Show Summary

Diversionary presents “The Busy World is Hushed”
West Coast full production Premiere; this is the 4th full production in the United States

Diversionary Theatre will present Keith Bunin’s new play The Busy World is Hushed as the second show of its 2007-2008 season. Running October 4-28, The Busy World is Hushed premiered in June 2006 at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. Diversionary’s Executive & Artistic Director, Dan Kirsch, will direct. The cast features Barron Henzel, Aaron Marcotte and Jerusha Matsen Neal. The creative team includes Patricia Loughrey (Dramaturg), Greg Stevens (Set Design), Matthew Bright (Lighting Design), Erick Sunquist (Costume Design) and Amy Chini (Properties).

The Busy World is Hushed tells the story of Hannah, a minister and Bible scholar, who finds her faith at odds with that of Thomas, her estranged, wayward son. But when an inquisitive young writer hired to assist Hannah with her latest publication learns painful secrets from Hannah’s past, she spies a risky, unconventional opportunity for reconciliation. “…intricacies of faith—as well as issues of sexuality, love and loss—are addressed in this provocative and moving new play…a refreshing take on the overlap between religion and homosexuality.” - Theatermania.com

Martin Denton wrote this about the play in his nytheatre.com review in June 2006: “Busy World is a love story, and also a story of parents and children; most of all, perhaps, it's a meditation on faith in its many forms—on what it takes to make a life seem worth living, and on the ways we convince (fool?) ourselves that all those things we feel but cannot see (call it religion, call it soul, call it love) somehow comprise purpose enough to allow us to go on.

“Bunin puts a lot out there in his play: a woman who coped with widowhood by pursuing God and who now tries to engineer a stable relationship for her son; one man who never knew his father and runs from anything remotely resembling home as he tries to find his father and himself; and another man who is losing the father he loves dearly and buries himself in abstract ideas to cushion that loss and any others that may lay in his future. What unites the three characters, apart from their strong intelligence and sense of self, is a desire, possibly unrequited (possibly unachievable) to find an unassailable purpose. Love of another seems the best choice, but how often does that really happen? Where can we ultimately find that ineffable something that gives us light and grace?”

Jerusha Matsen Neal plays Hannah in Diversionary’s production. Reverend Matsen Neal is an ordained American Baptist minister, who is currently on family leave from her work as co-pastor at the Santee United Methodist church, where she has served with her husband for the past six years through an ecumenical appointment ("ecumenical" means two different Christian denominations working together across denominational lines). While Matsen Neal makes her Diversionary debut, Barron Henzel and Aaron Marcotte appeared in last year’s holiday show It’s a Fabulous Life, and Marcotte also appeared in the reading of Do Geese See God and the spring production of Bunbury.

Following each performance of The Busy World is Hushed, the audience will be invited to stay for cake and coffee and, during this “fellowship hour,” take time to reflect on the faith issues presented in the play.

Diversionary Theatre was started in 1986. The mission of the theatre is to produce plays with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender themes that portray characters in their complexity and diversity both historically and contemporarily.

The Busy World is Hushed is the second show of Diversionary Theatre’s 2007-2008 season, and will preview on Thursday and Friday, October 4 and 5, and open on Saturday, October 6 and run through Sunday, October 28. Performance times are: Thursday at 7:30pm, Friday and Saturday at 8:00pm, Sunday at 2:00 and 7:00pm, and a Monday, October 15 performance at 7:30pm.

Single tickets are now on sale. Tickets are $29 for Thursday, Sunday and Monday performances, $31 for Friday nights and $33 for Saturday nights, with a $4 discount for students, seniors 60+ and active military. Tickets for opening night will be $45 and include a post-show cast party.

Groups of 10-29 receive a $4 discount, and groups of 30+ receive an $8 discount. For tickets or information, call the Diversionary box office at 619.220.0097 or log on to www.diversionary.org.

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The City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture provides major support for Diversionary Theatre.

“Five Stars…Searching, perceptive, and absorbing…a tightly written interrogation of pain and belief…One of New York’s essential playwrights, Bunin has written wonderful roles for his actors…Rooting through the intricate tangle of motivations that undergird personal faith, Bunin offers an empathetic and fair-minded view of religion: not as some derisory opiate of the people but as morphine for someone in possibly mortal pain.” —Time Out

“Remarkably ambitious…A theatrical miracle: a complex, thought-provoking look at why religion, faith, and the human heart can’t always be reconciled…The script’s most amazing facet is how Bunin exposes the threesome’s souls through their esoteric bantering, with topics ranging from metaphysical semantics and predestination vs. freewill, then theological wrangling over the power of a superior being and the very meaning of life…It all leads to a highly charged finale, the resolution of which proves completely wrenching.” — Hollywood Reporter

Creative Team

Jerusha Matsen Neal	Aaron Marcotte	Barron Henzel

Press Photos

Barron Henzel and Aaron Marcotte in The Busy World is Hushed	Jerusha Matsen Neal, Barron Henzel and Aaron Marcotte in The Busy World is Hushed
Jerusha Matsen Neal and Barron Henzel in The Busy World is Hushed	The set for The Busy World is Hushed

Reviews

Curtain Calls by Pat Launer
October 12, 2007

THE SHOW: The Busy World is Hushed, a drama by Keith Bunin that premiered Off Broadway (Playwrights Horizons) in 2006, in a production that starred Jill Clayburgh and Hamish Linklater.

