and Angie Radosh, in Stuff.
By Hap Erstein
Prolific and eclectic. You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get with a Michael McKeever play. But if you don’t like one, don’t worry, there will be another along in six months.
As it happens, the Davie-based playwright-performer is serving up a winner currently with his new dark comedy, Stuff, now receiving its world premiere at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton through July 31.
It chronicles the eccentric lives of Homer and Langley Collyer, the infamous Harlem hoarders, who amassed ceiling-high stacks of newspapers, pianos and other collectible curiosities in their seedy mansion, where they died amid the clutter in 1947.
The obsessive Collyer brothers have been a fascination of McKeever’s since he was a boy. “My mom would come into my and my brother’s bedroom and say, ‘Oh, my god, it’s the Collyer mansion’,” McKeever recalls. “I grew up hearing ‘Collyer mansion,’ but I had no idea what it was,” beyond a negative role model of what his own room should not look like.
As a result, he has grown up with an aversion to becoming a hoarder. “Me? Oh, god, no. I definitely have a type A personality,” says McKeever. “I keep things that mean a lot to me, things from my youth. But I’m more, ‘You’re done with this magazine? OK, throw it away.’ If I were to keep everything, I‘d have a Collyer mansion.”
Trying for historical accuracy without limiting his dramatic license, McKeever looks at the Collyers at two points in their lives – 1929, just months before the stock market crash, when their hoarding began in earnest, and 1947, when their acquisitive impulses reached a conclusion.
What makes Stuff so interesting is how McKeever uses these two squandered lives of such promise to explore major themes, like the financial and racial inequities in society and the complex gravitational pull of family. There is plenty to laugh at in Stuff, but they are not empty laughs, as the play paints a surprisingly thought-provoking portrait of life – albeit not very typical life – in the 20th century.
“People ask me if it’s about hoarding and I say not really, it’s about this really twisted, wonderfully goofy, eccentric family,” says McKeever. “To me, the most interesting thing about them isn’t the fact that they collected all this stuff, but the dynamic between the two brothers and, for that matter, the mother as well. And to me, it’s all Oedipal, it all goes back to mom.”
As the first act illustrates, Homer and Langley led two very symbiotic, yet antagonistic lives. Each has ambitions beyond his given life of privilege, but those dreams are invariably quashed by their mother, Susie, bitter from her own failed opera career and the desertion of her husband. Homer yearns to buy some independence by purchasing the house across Fifth Avenue and becoming a landlord. Langley wants to resurrect his concert career as a classical pianist of undetermined talent. But Momma knows best, or at least how to manipulate her offspring and keep them under her thumb.
There are hints of the beginnings of the Collyers’ hoarding instincts in Act One, but after intermission – thanks to the ingenuity and resources of Caldwell scenic designer Tim Bennett – the mansion has gone to seed, filled with clutter forming a barricade of collected stuff, which hems in Homer and Langley and claustrophobically confines the action to a small downstage center area. There the brothers have also gone to seed, particularly Homer, now blind and disheveled, looking and behaving like a fugitive from a Samuel Beckett play.
Stuff is not only McKeever’s best script in quite a while – probably since his Carbonell Award winner Melt – but he has given himself a major acting plum in Homer, which he handles with impressive skill. His Act One performance does not break new ground, being a wisecracking whiner who gets tossed about, but his work in the second half shows a depth of feeling that is crucial to the play’s emotional core.
Director Clive Cholerton juggles the comedy and pathos ably, drawing strong performances from the rest of the four-member cast. Angie Radosh is genteel and iron-fisted as Mother Collyer, whose indulgence and disapproval are instrumental in sending her sons off on their rudderless existence. Nicholas Richberg (Langley) is everything Homer is not, except neurotic, and Marckenson Charles provides crucial support in two varied characters who stand in for the world outside the Collyers’ mansion walls.
While his main characters are certainly extreme, McKeever hopes he can draw an audience to their side.
“What I’m trying to do in putting these characters together, is for the audience to have great empathy towards them, to see that underneath all the craziness are two really, really likeable guys. Despite their abuse towards each other and the outside world, they really are two loving guys,” he says. “And ultimately they are victims of the times in which they lived and in the times in which they refused to live.”
As he succinctly sums up Stuff, it is “a look back at Americana from the turn-of-the-century to the 1940s, when everything was possible and the world was changing so quickly that some people simply didn’t have a chance to catch up. It’s a funny, fascinating look at the past — where we’ve been and how we got to where we are now.”
STUFF, by Michael McKeever; Caldwell Theatre Company, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, July 31. Tickets: $38-$50. Call: (561) 241-7432 or (877) 245-7432.