THROUGH 2/16: Barbenheimer, Meet Appropriate Paint: Burning Coal’s PAINT ME THIS HOUSE OF LOVE Completes Compelling Theatrical Double-Header

RALEIGH – Remember Barbenheimer, the cultural meme that arose after the simultaneous release of the twin tentpole flicks Barbie and Oppenheimer last summer? 

Through Feb. 9, Triangle theater has an even better double-header than that odder-than-odd couple from last summer – mainly because you don’t have to squint as hard to find meaningful – and occasionally eerie – parallels and cross-conversations between them. 

Call this one Appropriate Paint, a mash-up of the titles from the two strong and certainly disquieting family dramas on different current stages in Raleigh. I weighed in earlier this week on North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre’s harrowing Appropriate.

The first inkling I had that Burning Coal Theatre Company‘s production of Paint Me This House of Love might be exploring similar territory came in the middle of the second scene, as another certainly problematic parent, Rhondi (Julie Oliver), firmly attempts to dismantle her daughter Ci’s beliefs about her ex-partner, Michael. After Rhondi demands, “Say it. Say he doesn’t love me,” the moment comes when Oliver, one of the most seasoned and accomplished actors on the regional stage, soberly, slowly intones these words: 

“I’m not hurting you. I am not hurting you.” 

Seconds later, she adds that “[T]ruth is love. Okay? I’m not hurting you, it’s just the truth, and the truth is bad men are everywhere.”

It was the second time in as many weeks that a character on a Raleigh stage had basically said the same line, under circumstances where their good faith was questionable at the best. I flashed back to the moment in Appropriate when corrosive sibling Toni (Edith Snow, in a career-cresting performance) calmly told her younger brother Franz – after doing her best to terminate his relationship with his partner River, deadnaming him yet again – “This isn’t about you, Frank. It’s about the truth. I didn’t do anything but tell the truth.”

By that point in Appropriate, Toni’s dead-hearted malice has been indelibly established. But at this moment in Paint Me, we’re still figuring out what Rhondi’s game is. By then, Canadian playwright Chelsea Woolley, director Flora Bare and Oliver have already defined Rhondi as an abrasive, aging, guilt-tripping helicopter mom from hell who repeatedly bulldozes over her daughter Cecelia’s boundaries – or tries to, as Ci (a perpetually askance Monica Hoh) politely rebuffs her at least some of the time. Rhondi’s never-ending texts and calls, along with the rest of her overbearing discourse, demonstrate no faith in her 32-year-old daughter’s abilities to live her own life.

During one conversational skirmish, Ci warns Rhondi that visiting her “isn’t an invitation to boss me around, or manipulate me, or lie and drag me away from relationships I’d actually liked to have had.” It’s particularly telling when Rhondi only responds to all of this with “I do not lie!” – tacitly admitting that the rest is true. 

But is she the only unreliable narrator in Woolley’s script? What about Ci’s father, Jules (a smooth and ultimately shady Ali Goins)? He’s just shown up on her doorstep after being a ghost in her life for 25 years, with improbable tales of international success in real estate: “beautiful properties for beautiful people,” he claims, before asserting, “The truth is, I went on every one of those adventures so I’d have a story for you. A gift for you.”

Right about then, we begin to wonder if Jules’ real-estate portfolio also contains a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge. 

But the father and child reunion here is hardly helped by Woolley’s eccentric writing throughout the first scene. 

Sometimes we all speak in sentence fragments in conversations; particularly if we’re excited, upset or under pressure, a cascade of words can easily spill over interruptions in the rush: to get to intimacy, tell the harm or break the best news possible. We also encounter it (frequently in Washington these days) when people are talking past one another in a different sort of rush, to drown each other out and get the last word in. 

Throughout Woolley’s first scene, both characters almost always speak in sentence fragments, with random nouns, verbs, phrases left out. On opening night, many of these were conveyed with pauses, not as interruptions, but as glitchy, jagged edges in the discourse. 

To some degree, it works. In one sequence, this exchange with Ci takes place when Jules tries to minimize the impact of his time away, before yanking the conversation in a different direction: 

 

Jules: And everything going on with you at school, and your—and friends, and the-

Ci: Right.

Jules: Right! So it didn’t ever feel like we were not – And apparently you didn’t even need

Ci: I don’t know about

Jules: at this place!

Ci: not exactly one of your luxury

Jules: huge!

Ci: bought it – foreclosure

Jules: kind of magic.

Ci: asbestos.

 

This and other sequences more opaque suggest two characters speaking in slam poetry; a heightened verbal form of ping-pong, in which only the point-of-contact words are voiced while the rest of the conversational trajectory remains silent. It’s an interesting technique, and briefly successful – that is, when it points to an emotional subtext. But when the device lingers throughout the full first scene, it loses authenticity and organic sense, ultimately drawing more attention to its affectation than to any potential moments the characters might have been experiencing. Woolley’s script quickly improves when it’s abandoned.

As the telltale moth holes start to unravel in both Jules and Rhondi’s narratives, Cecilia’s poignant plight brings songwriter Jakob Dylan’s unbidden words to mind: “There’s got to be someone we can trust / Out here among us.”

And only then do subtle discontinuities begin to show in Ci’s own narratives, about Michael, her childhood, her world. They’re in the words of childhood letters her mom urges her to write to a father who is gone. They continue in her accounts of a devastating miscarriage and break-up with her partner – which her mother is determined to minimize. Rhondi callously dismisses Ci’s recent woes by comparing them to her own troubled childhood: “You have never gone through a speck of discomfort in your life…you have the nerve to say your life is over because you’re going through a lot?“

As these conflicts and conflicting tales play out, a character’s words from Appropriate come to mind: “All this life you live—what’s it for if no one’s there to tell you about it? To hold on to it and then give it back to you? To remind you of the things you forgot or never knew you even knew? I always thought that was what family was for.”

“But we don’t seem to be on the same page, memory-wise. We can’t seem to get our stories straight. And why is that? Or is family just a bunch of mismatched memories—stories you tell yourself when you need an excuse to explain how trapped you feel or broken or cheated?”

In both of these plays, when characters start to pull at the edges of lies and unpalatable truths, will there be anything left to the fabric of their families beside broken, disconnected threads? That – along with the riveting performances and challenging scripts – is the reason to take in Appropriate Paint.

Paint Me This House of Love continues at Burning Coal Theatre Company through February 16th.