Theater Review / Tiny Beautiful Things A beautiful thing to watch

By Joanna Brady

After reading the novel on which this play is based, I wondered how it could possibly be dramatized. It is after all, based on letters, i.e. the written word, rather than narrative, which would seem to preclude action on a stage. The book, by Cheryl Strayed (author of the NYT bestseller Wild, and a few other novels, was based on Ms. Strayed’s exchange with troubled writers to her ‘agony aunt’ blog on an online zine called Rumpus. Imagine, if you will, a play based on some letters to Dear Abby or Ann Landers. Quite a challenge.

But in the play version of “Tiny Beautiful Things,” opening Tuesday, Dec. 10 at the Red Barn Theater, the transition from letters to stage was very cleverly adapted by Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame. She has done so with brilliance and adeptness to produce a play which is intense and riveting about healing, forgiveness and a multitude of other serious themes; yet it manages to be entertaining. 

The happy collaboration of Strayed’s inspiration, Vardalos’s editing, and the shrewd direction of Joy Hawkins, has brought out the best of the selected letters, and especially the answers. Sugar’s answers. Sugar is the anonymous name Ms. Strayed chose to mask her true identity in the on line column. 

In her epistolary novel, Tiny Beautiful Things, it is Strayed’s answers which reach into our souls with emotional depth. In fact, each answer becomes an essay in which she relates the problems in the letters to her own life. Strayed published the book in 2012 while still in her mid forties, but even then, she was a lady who had lived a very full life and drunk deeply at the spring of experience. This was a woman with a dysfunctional family, grief for her mother, and with the guilty burden of a broken marriage behind her; one who did the Pacific Trail alone and on foot (it was on this experience she based her novel, Wild). Having survived horrendous life situations like child abuse and drug addiction, she was more than up to dispensing the advice sought by her correspondents.

Volunteers who answer suicide lines usually come to realize that most people who call in are not soliciting advice. They want someone who’ll listen to their problems. And Strayed often verbalizes this truism in her book. Yes, if they skewer her for an answer, she frequently does give them specific direction, but much of the time, she tells them they already know what to do and she is only reinforcing their decisions by giving examples from her own experience. When she does dispense advice, she always nails it.

This becomes evident in the play. Nicole Nurenberg is excellent as Sugar, a writer and mother of two young children, bringing to the role just the right combination of vulnerability and authority. David Black, Morgan Fraga Pierson, and Arthur Crocker all excel as the letter writers. Personified to bring the letters and their answers to life with an intimacy that is absent in the book, the writers join Sugar on stage, doing ordinary things, like snacking on nuts and building sandwiches in her homey kitchen. 

In the play, as in her novel, Strayed shows a great deal of empathy in her answers.  Sometimes her snappy replies will make you laugh; and some of them will make you cry. Life is like that. Lovers leave, children can get sick, be taken from you by a drunk driver; all the worst that can happen is dealt with. But Strayed never allows the answers to get maudlin.  Either direct or roundabout, her answers are always interesting. And this play, by careful selection of the very best of the Q’s and A’s in the novel, has managed to make it terrific theatre. It’s a tiny, beautiful thing. A jewel of a play. See it. 

“Tiny Beautiful Things” opens Tuesday, Dec. 10, at the Red Barn Theater, 319 Duval St. (Rear) and runs Tuesdays through Saturdays till Jan. 4, 2020—no performance Christmas Eve., Dec. 24, and New Year’s Day, Jan. 1. All curtains at 8:00 pm. Runs 90 minutes. No intermission. Not for children. Note: There will be a special Talk-Back with the Director and cast following Sat. Dec. 14 performance.

For tickets, call 305 296-9911 or go to redbarntheatre.com

(Joanna Brady is a local writer, author of the historical Key West novel, The Woman at the Light, published by St. Martin’s Press)

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