THE STORY: It’s a faith-based initiative: the dramatic triangle features a believer (a widowed Episcopal minister), a non-believer (a former follower of the faith, currently a blocked writer) and a doubting Thomas (the minister’s son, who probes as much as he avoids). But wait, there’s more. The two men are gay. The surprisingly liberal but oppressively over-protective mother just wants her son to be happy – and home. He has a tendency to play a game he calls “Get Lost,” disappearing for months or even years at a time. She has a tendency to worry and meddle. It doesn’t make for a warm-fuzzy, trusting relationship. Enter Brandt, who’s hoping to avoid his own problems by serving as ghostwriter on Hannah’s book. He gets a lot more than employment.

Each character is on a deep personal/spiritual quest. Hannah, a hard-edged, no-nonsense cleric who focuses on her flock and her ideologies in a desperate effort to bury her long-harbored widow’s grief, is delving into a new-found Gospel that may pre-date the other Four, and might shed light on the real Jesus. Her witty, smart-assed, irresponsible but adorable son is looking for himself, and trying to find any clue, within the family’s huge collection of Bibles and books, to his father’s enigmatic death before Thomas was even born. Struggling with his own father-son issues, Brandt can’t fathom how a benevolent God would cause such suffering in the man he admires, now dying of a brain tumor. Brandt naively steps into a hornet’s nest – a mother-son conflict in which he alternately serves as mediator, moderator, lover and pawn.

The stage is set for intellectual banter, religious debate, relationship issues of the man-to-man, employer-employee and parent-child variety, peppered with wry wit. There are airless spells in the sometimes heady, philosophical/religious dialogue, but the play is thought-provoking, on many subjects. And it might just make you question your own conception of faith.

THE PLAYERS/THE PRODUCTION: Diversionary executive/artistic director Dan Kirsch makes an impressive local directorial debut. With assistance from dramaturg Patricia Loughrey and mentoring from USD/Globe director Rick Seer, he nimbly charts the choppy course of the talky but intelligent play. The cast brings these troubled characters to life, and makes their concerns and conflicts thoroughly believable.

Jerusha Matsen Neal brings a wealth of life experience to the role of Hannah; she is an ordained American Baptist minister who recently returned to the stage. She has the steely certainty of a self-assured religious leader but also the doubts of a thinking believer and an anxious parent. She could demonstrate a tad more emotional range, and she swallowed the play’s final, seminal line, but overall, she’s quite credible, if not always lovable. The same can be said for all these characters. Barron Henzel makes Brandt a confused and damaged man, caught in the anguished crossfire of two families – Hannah’s and his own. Aaron Marcotte does his best work yet as Thomas, making this reckless and terminally adolescent young man a sometimes sympathetic, if maddeningly flawed human, apparently less likely to heal and grow than the others.

The detailed set (Greg Stevens), with its wood wainscoting, flocked wallpaper and thigh-high piles of books, suggests an understated minister’s home (“faculty housing”), complete with four suspended Christian-themed stained glass windows. The lighting (Matthew Bright) is evocative (rain, snow, and patterns refracted through church windows), and it combines nicely with the city- and storm-scape of the sound design (Bonnie Breckenridge). The costumes (Erick Sunquist) aptly define character.

The play’s first act is thrilling in its intelligence; the second act flags a bit, and the ending is somehow unsatisfying. But overall, this is a compelling and thought-provoking piece of work.

THE LOCATION: Diversionary Theatre, through October 28
BOTTOM LINE: BEST BET

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THEATER REVIEW
Put in a provocative picture
3 smart characters grapple with issues

By Anne Marie Welsh
THEATER CRITIC

October 13, 2007

The setting itself announces that “The Busy World Is Hushed” will serve as a departure for Diversionary, the city's gay-and-lesbian-themed theater. Unfolding in a cozy book-lined study on New York's West Side near Columbia University, Keith Bunin's domestic drama concerns a worried mother (who happens to be an Episcopal priest), her unsettled 26-year-old son, and the young ghostwriter she hires to help with her book on a newly discovered gospel.

She's liberal on social policy as well as in her theology; that both these men in her life are gay is therefore a fact, not an issue. No cause for polemic or exhibitionism or even grief over sexual identity here.

The Diversionary production, transparently directed by Dan Kirsch, is also the West Coast premiere of a serious and often engaging recent play that could easily be staged by a mainstream theater here – the Globe, for instance, or North Coast Rep. And the production values – especially Greg Stevens' set, Erick Sunquist's costumes, and the sound and music by Bonnie Breckenridge and Rayme Sciaroni – are of admirably high quality.

