Pay Attention

Marys Seacole and the political weight of caregiving.

- Sara Holdren

NO MATTER HOW orderly the stage may look when you arrive to watch a play by Jackie Sibblies Drury, it’s a pretty safe bet that an eruption is coming. Last year, Fairview crept up on New York audiences—smooth-surfaced, with a title and initial tone that suggested televised suburbia—and then tore through the house at Soho Rep with such a vengeance that I saw one overwhelmed audience member cry aloud, in a moment of lightsup and lines blurred, “Is this part of it? Is this part of the play?!” Oh, it’s part of it all right. Now Drury’s powerful, densely layered Marys Seacole arrives at Lincoln Center, and although there’s plenty that separates the two plays, they share that long, quietly roiling buildup to the inevitable boil—a sense of the uncanny during the crescendo, of glitches in the carefully maintained Matrix that will eventually burst forth into a fuguelike chaos, where things we’ve seen and heard before will circle back, issuing from different mouths and bodies to disturbing, enlightening effect. Most of all, in that ultimate cataclysm, the plays share a ferocious embodiment of ideas, an ability to make an argument not simply verbal but visceral. In Marys Seacole, that argument turns on who does the bulk of the world’s caring, and on how the people who get their hands dirty for the sake of their fellow humans’ well-being are themselves dehumanized.