La Jolla Playhouse’s ‘Year to Come’ looks back to see where we are now
The cast of La Jolla Playhouse’s “The Year to Come.”
Jim Carmody
As if diving into the lives of a big extended family over two decades and three generations weren’t quite enough for Lindsey Ferrentino, the rising playwright’s latest work poses an added degree of difficulty: An actual, functional swimming pool onstage.
Of course, “It’s only 3 feet deep,” points out Anne Kauffman, who’s directing the world-premiere La Jolla Playhouse production of Ferrentino’s “The Year to Come.”
To which Ferrentino adds with a smile, speaking of her eight-member cast: “And luckily they all know how to swim.”
Even if no lifeguard proves necessary in the Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre, “The Year to Come” still seems to represent a kind of swimming-the-channel moment for the prolific and prize-winning Ferrentino, whose recent, acclaimed off-Broadway works “Ugly Lies the Bone” and “Amy and the Orphans” were more intimately scaled.
The topper is that the new play not only visits with the same Florida family over nearly 20 years’ worth of New Year’s Eves — it does so backward.
For the Florida-raised playwright, the inspiration for that mode of storytelling sprang from the here and now.
“I think it was two things,” Ferrentino says of what prompted the piece, as she chats before rehearsal at the Playhouse alongside Kauffman. “It was right after the 2016 election, and everyone in the country was sort of asking, ‘What happened — how did we get here?’
“So it seemed sort of a natural thing to look backward. And then I was thinking a lot about narrative and myth and how stories change over time, and a lot about family ritual, and my own family’s rituals.
“This is not my family (in the play), but we do meet every New Year’s Eve. And it’s the same place, but the group and what we talk about and who attends changes over the years.
“The same stories are often told, but the stories warp as time goes on. And I was just thinking about that in relation to this country.”
If that makes “The Year to Come” sound like an overtly political play, both Ferrentino and Kauffman say politics often filter into the work more obliquely and indirectly.
For the play’s family, “it’s sort of like an object that’s used as a tool,” observes Kauffman. “Sometimes it’s shoved in the closet, sometimes it’s put out as a tablecloth. People really use politics against each other; they might use it in place of a personal argument they want to be having.”
For Ferrentino, “the idea was to sort of have the politics of the last 20 years affect these characters’ daily lives. So if politics is brought up and discussed, it’s in the way that you do it in your daily life” — in order to, say, “poke fun at a politician” rather than necessarily debate policy.
“It’s sort of how the national narrative that’s been playing out over the past 20 years filtered down from D.C. to Florida to these people’s lives. Politics is above the play and sometimes drops down on the characters. And some years it affects you more than others.”
To Kauffman, “The Year to Come” also connects with the political sphere in another important way, and it has everything to do with how the director sees Ferrentino stepping up to make a statement on such an ambitious scale.
It’s about “the idea of challenging yourself to do something big and messy and that you haven’t done before,” explains Kauffman, a distinguished graduate of the University of California San Diego’s MFA theater program and now one of New York’s most respected directors.
“This is kind of a leap, but I think about all the women who are jumping into politics right now, who are going from the private to the public sector. And this need to be courageous at this moment, and really tackle more than you can chew.
“That attracted me to this, and is very appealing to me, because we’re in desperate, dire times now. It’s not about closing the door and sort of hiding under your covers, or wrestling with the familiar.
“This is a moment where I feel we have to open our doors and look at our whole country and our neighbors, and the people who are disagreeing with us and agreeing with us, and try to figure out how to embrace that, and how to move forward.”
Turning to Ferrentino, Kauffman adds: “I like that your challenge right now in terms of artistic development is sort of mirroring what’s going on in the country.”
Hard to say how many of them have shared billing with a swimming pool, and Kauffman says that aspect of the show has been an adventure.
“It’s kind of astonishing, if you have a pool onstage, how much you take for granted,” she says. “Like, the ripple effect — no pun intended — that it causes for the whole production.”
The cast of La Jolla Playhouse's "The Year to Come" sits poolside. (But not, as it happens, beside the pool that sits on the Playhouse stage.)
But if a pool isn’t something you generally see inside a theater, Ferrentino has a history of showcasing characters you don’t always see in plays. “Ugly Lies the Bone” focuses on a traumatized female war veteran; “Amy and the Orphans” is built around a character with Down syndrome (the story was inspired by the playwright’s own aunt), and in its off-Broadway staging was portrayed — at Ferrentino’s insistence — by an actor with the same developmental condition.
With “The Year to Come,” Ferrentino says, “I was more interested in a family you don’t see onstage — like as a unit. One that felt closer to my family — this big, loud, messy group of storytellers, full of different generations and ages and races and sexual orientations. Sort of this big, microcosm, melting-pot family.
“And in my family, and I think also in this family, people when they’re telling stories are competing with each other. Everyone sort of speaks over each other and speaks at the same time, in conversations that loop back 10 minutes later, without having to re-reference what you talked about.
“I was interested in the way those big group conversations happen and develop and are enacted.”
To Kauffman, a founding member of the investigative theater troupe The Civilians (whose work “This Beautiful City” is now being staged at San Diego’s Diversionary Theatre), “The Year to Come” feels like a comedy.
Ferrentino isn’t so sure: “I never think I write comedies. I think I write funny things, but I was really surprised that ‘Amy and the Orphans’ was called a comedy by every reviewer and marketing person. I never thought that play was a comedy.”
No matter how the new play is labeled, though, Ferrentino knows this about it: “I just want to say a lot. I don’t want to worry about whether someone might feel like this is too much or too loud or too long. Or too political, or not political enough.
“I just wanted to write something that made the audience be in the space where there’s a lot to take in, a lot to process. And not even necessarily come to a conclusion, but just be thinking about the country.
“Where we are now, and where we’ve come from.”