The set is a hospital waiting room, except without all of the charm. There aren't any paintings on the walls. The tables conspicuously lack the presence of three-month-old magazines. The silence in the theater is a quiet vacuum without the ambient drone of nurses, patients and doctors. There's an out of order coffee/hot drink vending machine in the corner next to the ominous and angry, red glow of a fully-operating Coke machine. This vaguely surreal medical purgatory is where the entire two-hour stretch of "The Moonlight Room" takes place. It comes as very little surprise when you walk out of the Broadway Theatre complex's Studio Theatre and feel like you've just been in a hospital waiting room for two hours.
The plot follows Josh and Sal: a couple of New York high school kids who find themselves there waiting for news on a friend of theirs who overdosed on Ketamine at a concert. Chris Klopatek plays Joshua, a bright guy who might have a promising future. Joshua is something of a childhood chess prodigy whose spare time is now spent in what must be a somewhat lucrative career as a marijuana distributor. Klopatek rides the complexities of the character pretty well. He's fun in his character's more comic moments while managing an interesting degree of emotional drama in the serious ones.
Maris Hudson plays Sal, a girl in high school struggling to recover from childhood for long enough to become a woman. In the beginning, Sal isn't given much to say. Thankfully, Hudson has the kind of stage presence that's just as powerful in silence as it is when she's emoting somewhat volcanic emotional distress. Even in those silent moments, eyes mysteriously draw towards her.
The fact that there isn't much else onstage amplifies this effect, but Hudson's thoughtfully understated, quiet intensity could casually grab all the attention in a three ring circus without the benefit of a spotlight. She's just that good. Her presence goes a long way toward making up for the shortcomings of the rest of the play.
Having debuted just a few years ago, "The Moonlight Room" has an unmistakably contemporary feel to it. The production deftly captures its freshness in finer details like props and sound design. As Josh and Sal watch TV in the waiting room, their dialogue references "Law and Order," and we hear the familiar, overly dramatic sound cues from the show in the background. Playwright Tristine Skyler's dialogue has the fresh feel of small talk drifting through the crowded food court of a shopping mall. That doesn't make it interesting enough to carry two hours in a theatre, though.
Skyler graduated from Princeton with a degree in English. One might've expected more of a plot from someone who was presumably trained formally in the mechanics of storytelling at an Ivy League school.
"The Moonlight Room" isn't a single, cohesive story so much as a series of related monologues that rely quite heavily on exposition to get from beginning to end. The dialogue approaches cleverness in places, but seldom while it is advancing the plot. There is a little bit of nuance and subtle character development in some of the dialogue, but it is quickly drowned-out in the heavy hand of Skyler's paint-by-numbers morality. Complex moral questions crop up slowly only to be distorted by awkward, stilted dialogue amongst the parents who serve as supporting cast.
In a notably entertaining supporting appearance, Josh Aaron McCabe plays a relative of Josh's who is a doctor. Charmingly accurate neuro-psych and other medical jargon serves the role of novel comic relief as he discusses the effects of Ketamine with Sal. It's the closest "The Moonlight Room" comes to substance that is as fresh as its style.
The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's production of Tristine Skyler's "The Moonlight Room," plays now through Mar. 5 at the Broadway Theatre Center's Studio Theatre. Tickets are $30 and can be purchased by calling the box office at (414) 276-8842.
