Review: Stuck in Maine in ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’

Review: Stuck in Maine in ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’

10/09/2019

In Robert Frost’s famous poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” the New England bard evokes from the changing seasons a sense of continuous loss: “Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief.” In Chad Beckim’s play of the same name, there’s similar grief and, more important, circuity. But the show remains steadfastly prosaic, never rising to the heights of poetry.

Instead of the New Hampshire and Massachusetts of Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” a Partial Comfort production at the A.R.T./New York Theaters, brings us to a corner of Maine where the big delights are discussions of “Bob Saget’s man gland” and trips to the Olive Gah-den. (Jason Simms’s set design, garish grandmother chic that would make Bobby Berk cry, beckons to the lower middle class but also skews too old-timey, making the decade unclear.)

Here, Clay (Micheál Richardson) prepares to depart for college, leaving behind his girlfriend, Jess (Talene Monahon). When Jess has a falling out at home, she moves in with Clay’s mom (Mary Bacon) and gets a job with his sister, Tanya (Adrienne Rose Bengtsson), at a chicken farm.

But Jess soon falls into a pattern of bad behavior (the play calls itself a “love story for the opioid era,” after all) and drags down those around her, including Clay and her brother Jamie (Peter Mark Kendall).

Though the story heads toward tragedy, the route there is remarkably unremarkable. Under Shelley Butler’s direction, the production aims for a simmer that turns to boil, but suffers from an ultimate lack of urgency.

Part of the reason is Beckim’s obsession with loops, his characters’ self-destructive gyre leading one to observe, “This place is like a spider’s web. You stay long enough you’ll get stuck in it for good.” Yes, there’s a sense of being trapped in economically deprived New England, but it doesn’t explain or provide enough context for the characters’ inability to get beyond the same old, same old of their personal problems.

Richardson, the son of Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson, makes an unmemorable New York stage debut, though in key scenes Bengtsson, Kendall and Monahon, in particular, get to show off their stage smarts. But the characters and their relationships are too flimsy to give the drama its full heft.

And when Bacon, as Clay’s Carol Brady-type mom — tongue loosened by grief, red wine and THC candies — finally serves up a powerful and merciless speech, joke lines cheapen rather than enrich the performance.

Though Frost maintained that “nothing gold can stay,” some goodness remains, the play concludes. But the poet may have been right after all; whatever small measure of aureate glimmer and substance here is, ultimately, fleeting.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
Through Oct. 26 at A.R.T./New York Theaters, Manhattan; partialcomfort.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

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