Vosters is Superb in the Eye of the Storm at Next Act

In the opening moments of Natural Shocks, Angela’s house is shaking. And Angela is shaking. Recording herself on her cell phone, the camera shakes as she locks the doors to the basement and tries to calm down. Quickly we realize that she is sheltering from a tornado that’s heading her way, set to destroy everything in its path. Overwhelmed by the enormity of the deadly storm, defenseless against the weather, and uncertain if she’ll survive, Angela embarks on a stream-of-consciousness monologue that is also a reckoning. If these are her last moments, then she will confess to us, an unseen audience, the mistakes she’s made and the efforts she has taken to ameliorate the chaos — so like a force of nature — that has molded her life up to now.

“Life is just a game of chance.”

This is one of the truisms that the narrator offers her digital audience in Lauren Gunderson’s one-woman play, directed by Michael Cotey. Produced first as a reading for Door County’s Third Avenue Playhouse and now for Milwaukee’s Next Act Theatre, it is a verbal collage of many disconnected parts — one-sided conversations that range from collecting dice to collecting guns, Jane Austen to Shakespeare, and recipes she never mastered to insurance industry jokes.

The play, available to stream through June 13, is buoyed by the passionate, earnestness of our narrator and guide; actress Jennifer Vosters. In short, she is mesmerizing. Her fearful eyes, her almost reassuring laugh, her intelligent explanations of probability and predictive models, and her tender memories about her mother make Angela very likable, and a character who might be in a lot of danger.

“Forget the niceties. Show me your crisis management.”

Dressed in a plaid shirt and sporting a lovely diamond wedding ring set, Vosters’s Angela is Midwest nice. Skittering around her basement crouching amongst the boxes of Christmas ornaments, old clothes, books, and camping equipment, she is trying to make the best of the circumstances.

The great thing about performances like this one being forced out of the theater over the last year is that they end up in real places. Vosters’s basement is more authentic and recognizable than any set designer and props master could create. Both claustrophobic and quirky, it has lots of little nooks to explore and places to hide. Cotey and Vosters take advantage of a variety of camera angles and mini-settings in the environment, in addition to simply settling the focus on the actress’s incredibly expressive face.

“Lying always makes things easier.”

After the initial crisis of running underground and locking the door against the storm, we wait with Angela until it’s safe to reemerge. In the meantime, she looks for distractions from the dangerous sounds outside that come and go and come again — like a freight train suddenly bearing down on us. But over the course of several personal anecdotes, it becomes clear that this unreliable narrator is so practiced at lying that it’s impossible to tell what’s true. 

“This is a messed up world.”

Vosters’s character knows that things go wrong — sometimes people’s whole houses are uprooted in a tornado and their lives are swept away. Sometimes your dad leaves, or your mom gets cancer, your husband doesn’t like the vegetarian dinner you made, or you lose your nerve before taking a really big exam. But to counter this knowledge, she has spent her life planning to soften the blow of every eventuality by going into the insurance business, and even having a gun in the house — you know, just for emergencies. For protection.

“Help me, Hamlet.”

Reciting Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, a text that bubbles up in her memory from a long-ago high school English class assignment, Angela spends quite a bit of time considering her own mortality. Going through the soliloquy line by line, she weighs her options. As the audience finds out later, this hour or so holed up in the basement is actually more of a Shakespearean crossroads than simply passing time, hoping the twisters avoid her town. 

“Things fall apart.”

An issue play with a Lauren Gunderson signature twist at the end (that doesn’t quite work), Natural Shocks is a challenging piece for an actress that has good intentions written all over it. 

But the play struggles to make meaning out of a collection of memories, mathematical theories, literary quotes, and platitudes that are sprinkled liberally throughout the script. Of course it is admirable that Gunderson, the most produced playwright in the U.S. and the darling of regional theaters, made the play available, royalty-free when it debuted. Theaters across the country lit up, focusing on actresses with scripts in hand to perform Natural Shocks to mark the anniversary of the Columbine school shootings, and to raise money for gun control and domestic abuse prevention. The playwright’s own website labels it as a work of “theater activism”. 

But like the Yeats poem she references, the center of this story “cannot hold.” Disparate asides that feel like they might be important later, never are. Connections between harrowing statistics of murders by domestic partners don’t flow organically from Angela’s collection of dice. And the pacing doesn’t match the urgency of the message. In fact, the play never regains the breathless stakes of the first few minutes. Rather, it sags during an hour of meandering through ponderous musings. The threat of the tornado seems to appear and disappear randomly. And the details we learn about Angela’s life are inconsistent and contradictory. (It’s hard to believe she could accuse the audience of being antithetical to her — calling us “"kombucha and Whole Foods people” — when in the next moment she talks about the special gifts you receive after donating to public television during a pledge drive. And seriously, have the problematic politics of Chick-fil-a really never come up in her conversations with a close LGBTQIA friend?)

“It's all statistics until it's happening to you — then it's happening 100 percent.”

In a hard left turn, we hear about the tragedy that will befall Angela in the future, instead of living it with her. And the statistics she recites are affecting. But it’s the climax of a story we have a hard time connecting to the previous hour, or the charming, disarming, quirky young woman who we suspected was somehow doomed from the start. The truism I’m left with is:

“Lauren Gunderson’s Natural Shocks script undermines a compelling performance.”