FringeNYC 2013: Landscape with Missing Person: A Comedy About Finding What You Didn't Know You Were Looking For

Review by Martin Denton · August 10, 2013

In a year that has seen many more than its share of dystopic and apocalyptic visions on stage, it is a breath of fresh, clear, cool air to discover John Crutchfield's stunning new play Landscape With Missing Person, a luminous but quiet celebration of the power of the human spirit and of love. It's presented at FringeNYC by Asheville, North Carolina's Magnetic Theatre, in a production of spare and stately beauty directed by Steven Samuels. It deserves to be a gigantic hit at this year's festival and beyond: I wish it a long and fruitful life.

The play begins at a bus stop in a town in North Carolina. Here we meet Rachel, a teenage runaway whose foul-mouthed attitude and expansive fearlessness may or may not come naturally. She encounters at the bus stop a man of middle age and melancholy aspect who appears to be simply staring straight ahead at nothing. She engages him in conversation, or at least tries to, but he's pretty un-forthcoming. She sings him a rowdy ditty, accompanying herself on the ukulele that seems to be her only possession. Eventually she learns that his name is Don, and that he has just been deserted by his wife. He thinks he will go to San Francisco, where he believes she now is. Rachel, intrigued and with no real plans of her own other than to maybe go to Portland, Oregon, asks if she can come along. Surprisingly—or perhaps not—Don agrees.

And so their adventure on the road begins. I am using the word adventure very specifically here: the scenes that follow take Don and Rachel to a variety of locales, all startling in both their ordinariness and their capacity nonetheless to yield up astonishing people for them to meet and astonishing tales for them to discover. They befriend a roadhouse diner waitress named Maureen, a rural Illinois police rookie named Marge, and a loquacious lady of the evening named Cathy, among others. It struck me how much more we learned about each of these disparate strangers than about the relatively impenetrable Don and Rachel. Don, in particular, seems to have a gift for bringing people out of themselves, and bringing the best out of them; he's the kind of guy that, notwithstanding his quiet demeanor, somehow seems to leave the people he meets better than when he found them.

Landscape's subtitle is "A Comedy About Finding What Your Didn't Know You Were Looking For." I won't tell you whether Don finds his wife or not, or what it is that Rachel finds or doesn't find on her trip. I will tell you that the journey is rarefied, until it isn't; and that witnessing it is an enlarging and uplifting experience. This is due not only to the excellence of Crutchfield's script, which brims with wisdom and humor and deliciously colorful examples of Southern and Midwestern speech, but also to Samuels' production and the performances of a top-notch cast, all of which add up to as close to perfection as theater ever gets. Crutchfield himself stars as Don, full of reserve with unresolved passion well beneath the surface. As Rachel, Lisa Miguel Smith is luminous and brash and endlessly complicated; as we get closer to this young woman, we see the strengths and the deep vulnerabilities that have brought her to this place in her life. Jennifer Gatti is the third and final cast member, delivering nothing less than a tour de force as the aforementioned three strangers along with three others. Laura Tratnik's costumes work wonders to help Gatti transform herself quite magnificently into each of these remarkable women.

Samuels' staging is wonderfully simple. The set, designed by Shaun Kato-Samuel, consists of just a few versatile pieces that are reconfigured to create a variety of locales, from bus stop to restaurant to the side of a lonely highway where Don's car has broken down. The transitions between the scenes, underscored by Mary Zogzas' subtle and evocative sound design, are sheer magic: with grace and elegance, they gradually transport us from one vignette to the next, allowing time for the moment just past to sink in and for the moment to come to materialize.

Crutchfield and Samuels had an award-winning show, The Songs of Robert, at FringeNYC 2009 (full disclosure: I've published that play and several others by Crutchfield on Indie Theater Now). Landscape with Missing Person is an eminently worthy successor, and absolutely deserves to be on your list of must-see shows at this year's festival.