Anthony Rapp sits in a chair for ninety minutes as a miserable middle-aged gay man telling a story that goes from panic to frustration to betrayal, and yet “Touch” is among the most satisfying experiences I’ve had in the theater this year. Not coincidentally, it is also among the simplest and the most intimate, a solo play performed for forty people at a time in a year-old, venue called East Village Basement, which looks like a brick-walled living room, albeit one missing a couch and requiring wary descent down a rickety metal staircase.
Syd begins by telling us about a panic attack that he had on the 5 train, and from the start, playwright Kenny Finkle wins us over with the precision of his observations about life in New York:
“it’s that time of year when you don’t know whether to wear your winter coat or not – so, I’m on the train in my winter coat and a wool sweater and I start sweating. We are so packed in that I have no way to take my coat or sweater off. I have water in my bag, but my bag is down by my feet and there is no room for me to bend down and open my bag.”
Syd tells us he is on his way to the class on theater that he teaches in an afterschool program to ten-year-olds in the Bronx. But he’s feeling so awful that he gets off at an earlier subway station, gasping for air and thirsting for water – and runs into a young woman on the street, who looks concerned and offers him her bottle of water.
“Oh wait. Mr. Syd?” the young woman suddenly says.
“The only people who call me Mr. Syd are my students,” Syd tells us. (Later, he explains that, because his name is Syd Blatter, which his students misheard as bladder; “that’s probably why years ago I told everyone to call me Mr. Syd.”)
Julissa Rodriguez, who was his student some dozen years earlier, reintroduces herself, and starts reminiscing. “You know I still see Joseph! Like we’re still tight..You remember Joseph Gonzalez?..Joseph’s a queer now. Well you know he was always one…Oh, snap I’m just connecting that you’re probably a queer too, right? Oh but I have to tell Joseph..”
And “Touch” begins in earnest. Syd and Joseph soon meet at a café. Joseph is an aspiring fiction writer. Syd is an unsuccessful one.
I don’t want to tell you any more details. Some of the pleasure of the play is in the playwright’s sly craft in unfolding the story, selectively withholding and revealing incident and information as if Syd has a tendency to forget or digress. I’ll only say that the play teases one’s expectations about where it will go, then doesn’t go there, which is generally a good thing, although there are aspects of the story left unexplored (Syd mentions his husband only in passing), and the resolution is too pat (it could benefit from more subtlety and ambiguity.)
More persuasive than the plot is the vivid portrait “Touch” offers of a man of lost promise and ambition. Just a few feet away from any of us, Rapp shares his character’s yearning, resentments and sense of life’s disappointments in a paradoxically life-affirming and relatable way that we can almost touch.
Touch
East Village Basement through March 29
Running time: 90 minutes
Tickets: $69 – $109
Written by Kenny Finkle
Performed by Anthony Rapp
Scenic and props design by Thomas Jenkeleit, sound designby Bart Fasbender, costume design by Jennifer Paar, lighting design by Hayley Garcia Parnell, stage manager Shane Schnetzler
