‘Swing State’ Is Quietly Powerful Drama

Tami Workentin, Jack Lancaster. Photo by Michael Brosilow.

Where is the missing Winchester rifle? Where are the valuable prairie-digging tools that everyone is strangely looking for?

Why all these fragmented reminders in random conversation, mentioning such things as the vanishing creatures and plants that inhabit Wisconsin’s Driftless Area? The cast keeps collecting and dropping the residue of the prairie.

And what does all this have to do with these humdrum lives in an antique-cluttered living room overlooking the prairie?

This is the rustic home of widow Peg, who has spent her life working as a guidance counselor to young people and a nature expert alongside her recently deceased husband.

Swing State is not a formal mystery exploring social classes. On the surface it is casual, naturalistic talk among common folk. They are enduring conventional lives in a horrible year, 2021, for America — the malaise of the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis that together reached both rural country (as here) and the suburbs as well, perhaps even some represented by audience members who attend this Next Act Theatre production.

The malaise may be speaking to larger problems, but again it is not the core of discussion, just the background feeling as the disturbed humans try to find the rhythm of nature as a rationale for surviving their private glimmers of suicide and death.

Experienced playwright Rebecca Gilman reveals larger truths in natural bits and pieces — forecasting but in no way rushing toward a shattering conclusion. Just lean in and listen carefully to the deliberate, even exaggerated normalcy of the dialogue.

The daily scenes are separated by quick blackouts. A lot of comings and goings leave the stage blank as routine arrivals stroll in from the outdoor walkup to the live-in rural home created by scenic designer Jeffrey Kmiec, with its panoramic view of the prairie in the background. Properties designer Jim Guy has filled the space with believable household bric-a-brac.

But don’t think the play disjointed. Just listen carefully to how meaning emerges from everyday exchanges in Gilman’s dialogue. Next Act artistic director Cody Estle has polished Gilman’s methods to let silence and the simple tasks of preparing food point his way and ours. He has an attuned cast that can do this.

Veteran Tami Workentin may be best known to Milwaukee audiences for her comic touch in many roles, but she is also a superb hands-on dramatic actress and an effective naturalist as Peg Smith (could there be a more common name?).

Peg may be quietly thinking of suicide while serving as a calming influence on Ryan, the disturbed, profanely vulgar young truck driver and former felon whom she treats like a surrogate son.

This relationship brings out a fascinating performance from Jack Lancaster, new to Milwaukee, but he has understudied the role of Ryan in Swing State since its creation four years ago. His mumbling, dismissive manner gives way as we watch him grow from a typically explosive, unlettered youth to a still loose-tongued, blunt kid with a surprisingly caring underside. It is a largely hidden sensitivity that explains why Peg, and the audience, are willing to dig past his public manners.

But not Sheriff Kris. As played in bull-headed certainty by Kelli Strickland, she mouths all those law-and-order clichés we hate, dismissing Ryan as a ne’er-do-well as she visits the house mainly to watch him and catch him in a falsehood.

Her new deputy (Elyse Edelman) knows all the players and is caught in the middle, exercising her budding empathy and her naïve obedience to the sheriff that will come back to haunt her.

This is a fine unassuming performance by Edelman, who knows how to listen and react onstage, a key to the role.

The play deliberately reminds us of some disquieting years in the U.S. that seem eerily familiar to these current times. That sense of “things have changed but nothing has changed” may be core to our appreciating what the play is saying.

This is an attractive form of theater when done well — the quieter connective tissue revealing some larger truths about the human condition.

It is not a bombastic style of theater. It relies on an audience willing to let character and truth creep up on us. Some plays try to blow us away with their carefully signaled importance. Not here.

We may detect early where Swing State is heading, but watching it unfold is key, which you can do through March 8. For more details, contact Next Act Theatre, 255 S. Water St. (info@nextact.org).

Swing State Gallery

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here. For his Dom’s Snippets, an unusual family history and memoir, go to domnoth.substack.com.