missed chances to communicate.
And then something subtle shifts in the dynamic. By expanding the time line of this endless journey, scribe tries to take the parent-child disconnect back to its beginnings -- while fast-forwarding to its surreal conclusion.
The onstage moves are actually too subtle to support LeFranc's dramatic ambitions. Although the playwright wants to make the point that nothing really changes and nobody ever grows in this relationship, the helmer and her designers could be a tad more generous about indicating that this nonchange is happening in a flexible time frame.
Technical flaws aside, both the play and its players make it clear enough that, behind the combative behavior of this alienated father and son, there's a terrible unanswered need for love on both sides.
Set and costumes, Dane Laffrey; lighting, Tyler Micoleau; projections and sound, Leah Gelpe; production stage manager, Rebecca Goldstein-Glaze. Opened Jan. 22, 2009. Reviewed Jan. 20. Running time: 1 HOUR, 15 MIN.
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Date in print: Fri., Jan. 23, 2009