A secret is just an answer waiting to be revealed.
This is one of the central insights of J.T. Rogers' award-winning play "Madagascar," Fusion Theatre Company's season premiere at the Cell Theatre.
Directed by Dave Florek, the play focuses on the lives of three uprooted people who find themselves alone in a sparsely-furnished hotel room. They tell their stories in soliloquy.
Overlooking the Spanish Steps of the Piazza di Spagna in Rome, the room serves as an escape from the past for the three central characters: the widow Lilian Doyle (Laurie Thomas), her lover Nathan (Martin Rader) and her daughter June (Jacqueline Reid).
Their overlapping monologues come from three different places in time, all in this room - Lilian speaks from five years ago, June from a few days ago, and Nathan from the present.
"We should be punished for the things we did not do," Lilian says, and shares with her lover and daughter an overwhelming sense of guilt and disconnection.
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The trio's identities are closely defined by severed connections with their family members. The monologues are centered on the absence of two key characters: Arthur, Lilian's deceased husband who worked Madagascar during most of their marriage and Paul, Lilian's missing son.
The characters interact only in their flashbacks, and their stories are revealed through coinciding monologues. They speak to but do not face each other, reaffirming the sense of loss and inability to connect completely, even with the people they are closest to.
There is little action and almost no interaction between the characters, but the play is fast-paced and engaging as the narration jumps from past to present. Each monologue slowly reveals central clues, so the play is never stagnant. The play slowly reveals the secret of Paul's disappearance and the disintegration of Lilian and Arthur's marriage, and the audience becomes entangled in the interwoven fabric of the family's unraveling lives.
Rader's Nathan contrasts Thomas's elegant and worldly Lilian. Reid's performance as the haunted June, aching for her twin brother, is chilling. In historic Rome, June and Lilian long for "Madagascar," the place where Nathan disappeared to and where Paul disappeared from. The country represents a magical place the women hold most precious and an escape from the shared past that the characters realize is built on lies as the layers of truth are stripped away.
The minimal set, the nonlinear temporal structure and the characters' absence of exits or entrances give the play a sense of timelessness and reinforce the sense of loss the characters express as they search for meaning and identity.
It's impossible to turn away from "Madagascar," as the house seats are actually onstage. So close to the stage, it is easy and thrilling to get caught up in this world of loss and desperate searching.
The barren hotel room represents anonymity and escape as much as it does unbreakable familial bonds and the need to belong. But as the characters independently realize, you can't move forward without looking back, and even if you disappear alone, you're always leaving someone else behind.
"Madagascar" requires its audience to pay close attention in order to understand the clues being revealed, but the play's insight is luminous and its raw emotion powerfully delivered. The monologues overlap in a lyrical chorus of frantic voices that will leave the audience leaning forward in their seats, wanting nothing more than to be let in on the secrets.
