In playwright David Myers’ “237 Virginia Avenue,” a father and son play a not-always friendly, increasingly freighted game of Monopoly. When Rex asks son Eric, an adjunct professor, what he’s at work on, Eric says he’s writing about “Debt. History. Property.” To which Rex interjects, “Sexy. Sounds like a real bestseller,” with no small measure of sarcasm. The dice roll.
The pair’s prickly gamesmanship, which provides a throughline for the play, will name-check those familiar properties of the famous (and fun) board game. There’s the prime (and overpriced) Park Avenue, Reading Railroad and the sneaky wealth-building purple deed card of Virginia Avenue.
Eric, his partner and their young son are visiting the aging Rex, in part to make sure he’s doing all right. But Rex and Eric’s game isn’t the only one vying for property in this engrossing, intricate and highly amusing drama that wrestles with 400 or so years of bargaining or outright theft, of economic expectancy and oft brutal “extraction.”
Rex (Lawrence Hecht) and Eric (Jacob Dresch) engage in a friendly-ish, freighted, father-son game of Monopoly. (Michael Ensminger, Provided by Local Theater Company)
That last is a word a slaver, Whittlesby, uses with a knowing scoff at the play’s outset.
It is 1654 and he is talking to Thomas, who is desperate to put distance between himself and his family’s ill fortunes. Or, as his presumptive benefactor summarizes, “Your father is in prison, your brother is a drunkard. You have no name, no title, no family.”
Thomas hopes to get Whittlesby to finance his relocation to the colonies, specifically Virginia, where “they” are offering land in turn for three years of cultivation and farming. “The only reason Virginia will give it for free is it doesn’t yet own it,” Whittlesby quips. He may be a slaver, but he understands the devil in the details.
Lawrence Hecht and Jacob Dresch deliver physically agile and psychologically shaded performances as the various characters who take the play from a 17th-century coffeehouse to an abode of the American Dream variety in Virginia. The history of the land on which that home sits is infused with ambition and history: bloody at times, personal at other times and ultimately disquieting for Eric. The well-educated, economically pressed, socially aware character is a stand-in for the playwright and, likely, theatergoers.
In addition to Whittlesby and Thomas, there is the mercenary Edmund (Hecht) and young landowner Jack (Dresch), squabbling about the “savages” (Edmund’s word) as they fight back a raid on the home. The 1800s find Franklin (Hecht) convincing the equally inebriated but less financially flush stagecoach driver Armfield (Dresch) of the fortune to be made by breeding the enslaved. (Britain abolished its part in the slave trade in 1807.)
Armfield looks appropriately aghast, before the playwright pulls the audience’s hope for a hint of moral reckoning from under us. In 1950, Dresch is a homeowner who wants to sell his home to a middle-class Black family. His neighbor Bill (Hecht) expresses his displeasure. As they argue, Bill drags a beam along the floor and goes about some dark household carpentry.
Throughout “237 Virginia Avenue,” Rex and Eric inject contemporary quandaries in this rightly perturbing meditation on property and privilege.
Jacob Dresch portrays Thomas in “237 Virginia Ave,” a man desperate to buy land in Virginia but needs a backer (Lawrence Hecht, right). Michael Ensminger, Provided by Local Theater Company
Doggedly researched, “237 Virginia Avenue” doesn’t pretend to be a documentary. (Witness the paper cups from Starbucks at the start of the play, or the intentional mishmash of costumes they peel off or throw on that pay little heed to the eras except the one we occupy.) This is a biting parable punctuated by slanted gestures in the vein of Tracey Letts’ “The Minutes.” Here, leaps in time are acknowledged but not hewed to with absolute verisimilitude.
The play has been in development for two years with the Boulder-based Local Theater Company, whose mission continues to be the nurturing of American plays. The company’s co-artistic directors, Pesha Rudnick and Nick Chase, have nailed the landing through the marriage of nimble acting to kinetic action. (The company’s other co-artistic director, Betty Hart, has been bringing playwright Jeffrey Neuman’s classic-meets-contemporary work “The Road to Lethe,” to tart life at Lakewood’s Benchmark Theatre; it runs through May 18.)
A simple set intensifies each scene. As do the smart lighting (Cece Smith) and nuanced sound and projection design (Brian Mallary). Composed mostly of a table atop a square, wood-planked floor, ace set designer Markas Henry evokes the spare foundation of a home. But to this critic, it also — along with the verbal sparring of the actors — teased thoughts of a boxing ring.
Although “237 Virginia Avenue” is a two-hander, it acknowledges again and again the people not present onstage: the enslaved of the Middle Passage; the enslaved of this nation’s own robust slave trade; this land’s indigenous peoples; as well as “overseas investors” and even the wives of the central characters.
Myers was inspired to write the play, he confessed in talk-back, after he and his father went in on buying a house. (The writer lives in Los Angeles.) This no doubt informed the father and son’s sharp philosophical exchanges but also their deeply aggrieved back and forth. But “237 Virginia Avenue” arrives, too, during a time of land acknowledgements and migrant encampment sweep, obsessive interest-rate watching and the waning opportunities for new generations to own a home. Long in the making, housing crises have many dimensions, many disappointed aspirants and more and more mass casualties.
One recent example: A predominantly white enclave in Baton Rouge ceded from the predominantly Black city — a city that took in approximately 200,000 of New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina refugees. The upheaval continues, offering an aptly uncomfortable backdrop to Myers’ drama.
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By the time Eric and Rex come to the finale’s loggerheads — over ownership of Rex’s home — the familial has become purely and bitterly transactional. Along the way, the wooden floor has added three corner beams: first a shooting post, then a whipping post, then the upright beam of what becomes a cross. Will there be a fourth?
IF YOU GO
“237 Virgina Avenue”: Written by David Myers. Directed by Nick Chase and Pesha Rudnick. Featuring Lawrence Hecht and Jacob Dresch. At the Savoy Denver, 2700 Arapahoe St., through May 19. For tickets and info: localtheaterco.org.