Touched by his sad tale of escaping marauding Sudanese government troops at the age of six and trekking across Africa to a refugee camp in Kenya (crossing rivers filled with dead bodies and man-eating crocodiles), she offers him first a meal, then her daughter’s help with an English composition and eventually a place to live, with her serving as mentor/mom. Her motives are questioned twice, once by Catholic Charities’ social worker and the second by a Sudanese woman named Segel, who helps the Lost Boys acclimate and sometimes find and reunite with their families. Is Christine helping Gabriel to feel good about herself or does she really want to help remediate the situation by raising awareness (and money while she’s at it) in the United States about the terrible conditions in southern Sudan? The play—and Christine—attempts to answer those questions.
The plot is given credence by the magnificent performances of the six actors who speak Ryan’s dialogue. Early on, Warner Miller as Gabriel announces that he is “no longer a boy and is not lost.” Despite his boyish looks and demeanor, Miller’s Gabriel knows that he wants to follow the traditional ways of his people, even though he says he wants to be the “black Donald Trump.” With the help of a dialect coach, Miller recites his lines with what sounds like a Sudanese accent; it never flags and is always engaging. It helps, too, that his smile lights up the theater whenever he flashes it. He wins our hearts to him and to his plight. His fellow Lost Boy, Panther, is played with a mix of menace and melancholy by Jamil Mangan; his story is another side of the coin that is the tragedy of Sudan and Darfur. Trish McCall’s Segel is no nonsense, wily and often funny as she attempts to ascertain Christine’s motives and what she, Segel, can get this white woman to do to help her.
But it is Emmy Award-winning actress Kim Zimmer as Christine and Alexandra Rivera as her daughter Alex to whom many of us will relate. Zimmer is convincing as a newly divorced single mother; her natural exchanges with Alex strike a chord of familiarity with all the mothers in the audience. It sure did with me. She’s earnest in her desire to help Gabriel and at sixes and sevens when her attempts to ameliorate the situation only succeed in complicating it further. Rivera is all teenage attitude, sulky, annoyed with her mother, secretly furious at her absent father, yet intrigued by Gabriel. Just watching her warm to their house guest and her reactions to the play’s denouement grabs your heart. Her circumscribed suburban world expands, until it eventually breaks. She is a joy to watch onstage.
Joseph Gourley’s set provides a wonderful canvas for the events unfolding onstage. Evocative, it never distracts from the dialogue or what’s happening, even as it takes us to various venues. Nadine Charlsen’s lighting complements the set and helps us focus on those various settings.
The Hebrew Talmud says, “He who saves one life, saves the world entire,” a sentiment perhaps not familiar to Catholic Christine, but relevant nevertheless. That she attempts to help one young man who has been separated from his family and homeland by terrible ethnic cleansing is noble in itself, whatever her original motives. By the end of Lost Boy Found at Whole Foods, she—and we—have learned something about herself, about the world, about life. Isn’t that one of the aims of drama?
By the way, please bring your teenage or young adult children or friends to see this play. Its relevance to the world they will inherit is beyond measure.
Lost Boy Found at Whole Foods will be performed Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings at 8 PM and Saturday and Sunday afternoons at 3 PM through September 19 at the Zella Fry Theatre on the campus of Kean University on Morris Avenue in Union. There will be a post show discussion on Sunday afternoon, September 12 and 19, and a pre-show presentation of Issues 2010 at 5 PM on Thursday, September 16. For information and tickets, call the box office 908.737.SHOW (7469) or online at http://www.keanstage.com/ .
