Review: Contemplating the Meaning of Home and Moving On in Stargazers

In the program for the new play Stargazers, playwright Majkin Holmquist mentions how her own feelings of homesickness for her Smoky Valley hometown in Kansas led her to write a play that asks, “What is our responsibility to land’s history, and to its future?” But neither that earnest note nor the show’s brief plot summary quite suggests the strange and darkly comic directions in which this play goes. One thing you can’t accuse Stargazers of is being dull.

Holmquist’s play begins in the aftermath of a tragedy. Rita Olds (Kelly McAndrew) is still lamenting the untimely death of her daughter, Cate, 10 years ago when Clementine (Lizzy Brooks) walks onto her 150-year-old plot of land. She’s an employee of the Dedham Group, an East Coast land-development company that wants to buy her property and incorporate it into a progressive planned community in Kansas. The inexperienced Clementine is there to make a business proposal to Rita. That, however, goes haywire the moment she brings up her dead daughter and Rita responds with furious defensiveness.

The question of whether Rita will eventually sell her property to Clementine and the Dedham Group isn’t the only narrative thread animating Stargazers. Holmquist also focuses on some of Cate’s friends, like Jessica (Baize Buzan), whose desire to become a farmer herself is stymied by her father’s conservative views on women’s place in the household; and Aracely (Keren Lugo), who fled Kansas and now lives in Los Angeles. Rita reaches out to both Jessica and Aracely for a specific reason I wouldn’t dream of spoiling here. Let’s just say, the suggestions in the play’s first half that Cate’s ghost is haunting this patch of land get a rather demented payoff once Rita reveals that motivation.

Holmquist certainly has large subjects on her mind. Rita’s allegiance to the land in which she raised her daughter clashes with the capitalist forces that threaten to bulldoze over that land for the sake of profit, however well-intentioned in their stated aims. (Dedham himself and Rita’s ex-husband, Al, briefly appear in the play, both played by Andrew Garman.) Just how much Rita’s reluctance to sell her land is tied to her lingering grief blends with the broader question of what “home” means to not only lifelong Kansans like Jessica, Avery (Fernando Gonzalez), and Casey (Miles G. Jackson), but Aracely, who couldn’t wait to leave but still finds herself occasionally pining to return. And then there’s the question of just how far one will go to deal with grief.

That’s a lot to shove into one play, and Stargazers doesn’t always escape a feeling of a narrative, stylistic, and thematic diffuseness that occasionally mutes the emotional impact of certain plot turns. Thankfully, Holmquist evinces both a talent for crafting detailed characterizations through the sparest of means and a loopy sense of pitch-black humor. She only needs stray lines of dialogue to suggest, for instance, Rita’s deep-down conservatism (Rita’s indignant response to Clementine’s less-than-impressed reaction to her invocation of Ulysses S. Grant is particularly telling, since Clementine is Black and she white). And the way she finds unexpected bits of comedy—whether through a comment about white wine, a reference to The Lion King, and more—without them feeling forced suggests an acute sense of the way human beings in general try to find levity even in the grimmest of circumstances.

Director Colette Robert makes a solid case for Holmquist’s strengths as a playwright in Page 73’s world-premiere production. Tosin Olufolabi’s eerie sound design and the sudden bursts of light in Reza Behjat’s lighting design offer intriguing counterpoints to the naturalism of Lawrence E. Moten III’s sets and Alicia J. Austin’s costumes. The sharp performances are the real highlights, however. Garman, Buzan, Gonzalez, and Jackson all play double roles and manage to come up with distinctive profiles for each character. As Aracely, Lugo is convincingly torn between nostalgia for the character’s rural upbringing and her current taste for urban life, while Brooks makes Clementine’s naive sincerity in believing in the selflessness of the Dedham Group’s mission credible.

But McAndrew holds it all together as Rita, refusing to play the character for likability even at her spikiest, and managing to find emotional truth in even her most outlandish actions. Stargazers may be more ambitious and promising than truly great, but there are enough memorable moments in it to suggest that Holmquist may have even greater triumphs in store for us in the future.