Grand Horizons (Bess Wohl)

Dennis (a friend, you don’t know him) said once that any play is about a question you can’t quite put words to. While I don’t always agree with that observation it is true that the best and the worst plays often have an ambiguous void in the middle of them and you’re left with a feeling of nagging absence or brilliance.

In this ways plays can mean a lot of different things to different people, like the bible, and they take on something which is not quite universality but more chameleonic. If reading the back quotes about Grand Horizons is any indication that is true of this play because people ascribe all sorts of meaning from being about the refusal of the culture to accept women as complete people, to being about the foolishness of trying to support others, to being a comment on comedy itself.

For the record I didn’t get any of those, but is a strong work that is hard to articulate what is compelling about it.

If you want to be so blasé as to worry about something so insignificant as plot, then Grand Horizons is about a family coping with the late-in-the-life divorce of a mother and father. Our first scene is a glorious ballet of a marriage in routine which composes only five words over two lines: “I’d like a divorce.” “Ok.”

So Bill and Nancy are going to get a divorce after fifty years of marriage and with both of them nearing their eighties. They seem fine with it, but their two sons Ben (in tow with his pregnant wife Jess) and Brian (an unattached theater teacher,) lose their minds and spend most of the rest of the play struggling to understand that this decision is going to happen.

We get many lovely scenes of all the characters explaining their views on intimacy and how a partner changes you or doesn’t change you. Ben and Brian complain about the other and try to get through to their parents. Ben’s own marriage is tested by Jess’ frustration at putting her life on hold for this situation and his inability to make simple changes she asks for.

Altogether it is a mediation of love and relationships: who owes whom what and are we best served by building ourselves strong or by thinking of others first. In an unusual direction for this kind of story Grand Horizons seems to make the argument that looking after one’s own needs first, along with clear and early communication, makes for, if not stronger relationships, then less frustration over time.