Michael McKeever and Laura Turnbull in Distracted.By Hap Erstein
With two parts wisecracks and one part wisdom, Lisa Loomer has aimed her word processor at some of contemporary life’s intriguing social issues.
She has illuminated our views on employing Third World nannies (Living Out), body modification rituals (The Waiting Room) and efforts to become parents (Expecting Isabel) with highly theatrical humor.
Belonging unmistakably to that same family of plays is Distracted, a look through the comic microscope at the perplexing epidemic of the childhood condition, attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder. Now receiving its area premiere at Boca Raton’s Caldwell Theatre, the play is certainly informative, supplies laughs at regular intervals, and is directed capably by Clive Cholerton in a expertly performed production with first-rate video visuals culled by Sean Lawson.
But eventually Loomer feels compelling to provide a solution to this medical stumper, or at least some solace for parents driven to distraction by their overly rambunctious offspring. And when she does, it is with a tidy, simplistic homily that all but destroys the goodwill she had amassed up to that point.
Helping considerably to finesse the script’s eventual letdown is Laura Turnbull as the mother of a 9-year-old suburban hellion named Jesse. Audience members with a world view like W.C. Fields’ will be pleased and relieved to hear that the tot is heard, but not seen, for most of the evening.
Still, he is on everyone’s mind as Mama – yes, that’s the only label Loomer gives her – begins her journey of discovery, visiting clueless, contradictory doctors, impatient, disinterested teachers and meddlesome neighboring moms, trying to find a way to restore some normalcy – whatever that is – to Jesse and her family.
She finds that there is no magic pill solution, but there is Ritalin, which is unlikely to cure the boy, but it can help keep him focused or at least quieter in class. Jesse’s dad (understandably perplexed Stephen G. Anthony) is staunchly against medicating the boy, feeling that ADD is something one simply grows out of in time, but Mama succumbs to the pharmaceutical exit strategy.
Loomer jumps her characters around in time and space, as if the play had come down with a bit of ADD itself. And while she is not suggesting that 21st-century media overload is a cause of ADD, it’s not helping matters, either. The production design is dominated by two oversized video screens that bombard us with information and images, suggesting the electronic assault we have learned to live with and assimilate.
One of Turnbull’s most striking features are her deeply affecting, mournful eyes, which certainly come in handy here, but she is also a deft comedienne, and she earns all of the laughs that Loomer tosses her way, amid the anguish. Michael McKeever is all about comedy as a succession of physicians or, rather, as an ADD-addled actor turned functional by Ritalin, allowing him to play a succession of physicians.
And while her subplot is a tangent from the main story, motor-mouthed Nikki Bromberg is a genuine find as Jesse’s babysitter, a teen in pain whose cry-for-help habit of cutting herself has led to her own medication.
Toss in entertaining support from the long-absent Kim Cozort, Lela Elam and Kim Ostrenko, and you have a brisk evening of theater. It could have been a far better one, though, if Loomer had accepted that it is enough to ask questions rather than provide a facile answer.
DISTRACTED, Caldwell Theatre, 7901 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton. Through May 16. Tickets: $34-$55. Call: (561) 241-7432 0r (877) 245-7432.