The Altarena Playhouse’s first show of 2025—Grand Horizons, written by Bess Wohl and directed by Angela Mason—begins with a Hamlet/Who’s There? dramatic moment. The two main characters, Nancy played by Ellen Brooks and Bill by Ron Dritz, sit down for dinner and “Jeopardy.” All is calm, all is right. But before they take their first bites she says to him, “I want a divorce.” Mic drop, lights out, set change, let’s get going. It’s important to note that they are an elderly couple who’ve been married 50 years.
What follows is a play that falls into the category of what I’ll call sitcom theater, except in this case, thankfully, beautifully, it transcends the genre at a few poignant moments in the first act, followed by more in the second, and ends sorta full-circle with the Mom and Dad by themselves, where they speak truth to each other minus the gags and tropes that dominate early on.
Before I explore the play further I need to share a caveat: I am a theater snob. I come by it honestly. I spent 25 years teaching the finest poems, novels, and plays in American literature. Year after year I’d read and guide my students through The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, A Raisin in the Sun, and more recently Fences, The Laramie Project, and Ruined. I’m also a Shakespeare guy with multiple Hamlet tattoos and run a theater company producing the Bard’s best. So when I sit in a theater that’s not in Ashland or Berkeley or San Francisco, I bring my baggage with me, crossing my arms with a show-me-what-you-got attitude.
I share this because for most of the beginning of Grand Horizons I was not having much fun. The direction was strong, the set well-appointed, and the acting solid. But the lines were not moving me, nor the circumstances. Mom and Dad are getting a divorce, the older son who’s about to become a father is unhappy, and the younger gay son is even more upset. Why? How? What? Now? They don’t get it, and for me at least, I wasn’t really caring very much.
But then a good hour into the play, in a scene with the younger son and mom, after she’s pretty much been a cliché to everyone including herself, she tells her boy, “I will be a full person to you.” At that moment I raised up in my seat and thought okay, now I’m witnessing art. As part of that conversation she reveals she once loved someone else who discovered that she has five freckles lined up on her upper back. The way she tells it they became a love poem tattooed into her skin. More surprising scenes followed, including one where the dad’s girlfriend shows up and after talking about her vibrator, shares that sometimes she goes and holds the hands of people with dementia to give them comfort. These small moments of beauty lifted this play up beyond what I thought possible.
The acting, as always at the Altarena, was solid. Peter Marietta and Tyler Iams play the sons like worrisome bookends, each locked into their worlds to where they only saw their parents as one dimensional, and not people who parent. Laura Morgan is the daughter-in-law who has her own moment of moving revelation. She’s pregnant and shares her fears of soon losing herself into her new consuming role. Thomas Hutchinson, previously the complicated priest in Doubt, here plays the younger son’s date—frockless, saucy, and honest. Lori Mrochinski is the dad’s no-longer-secret girlfriend who starts as a caricature but ends up as a mensch in her single outstanding scene. And Ron Dritz plays the dad, also at first as a cliché, a stoic comedian-to-be, grumpy, gray, who in the end grows wings and becomes a person.
But it is the mom, played by Ellen Brooks, who is most transcendent. Her first impressions are deceiving—she’s got the sensible older woman’s short hair style, dresses Target-nicely like the mom (and former librarian) she’s meant to represent, and prepares a sandwich for her husband with the kind of care that I know my mom used when making mine. She exactly meets the expectations of a suburban parent. But then what Brooks gets to say gets better, and she gets better saying the words of this mostly invisible person. It’s not the shock of hearing an older woman talk about sex or even uttering “F**k You” to her family. Instead, she becomes a person, a real person, explaining herself to her family, looking at the man with whom she weathered half a century, and who later, but not too late, finds his voice, as she does hers, so they can talk to each other, person to person.
This play had plenty of ba-dum-ching! moments with the elders making the youngsters cringe by talking naughty, but in the end even grumpy me was moved, and you will be too. Grand Horizons is a sneaky play that comes wrapped in plain paper, but inside the box is Shakespeare’s mirror where we get to see our better selves up on stage.
The play continues through February 23. Visit the Altarena Playhouse website for tickets and information.
Gene Kahane is the founder of the Foodbank Players, a lifelong teacher, and former Poet Laureate for the City of Alameda. Reach him at [email protected]. His writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Gene-Kahane.
