A deep sense of loss pervades Rebecca Gilman’s eloquently mournful new play “Swing State,” receiving its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre.
Sometimes, the loss is extremely specific: the lead character Peg, played with layered subtlety and welcome flashes of sarcasm by Mary Beth Fisher, has been grieving her husband for the last year, when he died suddenly of a heart attack almost immediately after retiring and just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But sometimes, the loss stems from something less tied to a specific event but to a more general sense that the whole world is falling apart, largely due to our own species. For Peg, who lives on nearly 50 acres of now-rare prairie land in rural Wisconsin, this focus on ecological diminishment expresses itself with a wistful nostalgia for the plethora of bats she used to see — before a fungus ravaged the population — to a failing effort to nurture the seeds of her favorite wildflower.
Peg’s sadness has reached a point where it’s clear she wonders if it’s worth going on. In the opening sequence, we see her contemplating how she might wield a knife to do self-harm. And the other characters see it too, from her having made a will, to quickly offering up once-cherished belongings.
This isn’t, though, a play like Marsha Norman’s ‘’’Night Mother,” in which we witness an open debate about potential suicide. Instead, this work — peppered with acerbic humor to counteract its somberness — contemplates the mental state between hopefulness and disheartened surrender.
That psychological circumstance almost certainly defines the “Swing State” of Gilman’s title. The other characters exist in it, too, all responding in different ways to loss. Ryan (Bubba Weiler) lost both his parents and went to prison for a bad bar fight, relying now on Peg as a surrogate mother to help him hold onto his sobriety and stability. Kris (Kirsten Fitzgerald), Peg’s neighbor and the local sheriff, lost a son to a fentanyl overdose. Kris’ niece Dani (Anne E. Thompson) lost her sense of identity with a divorce and is finding a new one with her job as a deputy.
But the play’s title also has an undeniably political implication. Produced as the midterm elections approach and set in rural Wisconsin, a state that “swung” from Trump to Biden, it seems clear that Gilman’s subject here — hope versus despair — very much includes the state of the nation, lingering on a precipice that will eventually tip in one direction or another.
Although there is very little actual politics in this play, Gilman does clearly delineate two different perspectives on the world reflective, to a degree, of our national divide.
Peg sees beauty and even bounty in the prairie’s spareness. Kris just sees waste, or at least a lack of productivity. Peg tries to see the best in people, particularly in Ryan, perhaps because he wears his frailties so openly. Kris, perhaps due to her job, tends to see the worst, and views Ryan as the epitome of the unchangeable.
Robert Falls directs this show, the first time he has done so since he stepped down from the theater’s artistic directorship. He confidently and carefully restrains the sentimentality of the more emotional scenes, while still successfully capturing how caring for each other provides the only remedy for human anguish.
And Falls certainly brings out the best in his actors. The performances here are superb, compensating for a too-thin plotline involving some stolen tools and a rifle.
Fisher and Fitzgerald prove a formidable pairing, their characters’ differences juxtaposed with a sensibility — a forthright Midwestern practicality — that makes it clear what they share in common.
Weiler, who has grown up on Chicago stages since appearing at the Goodman in 2008, capably covers Ryan’s vulnerabilities until he doesn’t. And Anne E. Thompson takes the least damaged of the characters and invests her with both depth and a natural likability essential to the denouement.
The ending here doesn’t quite satisfy, reaching a dramatic moment and then resolving the consequences of it with some optimism that feels unwarranted. But Gilman, whose steady stream of plays and ties to the theater have made her the most produced living playwright in Goodman’s history, delivers with “Swing State” an engrossing work of intense melancholy, filled with sympathy for its characters, and for the country.
