photo credit: Adam Kopland
Post Office, a quietly affecting new play by David Jenkins being produced by Human Animals at the Ohio Theater is, as one might guess from the title, about the changing face of an American institution. It’s also about the changing face of America itself: Our collective aspirations, expectations, values, and identities are all fodder for thought in this story of two postal workers, young and old. The veteran Denny (Eric Hoffmann), not short on personality, likes to refer to the newbie, James (David Gelles), as a “cupcake” or a “dumpling.” If that sounds like sexual harassment, in this case it’s definitely not.
Sex does enter the proceedings, however, in the form of Victoria (Anney Giobbe), a contained but nonetheless desperate housewife with enough pent-up romantic longings and regrets to fill an entire small town of exactly the sort where the story takes place. She tells James her existence on her quiet street is like “living on the moon: no one is ever walking by.” By that time, of course, he has walked not only by her house but into her life, and he’s about to wander as far as her bedroom.
Jenkins has crafted an entirely character driven story. Not that much happens, but that’s just fine, because these three people whose lives intersect—thanks to the U.S. mail—are all likeable and interesting. They’re all struggling with something, and we want to see how they will or won’t fulfill each other’s needs.
James, 19, has been a postal service employee for such a short amount of time that in the play’s opening scene, he still hesitates before placing each piece of mail in its designated slot. His faltering movements are the bane of Denny, who trained him, and who despite his gruff exterior is a sort of mail-carrier-as-Zen-master. He takes his job—his life’s work—so much to heart that the other mail carriers in Littleneck, Illinois, think he’s nuts; some days James is inclined to agree.
According to Denny, there is a technique to sliding the mail into the slots, a proper rhythm. You have to stay loose, and remember to breathe. Then there is the way of seeing the slots, or the case, as it’s called in postal service parlance. When Denny looks, he does not see a bunch of slender openings to be filled with catalogs and credit card offers. He sees a map of his longtime route: the hills, the dogs, the types of houses; a practical topography of the whole west side of town.
But Denny is not on his usual route these days. He recounts to James a painfully embarrassing lapse, in which Denny was arguing—passionately, as is his wont—with a customer upset about the price of stamps going up (again!). Denny’s commitment to the mail goes deeper than technique, and he explained to her that 44 cents is a small price to pay for democracy, which is—no less—what the mail amounts to in his esteem. But he got so carried away that he fell off her steps, and so, as the play commences, James has had to take over for Denny—his customers, his “public,” as Denny puts it.
Denny sees great potential in his young protege. But the slightly sheepish, more taciturn James doesn’t share Denny’s lofty vision of the beauty and meaning in a life of delivering mail. He humors Denny, but he tells himself and everyone else he is just passing through. If anything, the prospect of a life spent like Denny’s terrifies him.
Victoria and Denny never meet—unless you count James repeating to each of them in turn bits of wisdom imparted by the other. His young, impressionable mind eats up and regurgitates what he learns from these two elders, so that Denny’s revelation that nothing is the same twice—in response to the claim that mail routes are monotonous—makes its way through James to Victoria. Likewise James repeats her observation that mail is “tactile”—without it, she says, we’d lose touch, literally—back to Denny. Denny and Victoria live vicariously through James, the glow of his potential, but he just as badly wants what they have: experiences and ideas that give color and meaning to their lives, and which James is utterly lacking, the proverbial blank slate. When he finally confesses to Denny that he’s “adrift,” after all but fooling us with his air of calm, we’re both surprised and not. These two may see James more clearly than he sees himself, and this would help explain his frustrated love for Victoria. She is old enough to know that when you’re adrift any anchor looks tempting, but sometimes it’s better to tough it out and let yourself float. Sooner or later, you’ll be ready to swim.
All three actors give strong performances. Giobbe as Victoria is odd and wistful, at once yearning and yet somehow removed, a woman who has let herself go slack. Gelles has a lackadaisical, hangdog charm as a young man in the first tentative steps of figuring out who he is. Still, his performance conveys a steadiness that makes us see his appeal, both to Denny as his would-be mentor, and to his older lover. Hoffmann’s Denny makes his character’s blustery proclamations seem like things the smarter, more articulate version of your cantankerous coworker—the one who never shuts up and is always philosophizing—might really say. As he limps around the stage gesticulating in his latest fit of indignation, he is proud and a know-it-all and ultimately hard not to love.
In hindsight, one wishes the scenes between Giobbe and Gelles had percolated with a stronger sense of heat—their connection seems more purely a meeting between two like souls than the passionate physical attraction both allude to, but perhaps that was the intention. Either way, their trysts sometimes drag a little. Our last glimpse of Victoria, as she is reading a letter—a hand-delivered one—is hard to register, staged at the back of the playing space. It’s an important moment, and we want to see it. Otherwise, director Josie Whittlesey shows a sure hand in slowly building toward the play’s emotional peaks, which feel natural and earned and are quite touching as played by Gelles and Hoffmann.
Whittlesey also does a good job managing the show’s transitions, which often aren’t really transitions at all, as James steps from Victoria’s house right into the post office, sometimes in mid-sentence. There is only one real change of scenery, and this is covered nicely by the sound of Denny’s TV. Otherwise Whittlesey’s use of the space, combined with Seth Reiser’s lighting, makes it clear when we’re at Victoria’s. Once the lights are up, we can take in set designer Alexis Distler’s nicely detailed back room at the post office, right down to the plastic mail bins and the grey linoleum floor.
Jenkins might use a touch more subtlety in making some of his points: The Post Office is dying, or at least imperiled, and along with it working class heroes like Denny who find a kind of nobility in honest service. But in the end, Jenkins doesn’t tell us what to think about the ideas he’s laid out for us, or about what lies ahead for James. We can see how early on James might be tempted to think of a lifer like Denny as small, but Denny is also big: his ability to find the beauty in what many see as a boring job elevates him beyond the ordinary, much like Victoria’s appreciation of the sensual—the sound of cicadas, for instance—makes her transcend what we think of as average. Will James become the keeper of the flame Denny so wants him to be? It could go either way, but thanks to people like Denny and Victoria, whatever he does, we know he won’t let it bore him.
POST OFFICE
December 1 - 17
Written by David Jenkins
Directed by Josie Whittlesey
Produced by Human Animals
Featuring Anney Giobbe, Eric Hoffmann, and David Gelles
Set Design: Alexis Distler
Lighting Design: Seth Reiser
TICKRTS
Olivia Jane Smith is a writer, editor, and lifelong theater lover (her parents borrowed her name from "Twelfth Night"). She has written about theater for the New York Daily News, Backstage, and the Gambit Weekly in New Orleans, Louisiana. Follow Olivia at ojanesmith.tumblr.com
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