Bob Jones, played by Christopher Holt (from left); Jennifer Jones, played by Brynn Lewallen; John Jones, played by David Bliss; and Pony Jones, played by Casey Turner. Luna Soley / The Times Record
The Theater Project’s rendition of New York playwright Will Eno’s “The Realistic Joneses” was a far cry from Broadway, where it was first staged in 2014. At the Brunswick performance, there were 13 people in the audience and four on stage.
“It’s so quiet you can almost hear the clouds go by,” one of the characters remarked in the opening scene. It was like that offstage, too — no symphony of phone vibrations and cough drop wrappers as hundreds shifted in their seats.
No race to find parking before the opening act, either — there were spots open directly opposite the front doors of The Theater Project, run out of an 1800s home on School Street in Brunswick.
But the silence didn’t last long — the performance, once underway, was punctuated by laughs.
Everybody got laughing out of the way in the beginning, when Pony told Jennifer one reason they had moved to the small town near the mountains where the play took place was that “the school system’s supposed to be really good,” and Jennifer, ever polite, followed with “Do you have kids?”
“No,” Pony said. “[John] just hates stupid children.”
The Theater Project, a nonprofit offering performances and acting classes since its founding in 1986, is located at 14 School St. in Brunswick. Luna Soley / The Times Record
Not much happened in “The Realistic Joneses,” directed by Christopher Price and starring Christopher Holt, Brynn Lewallen, David Bliss and Casey Turner — aside from four adults talking. There were no set changes. The actors wore clothes that looked like they had been scavenged from their own closets. The moral of the story — in which a young couple move in down a country road from ever-practical Jennifer and her taciturn husband, Bob, who is ill with a rare disease — can be neatly summed up by something Jennifer said to John, while they were shopping at the grocery store: “Talking to somebody else really can make you feel better,” she told him.
The actors talking also made the audience feel better.
“The ups and downs of everybody’s life are huge,” Professor Davis Robinson, chairperson of the Theater and Dance department at Bowdoin, said after the show, which he said he enjoyed.
A review in The New York Times after the show opened on Broadway said that for all Eno’s quirks, “his words cut to the heart of how we muddle through the worst life can bring.”
The worse life can bring in “The Realistic Joneses” is pretty bad: illness, unraveling marriages, the threat of death. But in their midst are four people who fumble and laugh over getting to know each other, the surprises — both welcome and unwanted — of real life.
“Do you know what’s weird and scary?” Pony says at one point to John. “That we’re not the greatest love story in the world, that we’re just kind of a mess and nice to each other and have fun sometimes.”
This play is showing through Nov. 12. Upcoming performances: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 9; 7:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 10; 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 11; and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 12. Tickets can be purchased online at theaterproject.com.
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