The Hot Topics of "A Lifetime Burning"

The theater community has been abuzz for weeks about a study a Princeton grad student did showing how hard it is for women to get produced on Broadway or by the big off-Broadway companies. So the prescient decision by Primary Stages to celebrate its 25th anniversary by dedicating its entire season to female playwrights should be hailed as a welcomed attempt to level the playing field. And I hope it doesn't sound ungrateful to say I'd be even happier if Primary Stages and other producers—off-Broadway and on—would just put on good works written by female and minority playwrights in the normal course of doing business and not to fulfill a thematic requirement or to expiate past sins.

Even so, I’m happy—for me and for you—to be able to say that despite my reservations, I had a good time at A Lifetime Burning, the new play by Cusi Cram that made its world premiere at Primary Stages last night. Cram's association with the company dates back 10 years and she currently teaches playwriting workshops at its school but this is the first time the company has produced one of her plays (click here to see a video interview with her).

A Lifetime Burning is one of the new generation of boulevard comedies that concern themselves with the travails of the people we used to call yuppies. As with any genre, some of these works are better than others. Cram's isn’t perfect but it swims in the deep end of the pool.

The play was inspired by the case of Margaret Seltzer, who wrote a memoir about growing up as a Native American foster child in South-Central Los Angeles where she became an acolyte of, and drug runner for, the infamous Bloods street gang. Just before the book came out, Seltzer’s sister revealed that the author was white and actually grew up in an intact and affluent family. A Lifetime Burning further complicates the situation by giving the fictional fibber (a trust fund baby of Irish heritage who pretends to be poor and part Inca) a bipolar disorder, a relationship with a younger Hispanic man she meets while volunteering as a GED tutor and a high strung-sister with issues of her own and a love affair with her cell phone.

There is serious stuff beneath the jokes. Cram makes a good faith effort to examine the distorted ways in which class, race, and family baggage affect how we define ourselves and how others define us. But her ambitious play leans too heavily on awkward plot devices (the sisters get drunk and so they get truthful, the writer’s tough British editor makes house calls) that threaten to push A Lifetime Burning into sitcom territory.

What pulls it back is Cram’s very funny dialog and the very appealing cast that delivers her lines. Jennifer Westfeldt (best known for her role as the title character in the 2001 movie “Kissing Jessica Stein”) is charming as the writer, Raúl Castillo avoids all the usual street-kid clichés as the boyfriend, and Isabel Keating steals all of her scenes as the editor—a miniature bull terrier with a sharp bite. Christina Kirk, who plays the sister, was the only one who didn’t quite work for me. Although I confess I may have been unfairly distracted by the actress’s small lisp.

I don’t know if Primary Stages is also going out of its ways to find female designers this season but Kris Stone scores with a set that is exactly the kind of superficial chic you’d expect to find in the home of a person desperate to maintain the right facade. And Theresa Squire’s costumes are just as smart—and great looking. With the exception, again, of Kirk’s character, who is dressed so dowdily that it almost looks as though the actress had been out running errands and got to the theater too late to change.

Smartest of all is director Pam MacKinnon who brings the disparate pieces of the 90-minute play together so neatly that you almost don’t notice its rough patches (would a high school dropout who struggles with the concept of antonyms really make quips about his cerebral cortex?). In fact, the whole show is so smartly done that I’d like to think the good folks at Primary Stages would have put it on even if they hadn’t had a gender quota to fill.