A smart but mishandled concept weighs down winning work by Marin Ireland (left) and Jeanine Serralles. (Joan Marcus)
Jordan Harrison’s “Maple and Vine” has one of the most intriguing premises of the year.
Katha (the quicksilver Marin Ireland) and Ryu (Peter Kim, stiff and bland) are a 30-something New York couple with thriving careers in book publishing and plastic surgery, respectively. But they’re not happy. One day they drop everything to go live in a Midwestern community of full-time 1950s re-enactors.
Goodbye, feminism, lattes and the Internet! Hello, rigid gender roles, Sanka and rotary phones!
It’s a terrific idea, yet Harrison doesn’t exploit it to its fullest, and too often “Maple and Vine” is dramatically inert. Things move slowly, as if Harrison were reluctant to actually show us how Katha and Ryu adjust to daily life in 1955. There’s more hustle from the stagehands who constantly — and distractingly — rearrange the sets in Anne Kauffman’s busy staging.
While it takes our dissatisfied couple the entire first act to leave present-day Manhattan, their new de facto leaders — Dean (a stone-faced Trent Dawson) and Ellen (Jeanine Serralles, born to wear pencil skirts) — regularly appear to explain how the endeavor works.
Thanks for the memos, but this isn’t dynamic storytelling: We’d rather experience these precepts in action, not hear laundry lists of do’s and don’ts.
As a result, the playwright has a hard time focusing on the people in the foreground.
Handily dominating the cast, Ireland and Serralles color in Katha and Ellen’s outlines. The other characters aren’t as well served, and remain unaffecting. Without a peep, Ryu trades his surgical practice for line work in a cardboard-box factory. A subplot involving Dean dominates the second act — but we don’t care, since we know next to nothing about him.
Yet “Maple and Vine” is hard to dismiss because it also offers some sharp insights. Harrison is onto something when he zeroes in on the way we get overwhelmed by our world of limitless choices.
“It’s a relief, the limitations,” Ellen says of the food options in 1955. And while you’re not obligated to eat red meat, she notes, “What’s a little hypertension if you’re happy?”
The thing is, the 1950s may not have been happy for everybody. A lack of options — not just in seasonings — can lead to miserable, stunted lives. One size is more convenient, but it doesn’t fit all.