Summer People

MAINE DRAG Belushi, left, mopes with Justin James Farley.

Photo: John W. Sisson Jr.

Set in rural Maine in the summer of 2004, Summer People, a new play by Gift ensemble member Connell, toggles uneasily among a number of interconnected story lines. A harried New York City mother brings her two girls to the family’s summer home for the first time since she separated from their father. Mom frets about her parenting skills and flirts with the proprietor of the nearby campground. The older of the girls, wrapped up in her own budding sexuality, quarrels theatrically with her mother while her precocious preteen sister longs for attention. Into the mix comes a handsome stranger who catches the teenager’s eye. This Picnic -like scenario is complicated by the revelation that the stranger—apparently the campground’s sole customer—is a marine newly returned from Fallujah with a bad case of PTSD; he’s got ghosts in his head and a grisly souvenir in his backpack.

While Summer People combines foreign policy and domestic drama to less than satisfying effect, the Gift’s production is well acted scene to scene. Intimate moments between Lynda Newton and Danny Ahlfeld as the mother and camp manager ring warm and true, while on the opposite end of the stage we get intriguing flashbacks of soldier Rob Belushi’s frustrated, language-hampered interactions with a young Iraqi woman (Minita Gandhi). But director D’Addario can’t seem to illuminate the intent of Connell’s awkward juxtaposition. If her title’s meant to suggest that America’s as out of place in the Middle East as New Yorkers summering in Maine, the comparison feels as cheap as Connell’s unfulfilling shock ending.

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