For the second play of Tesseract’s 2022 Summer New Play Series, playwright JM Chambers has chosen a subject that is much in the news but has rarely, to my limited knowledge, been dealt with much on our stages. The subject is mass shootings.
In Chambers’ play All That Remains, high school teacher Gary suffers PTSD, Survivor Guilt, and other painful reactions to the shooting which he survived but his best friend, Melody, the teacher in the next room, and Alejandro, one of his best students, did not. Gary can’t sleep, barely eats, and won’t leave the house. Conversation with his wife degenerates into bitter arguments. When she arranges a dinner with their best friends, he can’t make it through the meal; he must retreat to his safe place at home. His wife wants her husband back, the man she fell in love with and married. He’s not there any more.
His intense suffering generates sympathy from his dead colleague and student, whose comforting presence his pain generates. But that only separates him further from his wife, who never knows where his pain will take him next, into deeper isolation or into verbal and even physical attacks on her. The strain even affects her relationship with the wife in the friends’ couple.
Playwright Chambers’ arc in the play does bend toward healing, justifiably so given the seriousness with which she has treated the play’s issues.
The cast’s performances under director Brittanie Gunn are strong. Without resorting to melodramatic excess, Sherard E. Curry takes us through the nightmare reality and unreality of Gary’s suffering. Melody Valen Quinn fills the stage with the wife’s range of pain. As their friends, Morgan Maul-Smith and Luis Aguilar flesh out their confusion as they deal with the other couple’s strange behaviors. Nyx Kaine and Victor Mendez are the ghosty troublers and comforters.
Director Gunn arranged the minimal set of homely furnishings, with lighting by Kevin Bowman, sound – loud gunshots – by Taylor Gruenloh, and with Cheyenne Groom as Technician, and Brittney Roberson as Stage Manager.
As it walks so bravely away from the edge of despair, I hope All That Remains will continue its journey.
—Bob Wilcox
Photo by Taylor Gruenloh
