Pru Payne

Pru Payne

Speakeasy Stage

By Steven Druckman

Directed by Paul Daigneault

October 18 – November 16, 2024

Gordon Clapp and Karen MacDonald in Pru Payne. Photo credit: Niles Scott Studio

The twenty-first century has ushered in a new form of drama: the dementia story. Hollywood apparently loves to see nature actors unravel, bestowing Oscars on Julianne Moore for Still Alice (2014) and Anthony Hopkins for The Father (2020). My personal favorite Alzheimer’s film is Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2006). Based on an Alice Munro short story, it stars Julie Christie as Fiona, a woman who withers before our eyes. When Fiona deteriorates to the point that an institution is required, she sparks a sudden, illogical, romance with another resident, much to the despair of her devoted husband.

A parallel relationship fuels the drama in Pru Payne, a five-actor play in which an intellectual, opinionated creative critic crashes through cerebral crevices to collapse in a confining clinic. (The play features exhaustive alliteration, of which I will spare you any more). While under ‘observation’ Pru falls for fellow patient, Gus, the custodian/bus driver of a local prep school. They each have one son, who were brief lovers years ago at that prep school. The subplot of these boys all-grown-up reuniting in the gay-sex-wary year of 1998 is as completely predictable as the love story between Pru and Gus is unexpected. And therein lies the challenge—and opportunity— for playwright and audience member.

The relationship between Pru and Gus is unbelievable as every level, except perhaps the level of dementia. For though there’s much we don’t know about the condition, we do know that as it clouds certain dominant aspects of a person’s character, it often unveils unexpected attributes and affinities. In their right minds, Pru and Gus would have barely passed the time of day. She’s an aloof, critical, never-been-in-a-relationship woman (her son, who’s Black, having been born by strategic insemination as a weapon against writer’s block). He’s a likable stump. Their passion defies credibility, which, in the context of dementia, gives it credibility.

Once we dismiss all of our misgivings about Pru and Gus as a couple, the strange dichotomies that are dementia come to the fore.

Pru Payne isn’t a great play, but it lingers in your mind because of the courage playwright Steven Druckman took in pairing these unlikely lovers. Speakeasy’s austere production with its bare stage, clinical curtains, and five cafeteria-style chairs is too cold. If the dialogue didn’t remind us, often, it was 1988, we’d have no way of knowing. I was there; 1988 was mauve. Still, the austerity focuses our attention to the production’s strongest asset: the indomitable Karen MacDonald.

Karen MacDonald in Pru Payne. Photo Credit: Niles Scott Studio

Karen MacDonald has been a Grande Dame of Boston theater for years. One of the final members of the A.R.T. back when it was true to its initials—a reparatory company—Ms. MacDonald is a regular in memorable roles with The Huntington, Lyric, Speakeasy, and other local theater companies. Karen MacDonald is always good. In Pru Payne, she is amazing. She inhabits this brilliant, difficult, unfulfilled woman with gravitas and humor. From her strident opening monologue to her final dithering in a wheelchair, Ms. MacDonald illuminates an eighty-minute spiral from the apex of personal capability to the internal confusion of a hell none of us ever wants to enter.

Karen MacDonald is the real reason to see this Pru Payne. Or as she caustically rephrases her own name in a moment of demented clarity: Pru-Dense-Pain.