An author’s first play is usually subject to the regular pitfalls: stilted dialogue, unbelievable characters, slightly askew dramatic mechanisms. Not so for Francesca Pazniokas' Keep, currently running at the TBG Theater. Performed in collaboration with the Mastadon Theater Company and Wide Eyed Productions and directed byStephanie C. Cunningham, Keep weaves four deep, separate, but entangled veins of story in the form of four sisters facing and coping with crisis. Older sisters Jane (Madison Comerzan) and Kara (Jenna D’Angelo) are intervening on their younger sister, Naomi (Kim Krane), who has become a hoarder in the wake of a fourth sister’s disappearance. Each sister’s pronounced character -- Jane, the appeasing WASP-y partner of a successful psychiatrist; Kara, the hard-headed but ultimately understanding oldest sister; and Naomi, the ethereal, child-like youngest -- is clearly stated through the excellent performances given by the actors, but not stolid or unmovable. Through the process of clearing, cleansing, and the parsing of the importance of things, the sisters all express and attempt to work through the issues of their past, which reach well into the present.
Notably, Pazniokas also wrote Keep as a work drawn on life experiences. Though she makes clear that she never had a hoarding problem to the extent portrayed in the play, her personal knowledge of what it is to want to keep too many things empathetically informs rather than over-emotionalizes the issue at hand, which is an issue inherently difficult to understand for an audience presumably not caught in the loop of disordered thinking that causes a person to destructively hoard. Lighting, sound, and set design (created by Cate DiGirolamo, J. Alexander Diaz, and Alfred Schatz, respectively) created an engrossing, almost claustrophobic environment that pulled the audience into the scene, effectively portraying the proverbial walls closing in around the characters onstage.
In an age of Extreme Hoarders and similar reality shows, it is hard to find a portrayal of hoarding that is nuanced, sensitive without being sensationalized. Keep explores hoarding from a larger, more complex emotional context, and, while it does not fail to address the physical mess of things, it does not simply stop there.
