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Beate Hein Bennett
About the Closing of the Gate “Lakeplay”
To spend a romantic time in a cozy cabin by a lake in the Adirondacks was a heartfelt desire of many New Yorkers during the frightening times of pre-vax COVID! The playwright Drew Valins, an actor/playwright with a background in medical studies and an M.A. in Counseling Depth Psychology, wrote “Lakeplay” under the shadow of COVID, originally as a project for The Farm Theater Workshop, led by Padraic Lillis. The play is a mixtape of romantic love with comic touches plus mystery and psychological horror, set in a lakefront cabin during the chilly months of early COVID. The present production, directed by Hamilton Clancy, the Founder/Artistic Director of The Drilling Company, had a first public reading in a storefront on NYC’s Upper West Side in April 2023. The three characters are the proverbial New York artist types who have to support their artistic ambitions with more conventional work: Dan is a writer and (unhappy) teacher; Vibeke is a photographer; Kimber is sculptor and the manager of the lake-front cabin. The couple Dan and Vibeke (a.ka. Vib) used to live on the Lower East Side [LES] in the 80s before gentrification but moved to a small brownstone apartment in gentrifying section of Brooklyn. Kimber, also a former Lower East Side denizen during its artistic heyday of experimentalism, had escaped to the Adirondacks many years earlier, and now takes care of the cabin that Matt and Vib are renting for the month to escape COVID and their noisy “millennial” neighbors. And to “make” a baby before the proverbial 11th hour “gate” closes. Matt (44) Vib (39) have been a couple for a decade or more and have reached the age when the decision to become parents cannot be postponed anymore—or so they both seem to feel. The play deals with their respective fears, their ambitions, and their routine fondness for and exasperation with each other; it is a keen study of two high strung people confronting a sense of alienation creeping into their psyches while in this pseudo-romantic lakefront cabin. Mixed up into this fray is the somewhat puckish but dominating middle-aged Kimber, who becomes the catalyst to the drama’s explosive resolution. Hamilton Clancy recognized in Drew Valins’s play a prescient contemporary thematic poignancy (even without J.D.Vance pronouncements): namely, whether to have children in a place like New York, where the stresses and insecurities range from professional to financial to confined living space. Clancy's direction allows for an intimate view into the raw emotions of the characters as they respond to the mysterious environment of the cabin and the dark cold lake. Much of the action is placed frontally at the very downstage edge. Jen Varbalow’s detailed set design of the cabin bedroom, dominated by a huge oak bed dead center, with choice props by Michaela Lind, and Eric Nightengale’s lighting (including stretches in complete darkness) contribute to the disquieting atmosphere that permeates the play.
The three actors are well attuned to each other. Matt Lee as Dan, the hapless male between the two women, plays him with many colors as he tries to accommodate his wife, Vibeke, a Swedish woman who, like many European immigrants with artistic ambitions, is committed to New York City while he wants to escape the city. Petra Denison captures Vib’s abrupt no-nonsense behavior while also being a bundle of barely controlled nerves. Karla Hendrick as Kimber is a mysterious character –she is the practical manager but she also plays the trickster; she has abjured life in the city and disdains most New Yorkers who come to rent the cabin. However, ultimately she also helps to uncover the underlying psychological truth that has bedeviled Vib and Dan in two separate excellent scenes—one gentle scene with Vib, and one more challenging with Dan. The Wild Project space is well suited for this modest but captivating play and solid production. The environment of Alphabet City, an old but now gentrified neighborhood is a bit like the one that the characters inhabit. |
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