Keiko Green’s “Sharon” is wonderfully weird, its dread and desperation served up with a side of meatballs. Very little is as it seems in the domain of Sharon and Jake Darling.
Before the lights even go down in this claustrophobic Cygnet Theatre world premiere play, grown son Jake (Rafael Goldstein) is seen numbly moving a paint roller over one of the living room walls only to be distracted — well, unnerved — by the song playing electronically nearby: The Turtles’ swooning “Happy Together.” For a moment, Jake loses his you-know-what, and the stage is set for a domestic “comedy” wrapped in cobwebs.
Very little of what ensues is as telegraphed as that. “Sharon” never stops being ominous, but never is it obvious.
“Sharon” is debuting two years after its workshop reading in Cygnet’s Bill and Judy Garrett Finish Line new play series. It’s the second world premiere of 2023 for Green, a graduate of UC San Diego’s MFA Playwriting program. Her “Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play” premiered at the Old Globe in April. Another world premiere, of her play “Hells Canyon,” is expected on some stage later this year — all of this firmly establishing Green as one of the most prolific and whip-smart emerging playwrights around.
DeAnna Driscoll (left) and Rafael Goldstein in “Sharon” at Cygnet Theatre.
(Courtesy of Karli Cadel)
The setting for “Sharon” is Washington state, where Green is partly based — specifically the town of Everett, an hour from Seattle. It’s there, in a dilapidated apartment building, that Sharon and Jake reside. Sharon (DeAnna Driscoll) wears aprons and hums and cooks; Jake toils robotically in a store called Jackson’s, comes home, resists chitchat about his day, simmers to a boil one moment, then pecks Mom on the cheek another.
Something isn’t right here. That’s clear enough. These mother-and-son exchanges rinse and repeat in the first stages of the storytelling, under the adroit direction of Rob Lutfy, mingling tension and absurdity.
It’s a pleasure to watch Driscoll, who has returned to San Diego from her new home in the Bay Area to appear in this production, exploit with her meticulous actions and reactions the enigma that is Sharon. At the same time, Goldstein’s dead-staring Jake can flit from repression to manic outburst (including one prodigious rant at Jackson’s store) yet still manage to warrant a degree of sympathy.
Heightening this bizarro world are Green herself as Tina, the snarky information-booth minder at Jackson’s, who finds herself strangely drawn to the very strange and more than a bit awkward Jake. As she demonstrated earlier this year in Backyard Renaissance’s “Gods of Carnage,” Green is a sharp and edgy comic actor. Her spouse, MJ Sieber, who also appeared in “Gods of Carnage,” plays a whacked-out banker in “Sharon” with appropriately whacked-out hair.
A second-act dinner, to which Jake’s “new girlfriend” Tina has been invited, will include a couple of other unexpected guests, and before the Chicken Parmesan can be knifed into, a truth game turns serious, secrets seep out and darkness descends. To say more would be a crime.
The deceptively innocuous apartment designed by Yi-Chien Lee with shifting lighting by Bryan Ealey are certainly part of “Sharon’s” moody mystery.
If these painted walls could talk ….
‘Sharon’
When: Showtimes 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through July 2.
Where: Cygnet Theatre, 4040 Twiggs St., Old Town State Historic Park
Tickets: $32 and up
Phone: (619) 337-1525
Online: cygnettheatre.com
Coddon is a freelance writer.