'Julie D.' leaves audience thinking

Local resident Mike Smith's "Julie D." is rich with allusion, heavy on antithesis and eager to find humor in the dramatic. After an off-off-Broadway run, the play opened this weekend at the John Waldron Arts Center Rose Firebay under the direction of Bloomington Playwrights Project artistic director Richard Perez and co-produced by the BPP and the Bloomington Area Arts Council.\n"Julie D" centers on the character Julie Davenport, played by Francesca Sobrer, a once-successful writer now teaching creative writing at a small liberal arts college. The problem: After she stopped drinking, JD stopped writing. Determined to write a play, JD begins stashing vodka bottles in her file cabinet, desk, bookshelf and even a hanging plant. As she writes and drinks more and more, JD must also concern herself with her shy, math-whiz son David, played by Eric Dagley; probing student Elise, played by sophomore English and theatre and drama major Jessica Rothert; awkward but romantic math professor Andrew, played by Todd Fleck; and administrator John, played by Charles Nelson.\nAll of these people become characters in JD's play. Joining the dual characters are Julie (played by Amanda Scherle), JD's self in her play, and Thomas (played by Frank Buczolich), who is Julie's past lover and possibly the father of the child she leaves with him.\nThe play's design takes advantage of the JWAC's intimate Rose Firebay. The set, designed by Under the Billiam Tree -- a local production company headed by sisters Danielle and Nicole Bruce -- is an understated professor's office. It provides the scenery for both JD's present life and the scenes from her play, acted as she writes -- and rewrites -- them. Lighting designer Mike Price blankets the set in soft lighting to emphasize the natural textures of wood, brick and wool.\nSmith's script relies more on discovery and revelation than external events to drive its plot. The play begins with a minor event: JD pours vodka into a thermos. But it's the emotional undercurrent of JD's crisis -- to drink or not to drink -- that turns the simple activity into one of painful fragility. \nSobrer, director of theater at Bloomington High School North, handled such demands with exemplary command, though her fellow actors did not achieve her consistency. The show had gaps of (dis)engagement between its actors, most noticeably in the scenes from JD's play involving Thomas, Julie and their son, Dylan. The lack of eye contact was discouraging -- the actors spent too much time looking at the floor or some indistinct point, rather than each other. Consequently, the actors seemed more concerned with how their next lines would come out than making an authentic connection.\nThe good news is that the play has too many scenes that work too well for such flaws to make lasting impact. Perez lets the show breathe. He avoids over-directing the action and he doesn't let the show's intellectual leans usurp its humanity. His touch is paralleled by the show's only two songs, a selection from Yo-Yo Ma and Shawn Colvin's "Sunny Came Home."\nQuantitatively, the show achieves a series of engaging circumstances that let bigger things bubble beneath. The literal and figurative dialogue between JD and her play creates a metatheatrical experience that allows "Julie D." to ask sticky questions that everyone remotely involved with the arts has an opinion on: Where do the roles/responsibilities of the artist (in this, the playwright) begin and end? When does personal investment stop being noble and start being debilitating? Can a person's art too accurately reflect their life? What are the ethics of representing an individual experience as intrinsically part of a collective one?\nThese are big questions, almost as big as David's question for his mother: Does she want to be sober? You'll have to go to the show to find out, and yes, it is worth finding out.