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Johnna Adams' Sans Merci is a test in emotional endurance: Where some dramas prod, this one pummels. For much of the play, directed by Antonio Sonera, the blows come steadily and hit squarely. But in throwing a final punch that's more shock tactic than effective dramatic climax, Sans Merci steamrolls the nuance that's come before. After Badass Theatre Company's remarkable first production, 2013's Invasion!, this is a letdown.
Local audiences may know Adams from Gidion's Knot, staged last season by Third Rail. Like that play—which centers on a mother aggressively teasing out the details of her son's suspension from school—Sans Merci begins with an unexpected confrontation. Elizabeth (Luisa Sermol), one of those rare Republicans with a master's degree in poetry, has just arrived in Los Angeles, where she knocks on the apartment door of a 20-something named Kelly (Jessica Tidd). The two have never met, but it's quickly apparent why Elizabeth is here. Her daughter Tracy was murdered while traveling with Kelly on a humanitarian mission in Colombia, and she wants answers. And not just about Tracy's death—she also wants to meet the woman who seduced her daughter into a sinful lesbian relationship.
The conversation that unfurls is volatile and painful. Elizabeth might make babbly small talk about the weather and her first visit to a "lesbian apartment," but she also blames Kelly—a Dr. Martens-clad, bleeding-heart activist on a raw-food diet—for, well, everything. Kelly blames herself for Tracy's death, too. After all, she invited her girlfriend on the ill-fated South American trip. In flashbacks, we see Kelly and Tracy (Jahnavi Caldwell-Green) together at college—they first meet in a feminist literature class, of course—and in Colombia.
The flashbacks are fine, and as the young couple, Tidd and Caldwell-Green are credibly hesitant at first and later smitten with each other. The better exchanges, though, are those between Sermol and Tidd that explore the perversity of grief: how we wish we could wear our misery like a scar across our face, forcing everyone to see it; or how we're stubbornly glad when the pain refuses to fade. In the production's most lived-in and affecting performance, Sermol chatters from nervousness and keens in agony.
But for a play that attempts to excavate the messiness of emotion, Sans Merci is
overwritten and too carefully choreographed (the extended Keats
quotations hardly help). After several false endings, it rockets to a
blistering frenzy, with a final monologue ripped straight from
Euripides' playbook. It's bold, to be sure. But where Invasion! managed to balance shock with sensitivity and stealth, Sans Merci cudgels us into oblivion.
SEE IT: Sans Merci is at Portland Actors Conservatory, 1436 SW Montgomery St., badasstheatre.org. 7:30 pm Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 pm Sundays through Oct. 11. $10-$20.
WWeek 2015