Playing Pretend

“Portrayed” is described as “the unbearable burden of deciding what to do before dying.” In reality, however, this is a play about two people living idly, trying to be everything they are not and believing in their castles in the air. Great as it seems, the idea is not presented to the audience in an engaging way, and the characters’ monologues are tangled and boring.

What catches the audience’s attention from the beginning of the play is the way the characters are dressed. We see twins, Trevor (Stephen Calkins) and Mary (Kim Cichelli), who wear formal outfits while sketching each other’s portraits. Looking at Mary’s elegant black dress with long luxurious gloves reaching her elbows and simple shoes on a medium heel and Trevor’s suit with a vest and a tie, we immediately believe that they are the children of rich parents who study painting.

However, when their sister, Sarah (Breanne Hakes) comes into the scene in her pajamas and a shabby T-shirt with a childish picture on it and her hair picked up in a messy bun, we find out that she works nights and goes to college during the day, while her other two siblings don’t do anything and live on their parents’ money. Once we get to that point, the twins suddenly become unlikable, and their purposeless conversations disgust the viewers. When Trevor says a long sentence pretending that he is knowledgeable about something, and Mary has no clue what it is about, she states, “I’m not stupid; I just wasn’t listening.”

She repeats it to Sarah, too, when the young girl points out that they have to do something, as their parents won’t live and support them forever. Mary tells Trevor she has no idea what their sister is talking about and that Sarah’s language is unacceptable (which is actually true, as she drops an f-bomb once in every two sentences).

Language, by the way, is one of the means the playwright, James Holland, uses to distinguish the worlds the characters live in. Mary and Trevor have their own utopia-like reality. They imagine that they have a maid, who is a dark-skinned Mexican and speaks zero English. Accordingly, their language is the written word of the novels from the past century, and their phrasing sounds old-fashioned and vague.

On the contrary, Sarah’s expressions are down to earth. She speaks the language we can hear in the street at every corner. And her world is the real one, as she makes her living, graduates from college, gets married, has children, buries her mother, – all of which the twins miss. When Sarah visits them with a huge belly, Trevor and Mary agree that their sister put a lot of weight in her midsection pretty quickly.

Seeing that none of the important events that take place in her life interest her siblings, Sarah is deeply hurt and often cries or says something rude to the twins. She never abandons them, though, until she is grey-haired, her kids are independent, and she goes abroad leaving the twins in the house with candles, as she is afraid that the electricity will be shut down due to non-payment. She admits that she can do nothing more for them. Trevor and Mary don’t understand that, either, and Sarah goes away.

Interestingly enough, while Sarah’s hair is grey, the twins remain young and unchanged. It maybe a mistake, but most likely, it symbolizes that the twins are untouched even by nature. They remain the same young and indifferent daydreamers who believe they are everything they will never be. It was probably meant to make us sad (it does upset Sarah), but instead, the audience is turned away by these characters whose life has no value and no meaning.

What makes the play boring, though, are the long meaningless speeches of the twins. They talk about literature and things their grandmother said, but they don’t understand what those imply. They have no clue what life is, and they have no desire to learn. They are limited and uninteresting human beings who shouldn’t be on stage for such a long time. The play could have been more appealing if the audience saw and heard more of Sarah, who is a real person and an amusing character with simple manners and good heart.

Failing to impress, the play is nevertheless memorable due to the actors. It is amazing how the twins blush several times complimenting each other. Blushing seems to be a natural reaction that can’t be played, and they portrayed it well. Sarah is also brilliant, from the first scene in which the twins wake her up ringing the bell for their maid till the end when she is old and helpless, with a tiny hunch on her back and the expression of agility on her face.

But even the actors can’t save the sinking ship though, and as the play comes to its end, the audience has a queer feeling that the play didn’t stand up to its original idea, and instead of being a performance about people who decide “what to do before dying” (relating, most likely to Sarah rather than to the twins, as they are unable of any decision-making, in general), “Portrayed” turned out to be an unbearable burden for the viewers to watch. As the portraits of Mary and Trevor will stay in their abandoned and empty house and will never be revealed to the world, their portrayed images will not be imprinted on the audience’s memory, unless it’d be remembering how bad they were.