By Julia Polinsky

 

Director Sean Daniels has paced I and You is if it were dishing out social-media instant information, and the two actors who play the high school students blitz through their dialogue at warp speed. That speed may be appropriate for teenagers, but it serves the story badly. All the clues are in the text, but they get obscured by mildly annoying performances, which make tedious characters of these two far from ordinary kids.

 

In scenic designer Michael Carnahan’s terrific set, an after school disaster seems to start when Anthony (Reggie D. White) arrives in the bedroom of Caroline (Kayla Ferguson), Caroline, a shut-in with a serious health problem, also has an attitude. Anthony comes bearing last-minute homework, a project for the next day’s English class: an analysis of the use of pronouns in Leaves of Grass (I and you, get it?). He needs Caroline’s help. She’s been chosen as his partner for the project, even though she’s been out of school for weeks with her illness, her “thing,” as they call it.

 

She’s having none of it, neither project nor Anthony, and does a postmodern Garbo take: she wants to be let alone. For the next ninety minutes, more or less, Caroline and Anthony confront each other, argue, make friends, retreat from that friendship, make it again, swap tastes in music, talk about school and life and stuff, and, finally, engage in the great barbaric yawp of Whitman’s “fundamentally awesome” poem, as Anthony calls it. Of course, Caroline’s initial resistance to the poem dissolves; she succumbs to the twin enchantments of Anthony, and Song of Myself.

 

The majesty of Whitman’s language thoroughly shows up the inanity of the discourse between Caroline and Anthony. Gunderson puts a tad too much effort into establishing adolescent street cred, referencing not only Facebook, but “forty cooler ways to communicate than email.” Particularly cringe-worthy? When the poet who wrote, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself/and what I assume, you shall assume/for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” becomes “Walt Whitman: National Badass.” It comes as a relief to hear the famous opening lines of celebration of life, to hear the significant, poignant closing words.

 

                                             Photos by Carol Rosegg

 

And yet. Throughout I and You, something stirs beneath the banal surface. Too many unanswered questions pop up. Time and again, talk leads to something, then goes poof! and vanishes. Gunderson tosses in hint after hint, but the breakneck speed of dialogue obscures those small intimations of something bigger underlying the conversation between these two kids.

 

Is it love, that underlying something-big? The play seems to say so, but the actors don’t succeed at being teenagers who fall in love, not just with the poem and the music and the ideas they share, but with each other. Her sad story, his bad day, her health, him being a “perfect son,” her pain in the ass attitude, his optimism: they’re set up for dislike, and that’s what we get, for most of the play, until things tip over, and we don’t.

 

The tipping point in I and You comes very late, and doesn’t work well enough for Caroline and Anthony to convert, suddenly, from zinging one another with snappy one-liners, to kissing.

 

Until it does.

 

Turns out, there’s a very good reason for the change, and that’s all I’m going to say about it. I and You may feel overlong (at 90 minutes, yes, overlong). So what? The end of the play has such impact, it’s well worth wading through the setup, to get gobsmacked by the finish.

 

I and You by Lauren Gunderson

At 59E59 Theaters, 59 East. 59^th St. (Madison and Park)

Opening January 27, runs through February 28

Tuesday – Thursday at 7 PM; Friday at 8 PM;

Saturday at 2 PM & 8 PM; Sunday at 3 PM.

Single tickets are $70 ($49 for 59E59 Members).

To purchase tickets, call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200

http://www.59e59.org/boxoffice.php

www.59e59.org