Daniel Corey and Laura C Harris in World Builders. Photo: C. Stanley Photography
By DCist Contributor Anya van Wagtendonk
Forum Theatre shows are criminally under-attended. This is troubling enough at any of their consistently brilliant productions, but it’s especially unfortunate for a show about intimacy, like Johnna Adam’s World Builders, playing at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company through Nov. 23. A two-person show done in the round in a small black-box, World Builders calls as much attention to the people around you as to the unlikely relationship developing onstage. As Max (Daniel Corey) and Whitney (Laura C. Harris) stumble toward a mutual love they both desire and fear, it’s hard not to notice the awkward dance that the audience has done to avoid making eye contact with, or even to avoid sitting near, a stranger. There is much to take from this lovely play, especially from Harris and Corey’s beautiful pas de deux, and it seems unfair that their vulnerability is not reflected back at them from their audience.
Thankfully, empty seats don’t hinder the actors one bit. Harris and Corey give remarkable, soulful performances as Max and Whitney, two patients with schizoid personality disorder participating in a clinical drug trial guaranteed to cure them. The illness they share means that they build private, detailed fantasy worlds. Whitney’s is expansive, encompassing galaxies, containing systems of government and vast, interconnected economies, and spanning time and history. Max’s is a hole in the ground, where women are held hostage until they die. Small wonder that he is a more willing participant in the drug story than Whitney, who loves her world and each of the several hundred major and minor characters whose lives she spins out with her eyes shut. But both are afraid of what will happen when the drugs take their course and the worlds they’ve created are extinguished. Both want to hold onto themselves, and neither knows what that means in the absence of their world.
Over the course of three uninterrupted acts, Max and Whitney go through the trial and become more approachable, more normal, after each pill. Whitney, in particular, starts out with the stilted speech, wide eyes, and forced, flighty gestures that can signal mental illness. Harris embodies these mannerisms with a dancer’s grace. As the two become more medicated, we watch them transform, and begin to straddle the boundary between fantasy and reality a bit more surely. As they do so, they develop tentative, confused, but serious and caring feelings for one another.
A simple summary of World Builders could, I suppose, make it seem that a personality disorder is at the center of this story. But this is no “illness-of-the-week” play. Max and Whitney share common symptoms, but their illness is the play’s context, not its content. Harris and Corey share a stunning chemistry through this progression. A less thoughtful pairing would make it difficult to sit through some of the rawest parts of the story. Instead, their slow, careful self-revelations feel like the beginning of any new relationship. The interiors they disclose to one another are strange, perhaps disturbed, but the process of telling your story to a new person is simply — but also thrillingly, deliciously, frighteningly — the first step of falling in love.
Forum Theatre’s World Builders plays at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s Melton Rehearsal Hall through November 23. Tickets are available online
