What does a divorcee look like? Zsa Zsa Gabor? Megan Markle? Elizabeth Taylor? How about a 19-year-old groovy chic from Los Angeles slumming it in a New York City apartment in the 60’s? That one fits the bill for Butterflies Are Free the 1969 play by Leonard Gershe (not to be confused with the 1972 film-adaptation starring Goldie Hawn.) Directed by Jason Crawford, this romantic-dramady tells the story of Don Baker, a young man living in his first solo apartment in New York City after fleeing his overbearing mother’s house in favor of newfound freedom. Oh, and he’s blind.
Leonard Gershe’s narrative is somewhat thin on substance and pushes large, life-altering decisions in a span of 24-hours (more like 12) without the stakes of the dramatic tension being high enough to warrant such decision making. The ending is also happy-camp-crap that feels like a throwback to wholesome American 1950’s rather than the radical shift of 1969 where the play is both set and when it was written. The concept is steady but the tenants which support it are shaky. It’s got a bit of fantastical absurdism to it, not unlike The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. (If you’ve ever taken a fiction course in college you’ll have come across this absurd-realist short-story about the young girl of age 11 or so who marries a traveling marshmallow salesman that she met at the school bazar.) Overall the meat of the story is lacking but the message that one can sift fro within the text is a powerful one.
Theresa Bonvegna’s set is a lot to look at and fills out the space impressively well. There are flats structured to look like the inside of a somewhat spacious studio apartment in New York City. Some of the walls are covered with newspaper articles (which is a clever and cheeky nod to the fact that the ‘walls are thin as paper’, enabling the Don and Jill characters to hear every blessed thing happening in each other’s conjoined apartments.) The skylight detail and elevated bunk are also really nicely done… the gray-plastic-tote-on-knobs serving as the bathtub is questionable. (You get what she was going for but given how nice some of the detailing is on the painted-wall-bookshelf one gets the impression that this particular scenic-prop was forgotten about until the director pointed out that it is referenced multiple times in the dialogue.) Ultimately a pretty impressive set for the space.
Fuzzy mics and other sound hiccups notwithstanding, the show’s lighting and sound, also designed by Director Jason Crawford, suit the show. You get some period-appropriate music for those few scenic shifts and you get basic interior lighting for the inside of an ordinary apartment. As the show’s director, Crawford leaves a few things to be desired when it comes to the overall experience, but this comes mostly in the direction of the main character of Don (Patrick Jay Golden.) It’s difficult to say if it was an intentional direction to make the character monotone, with one-note of delivery throughout the majority of the performance, or if this was Golden attempting too intently to focus on playing blind and losing sight of the fact that the character is still meant to have expressive emotional moments. (Having seen both Crawford’s direction and Golden’s performances in other productions, this is a puzzlement as the strange direction and poor performance is out of character for both of them.) To Golden’s credit he does a superb job of physically performing as a blind character. He doesn’t physically look at other characters when they are speaking to him, he doesn’t startle or respond the way someone who is sighted would to things moving, people talking, etc., and his travels around the apartment are simultaneously comfortable yet calculated, like he is concentrating on memorizing the space from steps alone. That is a remarkable feat to behold, though it regrettably does not make up for the lackluster, emotionless delivery.
Crawford could also stand to tighten the pacing of the overall performance. While the show clocks in at just under two hours with the intermission, if the dialogue was being delivered in rapid timing with a tightness that belays true conversational or even argumentative speed, you’d have a much more succinct and intense experience. These scenes happen mostly during the exchanges with Golden’s character and Jill and again with the Jill character and the Mrs. Baker character. There’s just something slightly stilted about some of these exchanges; they aren’t huge yawning gaps but you can feel a need for tightening, even just a bit, to add that ease of natural conversational exchange. Crawford does a fine job of casting the ladies in the production— both Jillian Paige as Jill and Suzanne Young as Mrs. Baker bring vibrant breaths of fresh air into the somewhat stale format that Gershe has laid down in the text.
Patrick Jay Golden, as Don Baker, does have a lovely, mellifluous voice, which he only gets to showcase momentarily in song, but it’s beautiful and well worth the wait all the same. To Golden’s credit, in addition to the stellar job he does with ‘moving as an unsighted character’, there are two very quirky and humorous moments that you really get a sense of his character’s internal personality. (The “Dracula— blind as bats” quip and again when he’s mock-quoting “Little Donnie Dark” to Jill.) Watching Golden in that tense exchange with his mother and later with Jill, where he delivers what is arguably the most powerful line of the production— “You’re crippled; I’d rather be blind”— falls short of really emotionally stunning the audience because of how one-note the delivery and exchange in both of these instances are.
Mrs. Baker (Suzanne Young) has the zestiest dialogue in the play. Her quippy, snappy, waspish one-liners are laced, locked and loaded, resulting in great guffaws and chuckles from the audience. There are times where Young’s pacing could use a bit of tightening, but often the casual pauses before she drops a biting zinger only add to the comedic heft and sting of the delivery. What’s truly touching, albeit out of place in the trajectory of the story (and that has nothing to do with Crawford’s directing or Young’s performance; that’s solely on Gershe) is the quick-shift that Mrs. Baker undergoes after having a die-hard-dead-set opinion, which on a dime of next-to-nothing shifts rather drastically to the other side of the fence. Getting to see the versatility that Young possesses to portray both sides of the Mrs. Baker-coin is impressive; trying to figure out how such a shift in the character is possible let alone justified is a mystery that Gershe will leave us pondering for a spell.
Chirpy, chipper, and mellow with an inner glow like a lava lamp of the time, Jillian Paige, as Jill Tanner-Benson, is as vivacious as her psychedelic orange flower-dress featured in the second act. While she’s not bounding around the room like someone on an upper, you get the sense that she’s truly the ‘butterfly of freedom’ in this narrative. There’s an undeniable lively spark inside of her that just bubbles out of her mannerisms and overall movement. Watch her delightfully disgusted responses every time she makes a sight-reference to the Don character (casual things like “can’t wait for you to see it” or “you’ll see”), forgetting but instantly then remembering that he is in fact blind and won’t physically see it. The balance of a drifting soul tethered to the bubbly buoyance of elation and merriment come together in Paige’s portrayal of Jill making her a fascinating creature to watch. Whether she’s mouthing back, albeit politely, at Mrs. Baker, dragging Ralph Austin (her director friend played by Joey Hellman) over to be face-felt by Don, or simply by hankering for food that the character is constantly eating, you get this sense of convivial reality washing out of Paige’s character with every step and spoken word.
It’s not uninteresting and the performances in varying degrees are impressive. It’s rarely produced, this somewhat dated and oddly-set slice-of-life dramady, Butterflies Are Free. You have an opportunity to catch at Just Off Broadway this weekend and next.
Running Time: Approximately 1 hour and 55 minutes with one intermission
Butterflies Are Free plays through May 14th, 2023 at Just Off Broadway in Epiphany Lutheran Church— 4301 Raspe Avenue in Baltimore, MD. Tickets are available at the door or in advance online.