Hannah (Jerusha Matsen Neal) warns her assistant Brandt (Barron Henzel) that she gives all of her lectures and sermons extemporaneously: “I can warn you, it's generally going to be impossible to shut me up.” And that's exactly how it goes with this woman who turned to the ministry after her husband died under mysterious circumstances that may have been suicide.

When her son Thomas (Aaron Marcotte), an inveterate runaway, appears, there's an immediate charge between him and Brandt. Though he has ostensibly arrived to build his mother shelves for the books cluttering every nook and cranny of the room, he's actually on a reconnaissance mission to discover clues about the father he never knew. Hannah was pregnant with Thomas when the boy's father disappeared into the ocean.

The conversations between mother and son are charged with their own electricity. She feels he's wasting his life on unworthy partners and a vagabond existence; Thomas feels she hides behind belief in Jesus and redemption to avoid authentic relationships – with him and any man who might assuage her loneliness.

Brandt becomes a willing go-between in this dance of mother and son, though he has problems of his own, notably a loving father who is dying of brain cancer. If this triad sounds a mite schematic, it is that, with each character staking out his and her theological positions (however complex) and each living a different reaction to the possibility of personal – and eternal – salvation.

As Hannah, Neal has a wide-eyed and plausible sincerity, despite her tendency to lecture. Playwright Bunin attributes some decidedly unmotherly feelings to the character: In Neal's most powerfully acted speech, Hannah says she can only love Thomas because she first loves God. Henzel's Brandt possesses a charming diffidence and the social unease associated with a blocked writer, while as Thomas, Marcotte exudes the bravado of an adventurer for whom a tool-belt is a kind of weapon.

Bunin's dialogue is too often thesis-driven and literary in its polish. Yet his ambitious play is thought-provoking in the best sense, as three smart characters grapple with issues of belief and doubt and how these create their values and affect their real lives.

 

Playwright: Keith Bunin. Director: Dan Kirsch. Set: Greg Stevens. Lighting: Matthew Bright. Costumes: Erick Sunquist. Sound: Bonnie Breckenridge. Music: Rayme Sciaroni. Cast: Barron Henzel, Aaron Marcotte and Jerusha Matsen Neal.

Anne Marie Welsh: (619) 293-1265; anne-marie.welsh@uniontrib.com

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San Diego CityBeat
10/09/2007
Acts of God
Busy World tackles religion, homosexuality and everything in between
By Martin Jones Westlin

Biblical scholars don't spend a lot of time on the prospect, but they do say there's no hard evidence that Jesus Christ has ever stopped in at The Brass Rail, or that indeed he ever will. Too bad, because the iconic Hillcrest gay bar reportedly sports a serious come-as-you-are attitude, and Jesus is supposed to be a serious come-as-you-are kinda dude. If he's passed it over, he may have blown a chance to hook up with some seriously interesting like-minded folks, and that's on him.

Maybe he's holding out for the Second Coming, although by now he's so goddamn late that the upshot of his visit is anybody's guess. That's on him, too.

But maybe it's like Hannah says in The Busy World is Hushed, a West Coast premiere and Diversionary Theatre's very good look at religious faith, gay love and a mother's best hopes for her wayward son. God and his boy pretty much keep their own hours, and our place in those hours (bar-hopping included) is created at their discretion.

Religious faith, Keith Bunin's play declares, is thus a trap in many ways. It exploits our finite natures and our finite expectations, which are often the source of our greatest disappointments.

Bible scholar Hannah (Jerusha Matsen Neal, a Santee minister) is about to discover as much. Her worldly-wise, lusty son Tom (Aaron Marcotte) has taken up with Brandt (Barron Henzel), a gentle writer hired to help Hannah with her latest book. The men's involvement is the flash point for Hannah's epiphany about her faith-eventually, it had become a crutch against the sadness of her widowhood and the condition under which she harbored her hopes that the gadabout Tom would settle down. There's a chasm between mother and son now, replete with Tom's barbs about religion and free agency. "If God wanted me to be different," he bellows, "I don't know why he didn't make me that way."

It all works out in the wash, but not before director Dan Kirsch indulges Bunin with some excellent casting to physical type. These three are clearly just plain folk in appearance; as such, they're also the most interesting and appropriate to face Bunin's tough questions about man's place in the great scheme. And let's not forget that Hannah's a Bible scholar-she's been at this a while, and Neal nicely lines Hannah's sincerity with the roteness you'd expect from someone so inured to Christian doctrine.

The Busy World is Hushed vaguely presumes that religiosity doesn't exist in gay life, because Bunin underwrites the potential for religion as the basis for the couple's conflict; he also fails to outline his reasons for painting the men as gay in the first place. But Kirsch gives us lots of cadenced, thrifty, deliberative subtext on which the playwright bases the characters' rich understories-and the muted music bed and other tech values don't exactly constitute a mortal sin. Nice job.

This review is based on the opening-night performance of Oct. 6. The Busy World is Hushed runs through Oct. 28 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Blvd., University Heights. $10-$33. 619-220-0097.