Molly (Kathryn Erbe) and Leo (Javier Molina) both lost their spouses young.
Around three-quarters of the way through Martha Pichey’s inchoate grief drama Ashes & Ink, Kathryn Erbe delivers a monologue that should open the play. It’s the only monologue in Ashes & Ink, and all the experiences that Erbe, as Molly, refers to in it predate the action in the play, so it would be more appropriate at the top of the show, to lay the scene. Coming so late, it just expresses thoughts and feelings the audience is already aware Molly has.
Felix (Rhylee Watson) and Quinn (Julian Shatkin) are would-be stepbrothers.
Indeed, the play could do without the monologue altogether. It doesn’t provide any new information, but rather rehashes what the audience has witnessed. “You hold your beautiful baby in your arms, rock him to sleep, and then you end up holding a body bigger than yours and pray that he’s still breathing,” Molly reflects about her drug-addicted son, Quinn—following multiple scenes of Quinn’s struggle. “And when your kid’s dad dies ... they start telling you to ask for help. Take care of you,” she says—after multiple scenes in which she’s coping with her husband’s early death.
Ashes & Ink is the first play by Pichey, heretofore a magazine writer and editor, and she is not yet proficient at crafting scenes for dramatic impact. They don’t feel like they’re moving the story forward—they’re just people talking, and the same basic thing seems to transpire in every scene between Molly and Quinn and with Molly and her widowed boyfriend, Leo. It’s not until an hour or so into the play that the main conflict in Leo and Molly’s relationship is acknowledged: that she has not told him the full extent of Quinn’s problem (Leo thinks this was Quinn’s first time in rehab).
Meanwhile, a lot of time and attention is given over to … birds. Being out in nature, listening to and watching for birds, is how Molly finds respite from her Quinn-related angst. She’s also made a business—which she runs with her sister, Bree—of recording bird songs, and is in the process of digitizing and indexing this “sound library” so it can be sold to an audio company.
Javier Molina and Julian Shatkin in Martha Pichey’s Ashes & Ink. Photographs by Thomas Mundell/Mundell Modern Pixels.
This plotline, as well as its outsize presence within the production design—large leafy branches of a tree hover above the stage; the play begins and ends with extended, heavily amplified sounds of birds—distracts from the interpersonal drama and is one reason the story can’t gain any momentum. Emotional conversations about grief, addiction, parental love, and other serious topics regularly get interrupted with talk of birds.
Scene changes also disrupt the flow of the play, which is directed by Alice Jankell, the new artistic director of a Hudson Valley community theater. Scenic designer Tim McMath has created a modular set, with two-sided panels that get turned around to switch between Molly’s and Leo’s homes. But there are also pieces of furniture that have to be moved, and 15 different scenes in 90 minutes!
In Ashes & Ink, Erbe—longtime Atlantic and Steppenwolf company member, Law & Order icon—plays opposite several non-Equity performers. She has more professional polish than them, but with Molly so ineffectually written, Erbe can’t make much of an impression. Her only Equity castmate, Tamara Flannagan, fares even worse, since the role of Bree is so underwritten it’s unnecessary. She appears in part of two scenes, informing Molly in the later one that she’s going blind. “There was never any guarantee that my sight would hold steady. … That’s how it goes. You never know how fast or slow,” Bree says, as if the audience knows of her condition that’s causing the blindness, when it’s never stated.
Tamara Flannagan (left) plays Bree, sister and business partner of Erbe’s Molly. Photographs by Thomas Mundell/Mundell Modern Pixels.
The scene-stealer turns out to be 11-year-old Rhylee Watson, who gives a charming performance as Felix, Leo’s son. Javier Molina is miscast as Leo, much too tristate-area blue-collar to be convincing as a Victorian literature scholar. Julian Shatkin doesn’t master all of Quinn’s complexities, but does a decent enough job.
Unfortunately, the actors are stranded in a poorly developed story where subplots about bird recordings, Quinn’s RADA audition and Bree interfere with potentially meaningful moments about family and loss. Pichey’s script is also hamstrung by overwrought dialogue (“I am so deep inside my sucked-dry bones sick and tired”), dubious metaphors (Molly describes her regrets about not doing more for Quinn as “dead flower water … water sitting way too long in the vase, the opposite of hope”) and vacuous exchanges, as when Quinn tells his mother he fled rehab because “I couldn’t concentrate in there,” and she responds with the advice “Then go back and find your powers of concentration.”
Ashes & Ink runs through Nov. 3 at AMT Theater (354 W. 45th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, with matinees at 2 p.m. Sunday and the final Saturday; ashesink.ludus.com.
Playwright: Martha Pichey
Director: Alice Jankell
Sets: Tim McMath
Costumes: Kaitlin Feinberg
Lighting: Paul Hudson
Sound: Alex Attalla
