Cassidy Troy
Professor McGovern
Life of the Mind
21 November 2014
It is a play that touches upon loss, sorrow, family issues, with a balance of comedy. Last week, I got the privilege of seeing the theatre play titled, Crumble, (Lay Me Down Justin Timberlake), directed by Kate Sparacio, a senior Theatre major with Visual Arts and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies minors. Sparacio displayed her understanding for the deeper undertones and meanings during the play itself, and during the “Talk Back” session after Thursday’s show on November 13th, which I attended. The play had five characters in total, and they all had vital roles that the Stockton students accurately and realistically captured. Nicole Clark played the mother, John Wisienski played multiple roles as the father/Justin Timberlake/Harrison Ford, Madelaine Welch played Janice, the daughter, Phoebe Gruetter played Barbara, the aunt, and Evan Williamson played the role of the Apartment.
The show is mainly focused around the topic of loss and the death of the father and how the mother, Janice, and the Apartment are coping with the given situation. During the course of the play, the audience sees the frustration develop among all of the characters and how they each deal with their own losses separately. The mother is shown to neglect Janice and the Apartment, as she distracts herself from her woes through her occupation as a chef. The audience can feel empathy with this character as she is struggling to balance her job, the care she is supposed to be showing to both Janice and the Apartment, along with her sorrow. The character Janice is eleven years old, and mostly keeps to herself as she copes by hindering her feelings of the loss of her father from everyone except her dolls. She is a troubled child, who does not know how to appropriately react to her loss, (later in the play, Janice uses her resources as she tries to construct a bomb to end both her mother and her sufferings, but winds up losing her right hand in the process). During the play, Janice has more dialogue with her dolls and with the nonliving elements of the play compared to dialogue with any actual living character. Barbara, the aunt tries to give Janice advice, and acts as a mother figure to her mainly because Barbara is infertile and cannot have children. Barbara is dealing with the loss of fertility and copes with this loss by owning 57 cats, along with wanting to be a mother figure to Janice.
Kate Sparacio pinpointed the reason she chose this play when I listened to the “Talk Back” session. Sparacio mentioned that all the male characters were not real. I was fascinated when she discussed how the father is just a formulated memory for the mother and Janice. The father is not actually real in the play; for Janice, her mind creates the memory of her father as Justin Timberlake, and the mother creates the memory of her husband as Harrison Ford. The roles of these two made-up characters, (Timberlake and Ford), act as displays of how the mother and Janice actually viewed the father. The play hints at a possibly sexually abusive relationship between Janice and her father, and also hints that the father was viewed as a hero, like Indiana Jones, for the mother. The Apartment was another character that was not real. He expressed the lack of care for him after the death of the father. He is neglected, and is crumbling every day more and more. The play is very symbolic and expresses many different topics throughout such as the different ways to cope with loss, the different views a person can have of a person who was lost, etc. The play showed the strength of having characters that were inanimate, yet they still expressed emotion through themselves as well as the other characters in the play.
I was so pleased that I found the time to go to the show, Crumble, (Lay Me Down Justin Timberlake), because it was completely worth my time. The “Talk Back” was also interesting mainly because by listening, I learned a lot of what the play was about beneath the surface. I learned about all the thought and consideration that went into costume design, especially the fact that the father wore his wedding ring throughout the entire show, a subtlety that I did not notice until it was pointed out by the costume designer, Chelsea Regan, was a very significant touch. The play was extraordinary and the discussion directly after further developed my understanding of all of its elements. I truly enjoyed this production very much.