‘Maple and Vine’ an interesting intersection for nostalgia

• Reprints

Lawrence Grimm and Jenny Avery star in "Maple and Vine."

Updated: November 4, 2011 3:08PM

It has been said that “people seem to get nostalgic about a lot of things they weren’t so crazy about the first time around.”

In “Maple and Vine,” Jordan Harrison’s exceptionally clever play about dealing with the present by seeking refuge in a past that might have been something less than it was cracked up to be, nostalgia is neither easily dismissed nor wholly glorified. Rather, Harrison — whose play is now in its Chicago premiere at Next Theatre, and was a hit at this year’s Humana Festival of New Plays in Louisville — strikes a wonderfully off-kilter sense of ambivalence as he weaves the story of a stressed-out, bi-racial New York couple, and their “retreat” into a decidedly intense, full-time 1950s “re-enactment community” in the Midwest.

By the end of the play’s first act you might find yourself chanting “I Like Ike” and hankering for Tater Tots and a Salisbury steak TV dinner. But by the end of its second act you might well be calling out such code words as “Hillary Rodham Clinton” and “Google,” or racing off to Starbucks for a latte. Or then again, maybe not.

Living fully in the somewhat detached, relentlessly online 21st century mode are Katha (Molly Glynn, who enacts a swift and convincing transformation), a high-powered publishing-world type still emotionally drained by a late-term miscarriage, and her Japanese-American husband, Ryu (Peter Sipla), an ambitious plastic surgeon. Soon after Katha impulsively quits her job and hands it over to Roger (Paul D’Addario), her copacetic gay assistant, she encounters Dean (Lawrence Grimm, ideally taut and troubled), a strange vestige of the 1950s with his retro suit, hat and attache case.

Dean tells Katha about the Society of Dynamic Obsolescence, and she soon convinces Ryu they should jettison their current lives for a six month trial period of “living in the 1950s.”

As they begin to discover, thanks to the demanding tutelage of Dan’s unhappy wife, Ellen (Jennifer Avery in top form), this involves far more than a shift in fashion, food and gadgetry, or even views on smoking and drinking. It is about attitudes and expectations. It is about gender roles (women at home in aprons, men on the factory floor with lunch pails). It is about discrimination (whether mixed marriages or, in this case, prejudice against the Japanese in a post-World War II society). And of course it is about sex — from attitudes regarding contraception to, most notably here, homosexuality.

Secrets, decorum, repression and hypocrisy are all part of the 1950s casserole, but so is a certain level of intimacy compared to the laissez-faire, “anything goes,” virtual way of life of this moment. A price is paid by the conventions of both eras.

Director Damon Kiely keeps just the right sense of dislocation in the air, with Alex Meadows’ vintage costumes, Keith Pitts’ set and Lindsay Jones’ sound design all adding to the authenticity of the time warp. And while you can puncture a number of holes in the story it is crucial to remember one thing: When we first meet Katha and Ryu they are in bed and SHE has insomnia. So the whole thing might just be a very elaborate (but necessary) dream.