But the play puts a natural brake on such interpretations, because Guirgis, entering any complicated debate, can’t help himself from complicating it further. Walter’s story, like everyone else’s, is open to question. Is he out for justice or just revenge? And against whom? The wheelchair, we quickly learn, isn’t his.
Complications like that are unpleasant for absolutists; Guirgis’s needling of victimhood may please as few people on the left as his needling of Rudolph Giuliani may rile those on the right. Along with anyone who can’t tolerate profanity, which is basically the play’s linguistic glue, they will have a hard time warming to a playwright who isn’t interested in telling us what’s right. He only wants to show us what’s real.
Everyone should see it anyway, to experience the pleasure of a great cast making a shrimps-and-veal meal of the incredibly rich material, even as it flips between comedy and tragedy on its way to the truth in between. Actually, that meal may even be too rich at points; the final scene can’t quite digest all that came before, and there are brief moments throughout when the actors’ love for the material itself begins to show through the facade of character, like those bricks behind the plaster.
For the most part, though, Pendleton’s production is amazingly confident, featuring not just Walt Spangler’s set, but also top-notch lighting by Keith Parham, sound and music by Ryan Rumery and, especially, costumes by Alexis Forte, which tell their own story on top of Guirgis’s. And when the scene changes are as expressive as the actors’ attention to every nuance of each other’s actions, staging becomes a kind of emotional choreography: thrilling, precise, impossible to pin down.
That’s Guirgis’s sweet spot. In plays like “Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven,” “Our Lady of 121st Street,” “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” and “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” — all premiered or revived in New York in the past five years — he consistently writes about characters for whom the world as it is, or at least as it seems, offers no reliable templates for creating a credible self. A nice girl can be a prostitute. An addict can be loving. A hero can cry wolf. A fraud can make a miracle.
That’s scary and yet also liberating. As the Church Lady repeatedly tells Walter, “Always we are free.” At any moment we can choose to be something better, or worse, than we are — or, in Guirgis World, most likely both.
Between Riverside and Crazy
Through Feb. 12 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
