Loved the message.
Not so much the play.
“The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey,” now on stage at Invisible Theatre, is about tolerance. That’s a good, important subject.
But the James Lecesne play — adapted from his young adult novel “Absolute Brightness” — is too thin, too tidy, and too sentimental to have much of an impact.
David Alexander Johnston carries the whole load here — he plays about 10 characters in a small New Jersey town where a young teen has disappeared.
He was able to delineate each, and Johnston has a warm presence on stage, but the clichéd characters just didn’t give him much to work with.
Susan Claassen directed the production, and although it moved at a good clip, the sentimentality was just too thick.
And this has to be said: Johnston’s costume consisted of a pair of ill-fitting pants that were pulled so high up they exposed his sock-covered ankles. It was distracting and didn’t make much theatrical sense.
The narrator of the story is a New Jersey detective — his dialogue is very noir-ish, of course — who is recollecting a murder from a decade ago.
He first got wind of the case when Ellen, a brassy hair dresser and her daughter Phoebe show up to report Leonard missing. Ellen’s pushy. And yes, Leonard has been missing for only 19 hours and 47 minutes, and of course he has to be missing for 24 hours for the police to do anything, but Ellen knows something’s wrong and hey, why isn’t the detective writing this all down?
As we come to know Leonard through the characters, we find he is wildly flamboyant, supplies the woman in the town with beauty and style tips, and has a big, big heart. And oh, yes, he disappeared wearing a pair of shoes he modified by taking multi-colored flip-flops, removing the toe part, and glueing the soles to a pair of sneakers.
Leonard is gay, loud and colorful. But this is a small town, and some of the folk think he should perhaps tone it down.
Even if he doesn’t, however, they love him for his differences, his creativity, his innate goodness.
Well, almost everyone loves him. One of those adapted shoes is discovered on the shore by the widow of a mafioso. It isn’t long before they find his body in the water, his head bashed in and his hands tied.
The journey in this play isn’t the solving of the murder — that is done, but clues are telescoped and there’s little tension about the mystery. It’s really about how the community so easily embraced this teen not in spite of his differences, but because of them. It’s also about the dangers disparate people face in a world that isn’t as tolerant as most in Leonard’s town.
Those are worthwhile sentiments. They just fell flat in this production.
