Bill Rosenfield’s, Another America, is a charming if somewhat misty-eyed, road-trip that sees three likeable characters bike across the American hinterland.
14 April 2022
This play is about bikes, brothers, buddies, and basketball. We know this because the writer tells us so at the beginning of the play. He might have added it is also about bonding between siblings, establishing boundaries, and overcoming barriers, but he sensibly eschewed that much alliteration.
Dan and Jared are brothers. Dan likes to imagine himself as a born leader but is not entirely convinced he has what it takes. Jared has always been in his elder sibling’s shadow and wants to start living life on his own terms. Their buddy, poetry-loving jock Clint, has just lost his job and his girlfriend and needs a goal in life.
The boys all love bikes and basketball. So on a whim, and with just $900 dollars between them, they embark on a 3,000-mile road trip from LA to the basketball hall of fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. But what kind of America will the boys find and how will the trip change them?
This is an ambitious set-up to resolve. Particularly with a three-person cast who are asked to play 36 different characters on a stage the size of a large living room. With some reservations, I think writer Bill Rosenfield and director Joseph Winters pull it off.
The play sensibly avoids any action set on bikes and is deftly written around vignettes of people and places the trio encounter on their trek. We meet, amongst others, the preacher who could have been a pro basketball player but chose God instead; Larry, the brothers’ wayward uncle, immersed in conspiracy theories and living off-grid in Colorado; Sam, who loves the hopeless rural farm that he just cannot make work; Randy, who toils at a Subway and cannot grasp why his ex-girlfriend left him for someone more ambitious.
The writer really wants us to like these characters, and I suspect his America, so populates the story with encounters that are kooky and endearing rather than threatening. Even the crazy gun-owner who insist on the boys leaving his town is played as a comic turn, rather than the sinister, hostile, fruitcake he is. The writer’s ‘other’ America is the hospitable, generous, kinder nation of an earlier generation, not the bitter land that Trump divided.
There is nothing wrong with painting a positive picture, but the problem here is that the characters sometimes verge on the one-dimensional. Rosenfield never really interrogates these people or addresses what makes them tick, because I suspect he may be uncomfortable with what he might find. Maybe he wrote this as a personal story, rather than a political one. If so, as a road-trip the confection works well enough, although as a state-of-the-nation piece it is all a bit sappy.
Marco Young, Rosanna Suppa and Jacob Lovick are very watchable and make pleasant company for a couple of hours. They do sterling work exploring the interplay between the three boys, and in switching between the multitudinous characters the director asks them to inhabit.
This is an effective if occasionally sentimental piece of storytelling brought to life by an ebullient and amiable triad of actors. I am not sure I learnt much about America or Americans from the piece, but it is certainly worth seeing.
Writer Bill Rosenfield
Director Joseph Winters
Cast
DAN AUSTIN Marco Young
JARED AUSTIN Rosanna Suppa
CLINT EWELL Jacob Lovick
Duration: 2 hours 10 mins. One interval.
Full Disclosure: I paid full box-office price for the ticket.
